Manual Dexterity and Other Mexicans

From rawstory.com, 10/9/13

"Scientists claim that big toes and thumbs evolved in parallel"

“New research from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute indicates that, contrary to current belief, early hominids developed finger dexterity before they became bipedal. The long-standing theory that bipedalism “freed up” the proto-human hand for using tools has been overturned by brain imaging and fossil evidence that indicates that the quadruped brains possess the same potential for manual dexterity as human.”

“‘In early quadruped hominids, finger control and tool use were feasible, while an independent adaptation involving the use of the big toe for functions like balance and walking occurred with bipedality,’ the authors wrote.”

•••

If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you’re aware of my theory that humans descended from the trees to go hunting. The study mentioned above supports that contention. Mainly, it supports the observation that our ape and simian cousins also have finger dexterity; but it’s fairly obvious that one has to have said dexterity in order to wield weapons, which both us and chimps do. My ignorance was that I wasn’t aware that the field thought finger dexterity came after bipedalism; I’d never heard that. My question would be, having observed other primates, from where did that idea arise? It’s not self-evident.

Ah, the mysteries of science.

The Carbon Age

Mathias has lent me a book, The Carbon Age, by Eric Roston detailing the role of carbon in—well—the Universe. On page 48, Roston lists five things to remember about evolution, including: “only populations evolve; individuals adapt,” and “evolution has no goal.”

Ah ha! Someone tell that to the paleoanthropologists. It was a startling revelation to read those words as I’d begun to think I was crying in the wilderness. I’ve most often termed it that “DNA evolves not individuals,” but I believe we’re saying the same thing. And aimless evolution insures that one can’t evolve to escape danger. Thank you, Mr. Roston.

Mr. Roston didn’t use my favorite encapsulation that “evolution follows opportunity, not necessity,” but he well could have. In any event, it’s an unequivocal statement of the reason why people couldn’t have abandoned the trees because of the trees’ disappearance. That’s a goal: “We have to learn to stand up because the forest is going away,” (or its concomitant error, “Us fish should learn to walk on land to avoid predators”). As Roston points out, it couldn’t have happened. Those are side benefits to the effects of natural selection, not the intent. You can be quite sure that what drove us to the ground and fish to terra firma was food, pure and simple.

If I understand what I’m told, what distinguishes our ancestors from the pans is bipedality. We maybe didn’t give up our arboreal ways completely at first, but we right away began walking upright. For what we know, we didn’t have a period when we were knuckle-walking out on the velde, having abandoned the trees, but not yet taken to standing up straight. (How would we tell?) We never seemed to have went through a baboon period; we walked out of the forest upright.

That being the case, then abandoning the trees went hand-in-hand with walking upright. That fact uncouples bipedalism from the fate of the forest. If bipedalism first appeared in a savanna-like environment, it doesn’t mean that the environment was the cause of the bipedalism. Not to mention that it’s not agreed as to what kind of environment bipedalism first occurred in.

Ergo, I repeat, any theory of human evolution that doesn’t account for our letting go of the branches is no theory at all; and that “forgoing the forest because it was disappearing” is a circular argument. Fail.

carbon atom: examiner.com

Man the Grazer

Popular Archaeology
June 2013, Cover Stories, Daily News

"Diet Change After 3.5 Million Years Ago a Gamechanger for Human Ancestors, Say Scientists"

The most significant findings indicate that human ancestors expanded their menu 3.5 million years ago, adding tropical grasses and sedges characteristic of a savannah-like environment to the typical ape-like diet of leaves and fruits from trees and shrubs of a forest environment. This, suggests the scientists, may have set the stage for our modern diet of grains, grasses, and meat and dairy from grazing animals.

"We don't know exactly what they ate. We don't know if they were pure herbivores or carnivores, if they were eating fish [which leave a tooth signal that looks like grass-eating], if they were eating insects or if they were eating mixes of all of these."

He says this because the isotope method used in the new studies cannot distinguish what parts of grasses and sedges human ancestors ate – leaves, stems, seeds and/or underground elements of the plants such as roots or rhizomes. The method also cannot determine when human ancestors began getting much of their grass indirectly by eating grass-eating insects or meat from grazing animals.

May I leap in before this goes any further? Take that opening sentence; it says that early humans added “tropical grasses and sedges characteristic of a savannah-like environment to the typical ape-like diet of leaves and fruits from trees and shrubs of a forest environment.”

That seems pretty unambiguous. It implies we typically ate leaves and fruits before adding grasses and sedges. I didn’t know that we were leaf eaters prior to diverging from our fellow simians—I thought it was primarily, nuts; fruits; and small game, like insects—but I’m a little dubious about us moving over to include the grasses and sedges. To begin with, can one tell the difference between grasses and sedges in the diet of proto-humans, or do they both have the same signature? As they stand, sedges provide a very minimal addition to the human diet in any culture, so it’s hard to imagine that they were once very popular but then died out.

