mistermack

Paul, you seem to be talking as if there is no such thing as birth control, and planned parenthood. Many people are now deciding not to have children, and others are just having one or two. Given the reasons given on other posts, this is why a lot of countries have falling populations. It's a growing trend in developed economies, there's no mystery or debate about it.

Is it known, or theorised, what happens to a primordial black hole that is less massive than the Moon, and so losing mass? Does it go through stages, or just remain a black hole and just fizzle out to nothing?

That also makes us special. I'd like to see dolphins or chimps fuck up the planet. 😏

I said in my post that other animals have cultures. In our case, it's so extreme that we put men on the moon. You might not call that special, but I would. Our nearest rival species are still at the bashing things with stones level. What more do you want to call us special? We are special in the degree of development of features that are either rudimentary, or non-existent in other animals. Anyway, I'm not posting here to support the OP. I'm just posting my thoughts, on the discussion.

A hugely important factor in the history of invention is culture. If you take intelligent animals like octopuses, they can innovate and display surprising intelligence in problem solving. But their inventions die with them, and the next generation starts from scratch. If your population has a culture, it means that you learn from each other, and beneficial behaviours spread around populations, and pass down the generations and can be built on. We humans are the most extreme example of this. Other animals have cultures of sorts, but nothing like the level that we have taken it to. And of course, language plays a huge part in the process. I don't know what the language skills were like at the time that we became bipedal though. Probably basic to non existent, but the learning culture can be pretty strong just from observing and copying.

The Schöningen spears prove that that is the case. You don't need to rely on my posts to find that out. The natural progression in the development of the spear would be stick, then all-wooden spear, then hafted, with either stone or bone on the tip. And that progression could easily take hundreds of thousands, or millions of years. But the weapon needs to have some real merit right from the start, or the process wouldn't even begin. It could be that it started out as a defensive weapon, or defensive/offensive between males fighting for dominance, or as a defence against predators. No leopard would enjoy the experience of having a sharp stick rammed down it's throat by a powerful ape. Whatever kind of tip it had. Apes have stronger arms than humans. The stabbing spear would be quite formidable as a defensive weapon.

Ummmm, you do realise that the picture you posted is labelled SHAFT SECTION ????? So no, it's not sharp enough. It's a section of a shaft. The clue is in the title. There has never been any suggestion that these spears had hafted stone tips. There is a tentative suggestion that some of the hand tools had been used in conjunction with wooden handles. But the jury is out on that point, the evidence isn't that strong. But the spears were all wooden. That's not disputed at all.

Where's YOUR evidence? I gave a link to the Schöningen spears earlier, but here it is again, as you obviously have memory problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_spears Please note that they are throwing spears, and the people who used them to survive obviously didn't have your superior hunting experience. The associated cache of 16,000 animal bones must have come from a lucky hit.

As an explanation for human bipedalism, endurance running is a joke. Chimps have far more endurance on four legs than two, they can only wobble around for about 100 m before getting exhausted on two legs. They generally walk on two legs for displays of male aggression, not for non-existent endurance reasons. Of course, endurance is selected for in nearly all animals, there's nothing unique about humans, but the endurance hunting hypothesis is full of holes as a proposed hunting technique for human ancestors millions of years ago. I've seen documentaries on the San people, and out of whole tribes, there are only one or two who can actually do it, and they wore modern trainers, and employed some very sophisticated tracking skills. None of that would be available to our ancestors, who would have been less well evolved for upright walking or running anyway. Endurance might well come into play once effective weapons were developed. You lie in ambush, and cause an animal a serious wound, and you then have to follow a blood trail to finish off the victim. That's a much more real-life scenario than ancient men running fit animals to a standstill.

The whole thread is about speculation. Nobody knows what made our ancestors become habitually bipedal. The fact that I posted earlier, that apes have been becoming gradually more upright over tens of millions of years in in the scientific record, and it's generally linked to size by evolutionists. That is obviously part of the cause, but it's the final jump, from a chimp-like ancestor to an upright ape that's unexplained. The fact that apes like chimps forage on the ground a lot, due to competition from monkeys for the fruit in the trees is also on the record, and not really disputed. But something happened to our ancestors, that didn't happen to chimps or gorillas. It might well have been a life transforming weapon or tool use. If it was, it has to be wood, because if it was stone, we would see the evidence. That's my line of thinking, but as I wrote earlier, the chances of any solid evidence turning up are pretty slim, given that the transition probably happened about 7 million years ago, and wooden artefacts are unlikely to last much more than a few decades in an African forest.

