Scavenging the Web

I ran across the following while hunting for hominin scavenging hypotheses on the Web. I have no idea who Blumenschine and Cavallo are or what book this quote is taken from, nor do I want to represent it a view endorsed by most scavenger hypothesis proponents; but I thought it typical of the fantasy world inhabited by advocates of the scavenger hypothesis:

“The earliest hominids probably scavenged and took small prey with their hands, as chimpanzees and baboons do. Only their next step was unique: they began to use tools to butcher large carcasses that nonhuman primates cannot exploit. The difficulty of this leap (to the use of tools to butcher) belies the charge that scavenging offers no challenge that might select for human qualities. . . Scavenging is not at all easy for a slow, small, dull-toothed primate. To locate scavengeable carcasses before others did, we had to learn how to interpret the diverse cues to the presence of a carcass in riparian woodlands. They include the labored, low-level, early-morning, beeline flight of a single vulture toward a kill; vultures perched in mid-canopy rather than at the crown of a tree, where they nest; appendages of a concealed leopard or of its kill dangling from a branch; and tufts of ungulate hair or fresh claw marks at the base of a leopards favorite feeding tree. At night, the loud 'laughing' of hyenas at a fresh kill, the panicked braying of a zebra being attacked, the grunting of a frightened wildebeest---all serve notice of where to find an abandoned carcass when morning comes." (p. 94-95, Blumenschine and Cavallo, 1992)

Starting off with a bang: “The earliest hominids probably scavenged and took small prey with their hands, as chimpanzees and baboons do.” This is the foundation their argument, equating early hominin behavior with that of chimpanzees and baboons. Fair enough. Except that in Stanford’s paper which I cited last post, “The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees,” the author states, “wild chimpanzees (particularly the males who do most of the hunting) show little interest in dead animals.” Okay, so much for the scavenging chimps. Unfortunately, of course, since B&C start by presenting this as fact, all the rest of their conclusions follow from this erroneous statement. Did they just not know what chimps eat, or did they ignore it and make up chimp behavior to suit their theory; because that’s, effectively, what happened?

They continued with the following assertion: “The difficulty of this leap (to the use of tools to butcher) belies the charge that scavenging offers no challenge that might select for human qualities.” Since they haven’t proved that hominins were scavenging, the statement makes no sense. It’s a non sequitur. Simply because people used tools to butcher is no proof that they scavenged the animals they butchered, much less that it was selected for. They don’t appear to realize that, if scavenging were selected for in human evolution at such a late date, we’d still be scavengers.

The authors did have a flash of reason when they observed, “Scavenging is not at all easy for a slow, small, dull-toothed primate.” Forget about unarmed. So, why would we do it? It’s doubtful we could scavenge enough food to compensate for the energy expended to get it. Scavenging is easy for hyenas and vultures; they’d clean everything up long before slow us got to the carcass, even if we wanted to eat the meat.

The authors finished with a fanciful flurry of heightened imagination; for a minute they thought they were writers:

“To locate scavengeable carcasses before others did, we had to learn how to interpret the diverse cues to the presence of a carcass in riparian woodlands. They include the labored, low-level, early-morning, beeline flight of a single vulture toward a kill; vultures perched in mid-canopy rather than at the crown of a tree, where they nest; appendages of a concealed leopard or of its kill dangling from a branch; and tufts of ungulate hair or fresh claw marks at the base of a leopards favorite feeding tree. At night, the loud 'laughing' of hyenas at a fresh kill, the panicked braying of a zebra being attacked, the grunting of a frightened wildebeest—all serve notice of where to find an abandoned carcass when morning comes.”

Pay attention to the phrase “riparian woodland”: “woodland down by the river,” another cogent, if unintentional observation by the authors. Other than that, they didn’t appear to think much beyond their thesaurus. Or they haven’t spent much time looking at vultures. I’d challenge them to spend a day on foot out in, say, the John Day country of eastern Oregon and try and find one carcass with enough meat on it for them to get a reasonable bite or two. Hell, just find any old carcass, meat on the bones or not. Roadkill doesn’t count; stay to the backcountry. Go ahead, follow all the vultures you want. And in the early morning light, try and find where the coyotes were last night. Did you hear the roar of a mountain lion? Track it down and see if it killed anything.

The authors are, alas, delusional and woefully inexperienced. We are exceptionally poorly equipped to be scavengers. We are not so poorly equipped to be hunters; we’re good at throwing things. The odds of us finding game to kill are much greater than the odds of finding a leftover carcass. If you’ve ever been deer hunting, try and remember the number of dead deer you’ve seen (that weren’t shot) compared to the number of lives ones you’ve seen. In my experience, the ratio is probably bigger than 1:100. Our blunted sense of smell alone would rule us out for scavenging.