I’d also question the signature difference between what parts of the grass were eaten, a difference we can't yet discern. The way the sentence is written, it’s implied that grasses were used much like a cow would, the entire plant eaten, as if we suddenly had become a grazing animal, only to abandon the practice later on. That, too, doesn’t seem likely to me. It doesn’t seem likely that we began to use any but the seed heads from grasses; and even those, it’s easier to imagine that we started to consume grain after we’d domesticated herding animals and tended to have stockpiles of grain on hand that we might, in desperation, try eating in times of privation. Most importantly, it’s easier to imagine grain consumption after the advent of cooking, as it’s nutritionally much more accessible to us after it has been cooked.

All in all, it seems unlikely that humans ever were large consumers of sedges and grass blades any more than they are now. That doesn’t mean that their data are wrong, though. Instead, the answer lies in a succeeding paragraph, where it added, that their analytical “method… cannot determine when human ancestors began getting much of their grass indirectly by eating grass-eating insects or meat from grazing animals.”

Well, okay then. Is it likely that people were harvesting grass eaters 3.5 million years ago? You can bet your bottom dollar on that. It’s a hell of a lot more likely that we were hunting grazing animals 3.5 mya than we were doing the grazing ourselves. A hell of a lot more.

I’ve seen this error made before with precisely the same kind of evidence, evidence that our diet of grasses and sedges increased, but in that case, too, they couldn’t tell whether it came from direct or indirect consumption. For some reason, primarily related to our own obsession with fad diets and the heavy PC status of vegetarianism and veganism among the young creatives, etc., the nod is always given to a vegetarian interpretation of our probable early diet history, despite evidence to the contrary.

The profession of archaeology, also, poorly interprets early dietary data because they’ve yet to understand how early it was that hunting tools, including stones, were used by our ancestors, millions of years prior to the first flaked stone tool; nor do they recognize the strong probability that standing up to carry hunting tools and game was the only reason we stood up in the first place. Much of that error comes, of course, from the impossible assumption that it was a dwindling forest cover that drove us to bipedalism. As any reader of this blog is well aware, evolution only goes towards a goal, not away from a danger. If we stood up, it was because we were harvesting a new food source that required us to stand up; and I can guarantee you that a diet of grasses and sedges does not require one to stand up.

Stand up to hunt? Sure, the chimps do it all the time. They just don’t do it enough to make a habit of us, like we do. And if I were you, I wouldn’t give them any ideas.

The good news is that we now have evidence for hunting going back 3.5 million years. You can be sure it goes back twice that far, but this is a good leap in that direction.

Oh God

Oh God, tell me it isn’t so. This from the Christian Science Monitor:

“The broken, disrupted terrain offered benefits for hominins in terms of security and food, but it also proved a motivation to improve their locomotor skills by climbing, balancing, scrambling and moving swiftly over broken ground - types of movement encouraging a more upright gait," said University of York archaeologist and study co-author Isabelle Winder, in a press release.

This development would have conferred benefits that extend far beyond locomotion. Walking on two legs frees up the hands, allowing for the use of tools and, eventually, bigger brains. And the complex landscape could have made our ancestors smarter, says Dr. Winder.

The varied terrain may also have contributed to improved cognitive skills such as navigation and communication abilities, accounting for the continued evolution of our brains and social functions such as co-operation and team work.

That we stood upright because the terrain was rough. Oh sure. Oh double sure. Can’t think of a better reason. It’s for damn sure that two-legged creatures are much better at “climbing, balancing, scrambling, and moving swiftly over broken ground” than any four-legged stumblebum. Yes, a wolf is no match for us. We can run down mountain goats with ease. Is it any wonder that so many two-legged creatures evolved in rough, tumble-down terrain? You know, those other two-legged creatures like… like… like…
Oh well, you know who you are.

What Ms Winder ignores is her other statement: “Walking on two legs frees up the hands, allowing for the use of tools.” But, hey, Ms Winder, one doesn’t have to walk upright to use tools, only to carry them. And it makes no difference what kind of ground you’re carrying things over; you have to stand up. Carrying tools is like being in the water all the time; you have no choice but to stand up. We never had prehensile tails.

Never Cry Wolf

What is it with people and drinking? Have you ever given that much thought? One can imagine chimps hunting together, foraging together, eating together, sleeping together, fighting together, being together together, but can you imagine them sitting around drinking cups of adulterated water together? I can’t.

How about going for a swim? Maybe some fishing? Do chimps ever go after frogs? Turtles? Are chimps inclined to float around on a log for a spell? Perhaps tie—dare we say “raft”?—together a few big logs?

Ever read Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf? There’s a scene in there where he’s trying to see if a wolf, who regularly passed close to his tent, would respect his boundary markings; which he figured meant pissing in the corners, so to speak, just like the wolf did. It worked, but he learned something about peeing in the process. He began by brewing up a pot of tea, having a couple cups, and then waiting.

Until he had to go.

Which he did, and then he’d repeat the whole process over again; but, Christ, he was belting down a lot of tea. He got to wondering, “How does that wolf do it, he doesn’t drink a quarter of what I drink?”