But this is just stating the bleedin obvious. You are not making any credible link to bipedalism in our ancestors. Other animals that evolved on the plains, unlike ours, have shown no sign of becoming bipedal, even though they have had the incentive of looking for predators for millions of years. I can't think of one single example. You might quote the ostrich, except that it's obvious that it became bipedal by developing wings, like other birds. When you balance the benefits against costs, it's a non-starter as an explanation for bipedal walking. Apes like our ancestors live in very large troops, with many pairs of eyes, and that's how they effectively spot predators. At any one time, someone will be scanning for trouble, and they give a very loud warning. I've read studies that have found that Leopards actively avoid Chimpanzee territories, because they get spotted so very quickly, and the alarm is so loud that their chances of successfully hunting anything at all are very low. That's not to say that they don't occasionally get lucky, and snatch a chimp, but it's very rare.

Your point is what?

The idea of humans becoming upright to see further on open savanna is a non-starter, to the point of silliness, to me. If you are a small ape, new to the savanna, it may make sense to stand up now and then and look around, but if you walk around upright, you are just making yourself prominent. Lots of prey animals will stand and look around, but they all drop back down to move around. Or you can use a termite mound or a heap of rocks or a tree to scan for danger. Becoming upright for that reason just doesn't cut it. Some of the latest evidence points to the transition to bipedal walking happening in thick dry forest. There is a hominin species, Orrorin Tugensis, that is nearly twice as ancient as Lucy, (Australopithecus Afarensis) , and is more human-like in many ways. There is strong evidence of bipedal walking, but also good evidence of tree climbing. Which points to an animal that lived in a wooded environment, climbed trees for food and protection, but still had a strong selection pressure for becoming bipedal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrorin Using the stick weapon could be an explanation. It would aid males in becoming dominant over their less dextrous rivals, and also help defend the clan against raids by the neighbours. You could have an evolutionary arms race scenario, like the antlers of stags, or the big canines in male Gorillas and Chimps. Skill using weapons would one day replace big canine teeth in fights between our ancestors.

On the question of evidence, there actually IS evidence, but it's indirect. The oldest stone tools are the Oldowan "choppers", going back about two and a half million years. Electron microscopes have found tiny fossilised wooden splinters in the sharp edges of these. If they were chopping wood 2.5 million years ago, sharpening a stick is by far the most likely candidate explanation. I think it's good evidence of spear making from that period, but it could go back double or treble that amount of time. Technology moved pretty slowly back then. You can sharpen a stick just by dragging it around, and that would have surely been the first method.

The sharpened stick is by far the most effective weapon available to hominids at the time of the transition to a bipedal stance. But the chances of one surviving in recognisable form in Africa must be very nearly nil. Spear evidence goes back a lot more than 280,000 years, but nowhere near millions of years. I think these are the current oldest : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_spears There's far more chance of a wooden artefact being preserved in the cool North than a humid African forest. Probably the best chance of evidence of spear use by early hominids would be fossil tracks, like the Laetoli footprints. You might get the impression of a spear being dragged along, or used now and then for balance. But if you are not looking for it, you're not going to find it.

When discussing our ancestors' use or need for weapons, it's tempting to go along with the old "Savannah Hypothesis", because that involves much more contact with the significant predators, than jungle or forest living apes would be used to. The latest evidence is leading more and more towards a transition to upright walking in a heavily forested environment. You don't get many of the major predators in the forest, because the prey are mostly highly agile tree climbers, so the food is very difficult to catch. Chimpanzees suffer very little predation, which is just as well, given their slow rate of reproduction, and it's a fair guess that our ancestors were similar. But, by far the biggest danger to a Chimpanzee, is another Chimpanzee. And that's today, when they are rare. Six million years ago, our ancestors would probably have been much more numerous than modern Chimpanzees, so territorial competition would have been far more intense. The clan next door would have been a constant threat to life, and in my opinion, it would have been that pressure that resulted in the development of weapon and tool technology. By the time they moved out onto Savannah, they would have been pretty proficient at making and using weapons. They wouldn't really have stood a chance without them.