Me thinks a major stumbling block to understanding stone tools, is that paleo-anthropolgists tend to think of the first stone tools as butchering tools: hand-axes and scrapers; that’s why they place so much weight on early flaked tools which were, largely just that. They ignore the virtual certainty that the first stone tools were nothing more than the stones themselves, unprocessed. And not just for cracking open marrow bones or turtle shells, but for tossing at prey. There’s a reason why we developed a throwing shoulder early after descending; and there’s a reason why ball games are so universally important. Kill a seagull by pitching a baseball at him? You bet. A trick like that can stand between you and starvation, or at least a good meal. I imagine we came down from the trees as primarily spear-chuckers, but I’ll bet we added rocks to our arsenal early on.

No matter how common it is, it’s always a bit unsettling to find academic authors making such basic mistakes. Hopefully, some of their colleagues raised the same flags I did.

There’s always hope, right?

Dining With the Chimps

Somehow I got caught up in a debate about scavengers. It began with critiquing a recent article suggesting that early hominins ate grasses (see last post). In response to a Facebook post on the matter, a friend replied that she thought early people were scavengers. She led me to a paper by Craig Stanford, an anthropologist from USC, “The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees” (no date), that had some provocative information in it. If you thought chimps were meat eaters before, this paper makes it shockingly clear how much meat they eat:

“At Gombe, we now know that chimpanzees may kill and eat more than 150 small and medium sized animals such as monkeys, wild pigs and small antelopes each year.…

“The amount of meat eaten, even though it composed a small percentage of the chimpanzee diet, is substantial. I estimate that in some years, the 45 chimpanzees of the main study community at Gombe kill and consume more than 1500 pounds of prey animals of all species.”

I was under the impression that they primarily ate bush babies (Galagos) but Stanford asserts,

“Although chimpanzees have been recorded to eat more than 35 types of vertebrate animals (Uehara 1997), the most important vertebrate prey species in their diet is the red colobus monkey.”

Thirty-five types of vertebrates? Once again, I am astounded. These guys are bigger hunters than I thought. I do know that they count leopards among their prey. Yup, leopards. Their prey.

Killing by chimps is anything but incidental. Stanford observes:

“Jane Goodall has noted that the Gombe chimpanzees tend to go on ‘hunting crazes,’ during which they would hunt almost daily and kill large numbers of monkeys and other prey (Goodall 1986).”

He went on to assert,

“Chimpanzees may be among the most important predators on certain prey species in the African ecosystems where they live.”

Nonetheless, he still maintains a distance from meat-eating humans. He opines, “Since neither humans or chimpanzees are truly carnivorous —most traditional human societies eat a diet made up mostly of plant foods —we are considered omnivores”; a claim which is disputed somewhat. There are people who classify humans among the carnivores, but it’s indisputable that we’ve always had a large herbivorious component to our diet. The notion that “most traditional human societies eat a diet made up mostly of plant foods” is somewhat disingenuous. That depends largely on what one means by “traditional society,” a term he does not define. There are, in the main, two kinds of societies one might call “traditional.” There are those traditional elements of all modern societies, all of which are post-agrarian revolution and, hence, much more dependent on plant matter than a traditional hunter-gatherer society. Those pre-agricultural societies that survived into the modern age did so because they lived on marginal lands and don’t necessarily represent the norm for pre-agrarian societies. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine claiming the Inuit, for example, “eat a diet made up mostly of plant foods.” So, while it’s true that we’re omnivores; it’s by no means established that pre-agrarian societies ate, primarily, plant food. It’s those kinds of unwarranted assumptions that cloud one’s interpretation of data. The assumption makes it more likely that we had a vegetarian past, something the PC (politically correct) world would dearly love to be true. The brutal truth is, we certainly were as significant predators as chimps, and we certainly became more so once we were upright.

The author asked the question:

“Many researchers now believe that the carcasses of large mammals were an important source of meat for early hominids once they had stone tools to use for removing the flesh from the carcass (Bunn and Kroll 1986). But the evidence for stone tool use dates to only 2.5 million years ago. For the 3 or so million years of human evolution prior to that time, did our ancestors eat meat?”

Classic blunder. It’s not “evidence for stone tool use,” it’s evidence for flaked-stone tool use. All the difference in the world. By not mentioning the inevitable millions of years of un-shaped tool use that we must have had, he leaves the impression that we didn’t start using stone tools until we miraculously learned how to shape them. If we hadn’t already been using stone tools before we learned to shape them, how did we ever come up with the idea? It makes the question, “For the 3 or so million years of human evolution prior to that time, did our ancestors eat meat?” sounding like he didn’t read what he’d just written. Does he think we would have given up eating meat for those intervening years? Surely, he doesn’t. It’s an unfortunate slip of logic.

And it obviates the idea that we could have ever been scavengers. I know of no instance where a species turned from predator to scavenger, not to mention back again. That would be stunning, unprecedented. In the end, scavenging turned out to be one funny idea.

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.

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.