For one thing, he—the wolf—only pees a little bit at each marker, Mowat observed. Unlike people, the wolf was able to turn his urination on and off at will, with no ill effects; he did not walk away with his legs crossed. Furthermore, the wolf’s pee was much more concentrated than his pee; a little went a long way. Compared to the wolf, his pee was, well, weak tea. Farley accidentally came to the realization that people guzzle water like nobody else. At least nobody else out living on the savannah, where we were supposed to have come from. Other animals come to the water hole for a drink; we camp there for the whole afternoon. Us and the elephants.

I wrote a note to Elaine Morgan yesterday. Elaine is the chief apologist for the Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT). I Stumbled Upon a 2009 TED presentation by the delightful lady and felt duty-bound to respond. I noted that I wrote her occasionally and was sorry she hadn’t incorporated demographic data into the understanding of AAT. In her video she lamented academe’s reluctance to even consider AAT, and I was reluctant to point out that she treated demographics the same way.

I repeat my note here:

“The failure of AAT to capture its rightful place in human paleontology is due to its insistence on some untenable assumptions, but the unfortunate consequences are worse. I think it's quite true that much of homo sapiens' physiology comes from an association with water, but because AAT focuses on an unlikely interpretation of the evidence, it has turned most of the profession against the demonstrable associations between people and a water-based environment.

“I think you start the argument from the wrong end. The reason there is no fossil evidence for a previous semi-aquatic existence is probably because there was no such stage. On the other hand, there's abundant evidence that our ancestors—at least many of them—lived in close proximity to water. They may have used the savannahs as hunting grounds, but they evidently lived close to the water's edge and in relatively lush environments. For example, it's one thing to live on the savannah; it's another thing to live on the bank of a river that cuts through the savannah.

“All of that, of course, is somewhat speculative; how does one interpret the evidence, and what is ‘all’ the evidence? What's not speculative is modern demographics. Demographically speaking, humans are currently semi-aquatic animals; there is no question about that, it's absolutely and scientifically demonstrable. A) Everyone on the planet lives within close proximity to a source of fresh water; we know that because we know that without that a person will die. There is no exception. Those who live any distance from potable water spend most of their day acquiring that water. In the ‘civilized’ world, most people have running water in their home or an easily accessible common source. No one lives in the desert; everyone lives at the oasis. B) I would wager that 80% of the people on the planet live within four miles of navigable water. That's a guess, but it can't be too far off. Everyone depends on controlling and having access to water. We have been oceanic seafarers for at least 60,000 years; and we surely didn't start out as capable of crossing long distances, such as to Australia. It implies we began crude sailing much, much earlier. Like probably by the time our species evolved 200,000 years ago. And it would be hard to imagine that, if we were sailing by 200,000 years ago, that we wouldn't have been fishing and harvesting clams and turtles, as well. Which it seems we were doing.

“All that means that we, as a species, have most probably been water-side dwellers for at a minimum 200,000 years, but more likely for millions of years. Obviously you and I think the evidence goes back much further than a few hundred thousand, but I think we can safely say it goes back that far. However far it goes back, it evidently goes back far enough to have affected our physiology for, you're perfectly correct, our physiology more or less demands a semi-aquatic environment. But it doesn't require more of an aquatic environment than we currently enjoy. I repeat: we currently are a semi-aquatic animal. The only real question is, when did we become this way? If you put the question this way, then it becomes incumbent on the paleoanthropologists to find a date when that cross-over occurred. I don't think the demographics are assailable.

“The other part of your argument that, I believe, has to be abandoned is the theory that bipedalism is necessarily connected to our semi-aquatic existence. It's the weakest part of the argument with the least fossil support and logically isn't compelling. It's obviously advantageous to be bipedal if one wants to go wading, but it's doubtful than our ancestors ever got so into wading that the best waders supplanted the non-waders. I don't see that we were ever that dependent on or spent that much time in the water. Whatever water we started out next to, it apparently was fresh. I can't see that we were ever about ready to go swimming with the crocodiles. I can, though, see us, as the smartest ape, moving our abode to where the food was most abundant: the water's edge. We didn't have to hang out with the crocs to benefit from the lush water-side. Furthermore, a water-side existence would have aided our survival in times of shrinking habitat. It's easier to defend ones own turf than to dislodge someone from theirs. We could have spent millions of years living alongside and using water resources just as we do today: food, transportation, safety. If that's true, we would have turned out, well, just the way we turned out.

“My guess about bipedalism—though I have nothing like a demographic argument to buttress it—is that it's a result of habitual tool carrying. I suspect that, as meat eating increased in our diet, those apes who were more able to quickly take advantage of hunting opportunities—i.e. those who were always armed with a pointed stick or a rock—ate and reproduced better than their less prepared brethren; and slowly, habitually bipedal apes took over the species. Once everyone carried weapons all the time (and other things, as well, by the time carrying was habitual), those who were physically better suited to upright posture slowly increased their percentage of the species until we were obligate bipedal. Of course, there's nothing to say that those apes living down by the water, who were already the smart apes, wouldn't have figured out the carrying weapons trick first, as well. It does, though, suggest that bipedalism could have arisen more than once and under more than one condition. In any event, if you abandon connecting bipedalism with a semi-aquatic environment, I think you'll have a greater chance of success.”