You are missing the fundamental point of the way evolution works, just as they did. Comparing modern humans to chimpanzees is totally irrelevant. Modern humans have had six million years of adapting to the upright stance. Evolution cannot foresee that situation, as I already explained to you. The only way that our four-footed ancestors would become more upright was if there was an evolutionary benefit at the time. Are you claiming that modern chimps could walk more efficiently, if they became a tiny bit more upright? It's a ludicrous suggestion.

This betrays a real lack of understanding of the evolutionary process. Evolution cannot foresee a future advantage. The advantage has to be there, in the present, at all stages. It's a process of tiny incremental changes. Our chimp-like ancestors were clumsy and inefficient on two feet. On four feet they were fast and nimble and more efficient. The more upright they became, the less efficient would have been their locomotion. They became upright in spite of a loss of efficiency. Have you ever seen a chimp walk upright? They tire of it very quickly, because they are simply not built for it. There is no chance whatsoever that efficiency of locomotion had anything to do with the onset of bipedalism. The necessary incremental advantage wasn't there, until millions of years later. Likewise, seeing predators is a silly idea. If you can see them, they can see you, and they are faster and more efficient movers than a little newly-bipedal human ancestor. Also, the idea stems from the savanna hypothesis, which is pretty much defunct, with the newest evidence indicating a change to bipedalism happening in much more heavily wooded environments, where distance vision doesn't count, and tree-climbing ability does. The real factors behind bipedalism are firstly that the history of Apes is generally of an increase in body size and a more upright build. So bipedalism wasn't a sudden event. The two are probably linked. Bigger animals can't run along branches as nimbly as small monkeys and squirrel types. It's probable that as apes got bigger, they would do better standing on one branch, and holding onto higher branches for safety and balance. So a more upright stance is one logical direction for bigger tree dwellers to follow. Another likely factor is the rise of monkeys, at the expense of apes, which is well documented in the fossil record. Monkeys are smaller, quicker and can handle less-ripe fruit than apes, so over millions of years, apes have been losing out to them, because they can beat the apes to the fruit. One way for apes to respond to this situation is to exploit food on the ground, and under it, by eating fungi, and digging out roots etc. So it's quite possible that we should be thanking monkeys for our modern bipedalism.

I'm only guessing anyway, just hazarding an opinion. I think though, that if pain via the brain is involved in healing, it's likely to already have been investigated. The brain does influence growth, via the pituitary so it's not impossible. Maybe stem cells could be activated by a hormone via the brain.

It is a fact though, that sick animals tend to retreat to a quiet corner, and curl up and wait out the infection. And of course, doctors prescribe bed rest for the sick. I'm not sure if it's true, but it seems that healing seems to happen a lot quicker overnight when you're asleep.

Not necessarily. Stomach pains can indicate food poisoning, and probably did during our evolutionary past. Toxins can circulate in the blood, and damage muscle and organs, so cutting down on energetic activity might protect the body until the infection is cleared. Something similar might well apply to viral infections. Athletes can do real harm to their fitness, by overdoing it while they are suffering from an infection.

I see pain as a method of persuading (or forcing) you to favour a damaged part of the body, until it has repaired itself. If the brain keeps getting the damage signals, then it will continue giving the pain sensation. Some things can't be repaired, so the signals don't go away. Or maybe something does get repaired, but the damage signal keeps getting sent in error. Or maybe even the damage signal gets sent in complete error for no good reason. I don't see any evolutionary benefit in the body "stress testing" body parts. I'm not aware that repair is stimulated by the pain sensation in the brain. I don't find it likely, although can't say that I know anything to the contrary.

Instinct.

Two skunks living down a hole. One called In, the other called Out. How did Out know if In was In or Out ? (it's not difficult, answer tomorrow if nobody gets it)

Maybe clothing protected from the cold? A big penis might have been a liability till we began wearing something over it. Upright walking might have exposed it to a chilly wind. Selection could also happen with promiscuous females, where bigger penises might deposit semen ahead of the semen from a smaller one, or even pump out the semen from a previous partner. Chimpanzees have extremely big testicles, (from memory) which might compete with other males by producing large quantities of semen, and flushing out semen from a previous mating. Gorilla silverbacks, having more exclusive mating rights, don't need to compete in those ways, to the same degree.