•

What surprises me is that I don’t see the “demographic conundrum” being addressed anywhere. Granted, I’m a dilettante, but I don’t recall anyone other than myself ever asking the question of when did we move to the shore where we currently live? Likewise granted, they keep pushing back the age of aquatic resource utilization—only recently reporting 42,000 year old fish hooks—but they appear to think of aquatic resource utilization as an adjunct to a life that was predominantly lived elsewhere. Like on the savannahs. Not as a way of life unto itself.

I’m not here—in the words of Obama, let me be perfectly clear—to argue for any theory about our past behavior (although I have plenty of those, too) but rather to ask, when did our current demographic preference for the water-line take place? Everybody is trying to figure out when we climbed down from the trees, but nobody seems to be trying to figure out when we moved to the lake, river, swamp, ocean, mud puddle, oasis? I guess that’s what bothers me about so much of paleontology, it’s not that their data are wrong, but that they’re asking the wrong questions. Or more aptly put: not asking the right ones. We don’t live on the savannah. Proportionally, the percentage of the population that lives on a savannah anywhere approaches zilch. Even those who look like they live on the savannah, if you look closely, you’ll find they live in a town by the river or they built their house down by the creek. The rest of them? Why, they drive pipes deep into the ground and make artificial springs right where they live. How many of them live out on the savannah—forget about the prairie or the desert? Not a whole lot.

So, I’m not saying here that we didn’t, God only knows, live on the savannah at some distant point in our past; I’m only saying that we don’t live there now. Almost none of us. Every single one of us has moved as close as possible to the water hole, if not a navigable body. When did that happen? If you read current theory, it appears that most professionals think the move to the water’s edge happened after the rise of home sapiens some 200,000 years ago. All I’m looking for is the evidence that makes them think this transfer of habitat took place and when it occurred.

It appears to me that the modern scientific community credits the human species with an incredible plasticity and ability to change its environmental habitat at will. The usual reason given is “culture,” as if culture could change ones resistance to cold or need for water. The current scenario has the early hominin first coming down from the trees, leaning to walk upright, and inhabit the savannahs. That’s the first major habitat change. We know from demographics that said hominins now live next to water courses; which, if the savannah theory is correct, requires a new shift of habitat. That’s two big shifts to get us out of the trees and to the shore where we now live. The simpler scenario, that we came down out of the trees to inhabit the shore line, doesn’t appear to be seriously considered. I would just like the profession—me being a simple layperson—to explain the evidence for those shifts. I simply don’t understand it and would like some help.

For example, I don’t understand what sort of culture an Australopithecine would have had that would have insulated them from climate change; weren’t they some of the people to have first come down from the trees? And doesn’t the theory say that they came down because the forest was disappearing underneath them? That they had to adapt or die? I get to wondering about their cousins, the chimps, wasn’t the forest disappearing under them, too? How did they adapt or how come they didn’t die? Or did their territory and population simply shrink?

Then I get to thinking about the polar bears? I couldn’t begin to count the references I’ve seen to the story that polar bears are in danger of going extinct because their habit is disappearing underneath them. Really? What’s the matter with the polar bears; how come they don’t simply adapt like we did? We had culture? That’s why I wonder what kind of culture the Australopithecines had? Did they really have enough culture to protect them from habitat change? Could someone explain that to me? Being a naive nebbish, I would have thought the Australopithecines obeyed the same natural laws the polar bears do: in the face of habitat extinction, you die. Where did I go wrong?

Why couldn’t it be that we came down from the tree to right where we are now, at the shore line? (Not in the water, silly, kingfishers don’t live in the water; they go in it, but they don’t live in it.) I get it that the profession says we didn’t, but I don’t follow the evidentiary logic. My apologies for being so slow, but I’ve yet to see the fossils that said, “These people definitely didn’t live in the river cut-bank or down by the lake.” Perhaps I missed something; could someone point me in the right direction?

Nonetheless, I think Elaine would have a much better argument if, instead of trying to defend an improbable past, she began chipping away at the props of the current academic position. What savannah? Show me the savannah. I think the savannah is a chimera. Ask them to prove it. And ask when we left it?

Later we can talk about the notion that people stood up to see over tall grass? Oh, come on!

Well, Duh

First, an apology of sorts.

For decades I thought bipedalism was connected to our aquatic addiction, although I could never quite find a convincing argument. I figured eventually someone would figure that out, too. Until it became obvious that it was tools, not water, that was crucial in getting us to stand up permanently. I was wrong about that connection and I apologize.

But it doesn’t affect the reality of us as the Aquatic Ape. It doesn’t change our demographics or our addictions. It simply brings into focus the question of when we moved to the water’s edge? It still looks like it must have happened long before we became human.

*

I am perpetually amazed at the thinking patterns of academics. Does graduate school simply drive critical thinking underground? Is lack of vision synonymous with conservatism?

The headline (Discovery News 8/12/10) : “Tool Use by Early Humans Started Much Earlier: Small-brained ancestors used stone tools to whack into large animals some 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.”

Oh yeah? Thought by whom? Those damned academics again.

So, what are they saying? They’re saying that the oldest stone tools they’ve found are 2.6 million years old and that they’ve now found cut marks dating back 3.4 million years, hence the 800,000 year difference. They’re saying “our human ancestors were using stone tools and eating meat from large animals nearly a million years earlier than previously thought.” What that is saying is that the people doing the thinking were thinking that the 2.6 mya tools they have were evidence of earliest tool use by primates. This is where I worry that they failed their logic exams. Or their statistics exams. If one finds a stone tool, knowing nothing else about it except its age, what are the odds of that stone tool being among the first of its kind ever made?Approaching zero, right? What are the odds of that tool being from the heyday of its production? Approaching 100%, eh (bell curves and all)? How long do you suspect tools of that design were in production? Hundreds of thousands of years? Millions of years? Whatever the number, you can be pretty sure that whatever tools made those marks were around for a million years or better by the time we see evidence of them.

But it’s further apparent by the quotations that academia is still confused as to why people/primates stood up in the first place. They really don’t have a clue, even though it’s another case of those confounded trees obscuring the view of the forest. It’s as if they have no idea what drives evolution.

What drives evolution? Food. And to a lesser extent sex. Basically, it’s morphology for food, ornamentation for sex. Animals will change their basic shapes in a quest for food, but they’re willing to grow stupidly long feathers to get laid. You don’t stand up because you think it’s pretty; you stand up because you can eat better.

Eat what better?

Doesn’t make any difference (although we’ll get more into that in a bit). If standing up won’t feed you better, you won’t do it. If it will, you will. Standing up to eat, of course, is fairly common. Squirrels do it, bears do it, gazelles do it, even educated fleas do it. But none of them give up the ability to get down on all fours (forget the fleas) and run like hell, should the occasion demand it. How come only primates (and we don’t know how many times) gave up speed to stand up permanently? How come we were willing to be lion fodder just so we could stand up all the time? What was so great about standing up? How could we get more to eat by being lion lunch all the time, not just when feeding?

Well, you’ve got to hand it to us. It’s the hands, silly, it’s the hands. It’s the primates’ hands that guaranteed that eventually one of them would become us. Or many of them would. Hands certainly evolved for climbing trees and manipulating food products, and they could well have forced our brains to become bigger in the process of keeping track of the minutia of separately movable digits. And once we had hands, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to start using those hands to hold tools. It’s certainly common among primates. And a tool is anything that helps you get more/better food. Chimps use tools; bonobos use tools. Neither of them is an upright, obligate walker, but they both clearly use tools, so it’s reasonable to assume that protohumans began using tools before they were upright, too.

If you look at what chimps use for tools, though, you’ll realize that none of them would survive recognizable as tools. Sticks to tease out termites would be just sticks. Stones used to break open nuts would be just stones. Teeth-sharpened spears to stab bush babies would quickly turn to dust. Chimpanzees have undoubtedly been using such tools for millions upon millions of years, yet no one has ever claimed discovery of a stash of chimp tools of any age anywhere. We wouldn’t recognize a chimp tool, if we saw it.

Nor the average early hominin tool. We wouldn’t recognize a hominin tool until we could see a manufactured edge, preferably one that has travelled.

Hands lead to tools; tools lead to upright walking. Tools say that you can be foolishly slow, slow as a sloth, provided you’ve got a good weapon at hand. And if there are a bunch of you.

When did we start throwing stones? Chimps will certainly throw things, but not, to my knowledge, as a weapon (and underhanded, if I understand correctly); not in the sense of their spears being conscious weapons. Perhaps it’s a question more of offense versus defense. We start teaching babies, as yet unable to walk, to catch a rolling ball. Do chimps ever play catch?

It’s important to realize, though, that not only wouldn’t we recognize the first tools primates used, but that the period of primitive tool use (“primitive” here meaning “unrecognizable”) must have stretched back prior to recognizable tool use by multiple millions of years, if the length of time shaped-stones stayed unchanged is any indication. Indeed, logic says its stretches back as far as the first upright hominin. (And there’s always the question of how long the transition takes/took from scrambling to genuine, obligate bipedalism.)

One thing is certainly true: brains didn’t become big in anticipation; they could only have grown as an adaptation to circumstantial pressures and possibilities. Something had to be directly driving the creation of a bigger brain; it couldn’t have happened simply because it was fun. A brain doesn’t grown to meet anticipated demands, but rather in response to immediate opportunities. There is no chicken/egg debate over which came first, big brains or tools: tools, hands down (pun intended). Nor is there any debate over which came first, tools or bipedalism: tools, no choice. There is absolutely no reason slow, weak, toothless (as in big, ripping teeth), clawless, flightless apes such ourselves would give up the only defense we had—climbing trees—unless we had an equalizer. We had an equalizer. Forget carrying food for your family, forget seeing above the grasses, forget sweating theories and standing up naked with a patch on our heads. But that spear and that rock? Don’t leave home without them.

Or your friends. Ever wonder why dogs are so smart? Maybe it’s because they hunt in packs with their friends/family. Those animals which have better communication undoubtedly eat better. And tell me, which pack hunting animals are dumb? Orcas? Don’t think so. Jackals? Huh-uh. Lions? Doubt it.

Understanding how tool use led to bipedalism and big brains doesn’t explain the human addiction to water and our choice of proximity to water for nesting grounds. We undoubtedly left Africa some 100,000 ya savvy with water. We already knew how to sail and how to fish by that time. We had added aquatic food to our diet by then. (The Flores Hobbits may have taken to sailing much earlier than us.) In any case, you can be sure that the humans who spread out from Africa 100 millennia ago were already hairless, sweaty folk who drank a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we find the gene(s) responsible for our liquid addiction, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out when that addiction began, as well.

And it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that the addiction is what separates us from the other hominins. (Already I worry that somewhere in the depths of the jungle a group of chimps has taken up fishing.)

*********

While we’re on the topic of surprising news about the obvious, let me comment on a report from the BBC website on August 24, 2010: “Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claim”

No, not outer space, elbow room. The report contends that “new research identifies the availability of ‘living space’, rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.”

Okay, I accept the reason I’ll never be taken seriously is that you can never say, “Well, duh!” in an academic journal. For years I’ve been stressing the maxim that evolution is guided by opportunity, not necessity. Admittedly, I did no research, as these people did, to prove my point. I used the old-fashioned approach: I thought about it. I’m not even going to say I did well in my logic class at the U, because I didn’t. The logic I used was pretty elementary. First I looked at the current situation of climate change and species die-off. Nobody, it seems, is saying, not to worry about the polar bears, they’ll just evolve, like our ancestors did when the forests disappeared and they were forced to walk upright. Once I’d made that connection, it was easy to see that A) animals don’t evolve quickly enough to accommodate a quickly evolving climate; and B) thinning forests could not have been the impetus for our ancestors to take to the ground. Impossible. No way. Couldn’t happen.

One of the primary problems with the standard model is the “lion lunch conundrum.” (Or “eagle lunch conundrum,” or…) How did we avoid being lunch for a predator in the interval between standing on our own two feet and acquiring tools/weapons? One solution is to not have the interval. If one assumes that acquiring weapons opened up new opportunities that led to bipedalism, the gap then becomes the reverse: between acquiring tools and standing on our feet. You can be assured we still did get picked off, but weapons leveled the playing field: we could pick them off, too.

What concerns me is the quote from the opposition, as it were. As the BBC reports it, “Professor Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, US, told BBC News he ‘found the patterns interesting, but the interpretation problematic’.

“He explained: ‘To give one example, if the reptiles had not been competitively superior to the mammals during the Mesozoic (era), then why did the mammals only expand after the large reptiles went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic?
“‘And in general, what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?’”

Mt. Stearns has a decidedly curious interpretation of the facts. He makes it seem like there was a battle between reptiles and mammals, as if Godzilla and King Kong were going at it in the first rumble in the jungle. How many times, offhand, have you seen inter-species combat which was territorial in nature rather than one side looking at the other as lunch? When has anyone caught on film the fierce war waged between bears and blue jays for control of the huckleberry fields? I have a feeling something was awry in my childhood education, as I seem to have missed those documentaries. Has Mr. Stearns forgotten the fact that reptiles appeared on earth a hundred million years prior to the first mammal? A hundred million years is a long time to fill up all available eco-niches. What’s amazing is that mammals appeared at all given the reptiles’ dominion.

Mr. Stearns is apparently unaware of or has forgotten (which is troubling, considering his profession) that basic evolutionary axiom: that a species cannot evolve into occupied space. It’s a corollary of the rule that evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity. This is the sort of stuff that should be taught day-one in evolutionary science, so it’s disturbing that a practitioner in the field should not be aware of it. What sort of fight is he envisioning? If not hand-to-hand (paw-to-paw, paw-to-hoof) combat, then fighting for resource dominance? We’re back to the bears and the blue jays.
There are no “necessities” in the living world. There is no necessity for life on this planet. Most planets in our experience have no life on them; it’s obviously not a necessity for any given celestial object. It only arises where it can, not where it has to, and that distinction maintains itself forever. You do what you can, not what you have to to survive. If there’s a gap between need and ability, you die.

The second portion of Stearns’ argument, “what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?” makes it sound like one evolves to avoid danger, which is impossible. It again implies direct inter-species competition, which is not seen in nature. The lion and the vulture do not fight with each other over the spoils of a kill, they fight among themselves. The vulture doesn’t evolve with the hopes of knocking off the lion as king of the kill. It doesn’t even evolve to outpace the jackals. It evolves to be a better vulture than its neighbor.

And we didn’t evolve a bipedal life because chimpanzees were taking over the forests. Instead, becoming bipedal opened up previously nonexistent eco-niches: that of armed primates.

One wonders what sort of competition Mr. Stearns envisioned took place between the reptiles and the mammals after the die-off of the dinosaurs? Reptiles didn’t disappear during the Great Extinction, even in Connecticut there are lizards to this day. In Mr. Stearns’ view, it would seem, that the reptiles suddenly lost their competitive punch, or how else to explain that they couldn’t simply outmaneuver the mammals again, if that’s what they did they first time? Why did they loose their “competitive superiority,” as he put it? Unless, of course, they never had competitive superiority to begin with. Unless it was a case of first come, first serve, which is appears to have been.

To reiterate, the Basic Rule and its corollaries are:

Evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity.
1. Evolution can not outrun ecological change
2. Evolution can not fill an occupied eco-niche

Accept neither wooden nickels nor excuses.

And furthermore

The National Geographic article goes on to suggest that bipedality arose from the need for males to carry food to the females, for whatever reason; an old theory that’s been battered around for a while.

Pardon me, but that’s impossible. It violates one of the laws of evolution, which is that morphological changes are only made for food. Cosmetics for sex, morphology for food. Got it? Amoebas, birds, people, bacteria, grizzly bears, beans, and sequoias, we’re all the same: food for shape; sex for color. I’m not going to change my shape just to get you food.

It also edges on another evolutionary law: evolution only goes forward; it only moves in a positive direction. I.e. evolution is always towards something, never away from anything. The savannah theory directly violates that rule. One changes evolutionary direction because a new food source is appearing, not because an old one is disappearing.

(I feel the necessity to repeat these rules here because I don’t recall seeing them elsewhere, basic as they may be.)

Another evolutionary law often mentioned here: No species can evolve quickly enough to avoid environmental collapse. This is a correlate of the above law. Another reason why the savannah theory couldn’t be.

Spear ChuckersTools and Bipedalism

That humans have an intimate connection with water is self-evident, beginning with where we live and the amount of water we consume on a daily basis. In this we are unique among surviving primates. Unquestionably, other primates make use of and enjoy water holes, but none has attached themselves to the water hole as have humans.

Humans are also the only current obligate bipedal apes on the planet, so it’s been hard not to assume a causal relationship between our water dependence and our bipedal behavior, though the exact mechanism and motivation has been foggy. What has seemed probable from the outset is that the shift from discretionary to obligate bipedality was dictated by increased access to either food quantity or quality or both. It makes a certain amount of sense to think that an ape finding food foraging particularly good in the marshes, lagoons, and shallow waters would eventually adopt as permanent behavior, bipedality, that which serves them so well in a foraging environment. The main problem with that scenario was imagining that almost all of our ancestral food foraging was done in the water, rather than a shared foraging between aquatic and terrestrial resources, which seems much more likely, and with, presumably, only occasional time spent in an aquatic environment, with the rest spent on land. It’s hard to see quite why such an ape would take up walking on two legs on land, simply because it was necessary while in the water. It’s one thing to imagine an ape harvesting aquatic resources, but it’s another to think that any, much less a whole species, would choose to essentially live in the water on a daily basis. Nonetheless, given no other options, it seemed that bipedality was likely connected to aquatic foraging. The Alice in Wonderlandish musings about other potential scenarios, such as bipedality reducing ones solar exposure or increasing ones ability to see ones enemies/food, have always been beyond the pale of refutation. They can’t be taken seriously. Furthermore, none of the mainline theories has had the courage to tackle the water dependency question, yet. And with good reason. It complicates things no end.

But. I should make that bigger: BUT!

But there have been some recent developments (or, probably more correctly said, “recently released to the public developments”) concerning the study of chimps and bonobos that throw into question what it means to be human; most specifically the discoveries surrounding chimps making and using wooden spears in the hunting of bushbabies, a small primate cousin which they favor for dinner. The chimps sharpen carefully chosen sticks by gnawing on them. Like the neanderthals, they don’t throw their spears but rather use them to poke around in bushbaby nests until they find one.

Now switch your attention to the British chimp at a zoo who developed a rapid-fire throwing technique for pelting gawkers at his cage. When the zookeepers removed his rocks, he began to tear off chunks of plaster from the walls of his cage and used them. Furthermore, this wasn’t a spontaneous display by the chimp; instead he would spend the morning readying his ammunition stash in anticipation of opening. His was premeditated warfare.

It’s my understanding that bonobos share hunting predilections with the chimps, if not to the same degree of intensity. Nonetheless, it’s now evident that tool using, and even tool making, is not uncommon among apes, and appears the norm, rather than the exception. Needless-to-say, we’ve never found evidence in the wild of discarded chimp weapons, we wouldn’t recognize them, if we saw them. A stone looks awfully much like a stone, unless it’s in someone’s, or something’s, hand. It simply disappears in the archaeological record. As does a wooden spear. We can probably assume, for example, that proto-people used stones and wooden spears as weapons for millions of years before they hit on sharpening the stones. Which, consequently, makes a pack of australopithecines armed with such spears and stones a much more formidable foe than I’d perviously considered. A big enough pack might make a pride of lions think twice about the food value of those skinny little twerps.

Which makes me wonder if being able to haul around spears and projectiles might be enough of a benefit for food gathering and safety that those apes who can do it all the time can out-feed and out-breed those who can’t. Are we bipedal because we learned to use and carry tools? Prior to these recent discoveries, it had been assumed that bipedality arose prior to tool use, but that’s clearly not the case with our cousins, and there’s no reason to assume that it happened thus with us. Certainly, there had to be eons of using stones as tools before someone hit upon shaping the tool by flaking, which is where the archaeological record begins. When we see a millions of years old, crude hand axe, what we’re seeing is an enormous technological advance on an age-old artifact: the stone. We are not seeing the beginning of a technology; we are seeing an increased sophistication. One could easily imagine a pre-shaped stone age that lasted considerably longer than the “neo-stone age.”

Which essentially turns the standard viewpoint on its head. In the history of archaeology it has always been assumed that bipedality predated tool use. It was felt a serendipitous development that bipedality freed our hands for tool use; whereas the truth appears to be that our tool use accelerated our bipedality. In retrospect, it’s fairly astounding that no one, myself included, came to the logical conclusion that when we were witnessing the first crudely flaked hand tools, we were, inevitably, not seeing a brand new technology, but rather a refinement on an extant, time-tested product. Surely people, or rather would-be people, used stone tools for millions of years before they thought of shaping them. It was one thing to sharpen wooden spears; it’s a whole other matter to sharpen stones and a lot less self-evidently possible. It takes an intimate knowledge of stone acquired, undoubtedly, through millennia of experience, to see the possibilities of shaping certain kinds of them. That I’ve never seen this self-evident part of the process of stone technology mentioned in any discussion of the beginnings of tool use, implies that is hadn’t occurred to anyone until now. (Which, I guess, makes me feel a little better; at least I wasn’t alone.) Now, of course, with the realization that many apes are tool users, it’s observable that tool use precedes manufacture of their permanent versions. It is, unquestionably, one of the great insights of modern evolutionary archaeology, ranking right up there with Alistair Hardy's cogent observation about human body fat.

If bipedalism is a byproduct of tool use, then it frees the development of bipedalism from environment. In other words, if bipedalism arose in response to tool use, it could have happened independent of the ape’s physical surroundings. It could and probably did arise in many different environmental niches, albeit probably all within the standard primate range. It means that it didn’t develop in response to aquatic foraging, nor to the disappearance of the forest, the two current standard models. Tool use, instead of defining humans, appears to be a common development among the apes; and if tool use is common, then the tendency towards bipedalism is probably common, as well; and given enough time and enough apes…

What this theory of bipedalism doesn’t do, though, is solve the problems of our aquatic connections. Even if tool use created our bipedality, it wouldn’t have changed our basic environmental niche, which is where our physiology was created. That humans are apes who inhabit the waterline is not a theory but an observation. Our water dependence may be unrelated to our bipedality, but it’s not unrelated to where we developed. And it’s still reasonable to think that the smartest ape would choose the best foraging/hunting ground for itself, which is always going to be at the water’s edge. There’s still no argument for our particular human development other than down at the waterside. We’ve undoubtedly been hunting whatever the neighborhood looked like for a long time, be it jungle, be it savanna, but we’ve always lived down by the water hole. There is simply no other call for how we came to be. Or if there is, it’s yet to show its head.

Gilligan’s Ideas

But I’m not done yet: a few remarks on Ian Gilligan’s theories.

Gilligan’s theories were recently expounded in Science Alert, an Australian-New Zealand online science news source. The main thrust of Gillian’s work, and you should read the piece, is that the development of clothing radically affected human development, which is almost tautological, but deserves close attention. He is absolutely right in noting that, without clothing we’d still be stuck in the jungle, more or less; something many people discount or undervalue.

But the middle of the article finds some words about the naked ape that are most interesting:

As Gilligan points out, Homo sapiens are thermally very vulnerable, having at some point lost the thick fur covering of other mammals. The idea that this might have occurred in response to heat doesn’t really hold up, as fur can also insulate animals in warmer environments. Gilligan’s guess is that human hair loss came about as a side-effect of a slowing of the expression of the genetic code in our species, meaning that we’re essentially juvenile mammals in physiological terms, if not in mental capacity.

“Slowing of the expression of the genetic code.” Now, what does that mean? How does that manifest itself? How is the code normally expressed, and how is its expression slowed down? This is important, because it’s essential for understanding the next thought: “meaning that we’re essentially juvenile mammals in physiological terms, if not in mental capacity.”

I don’t know how you read that, but I read it to say that early human development is retarded in some manner and that said retardation somehow affects hair growth. I’m not sure how “juvenile mammals” fit into the human equation, because it seems to me that juveniles of furry animals are every bit as furry as the adults; so I don’t know how this “slowing of the expression of the genetic code” is supposed to function, but at first glance it’s unexplained. Presumably there’s more to it.

But offhand, I’m not buying it. At least until further clarification, but the obfuscating terminology is not helping.

Other than that, he’s dead on about the clothes.

Except maybe the dates.