Funny, I thought it was late man that got fired.
I’ve done some modest amount of wilderness survival training (“traditional”, not military/SERE-style short-term survival) and believe me, knapping flint, starting a fire via flint spark or friction peg methods, et cetera is far more complicated than “smashing two stones together,” to a point that I doubt even a modern human of average intelligence, without prior training, could develop efficient methods of doing so. This is an enormous gulf between the simple tool use and modification demonstrated by the chimp and the development of sophisticated cutting and scraping tools of Home ergaster.
I can’t find a cite for it online but I read a paper by Joanne Oliva-Purdy, who has done observational research on both black bears and primates which indicated that the capability of conceptual comprehension may be roughly equal, at least in some measures. Bears, of course, don’t enjoy the intricate social relationships that the more advanced primates do, and while they are capable of some degree of social altruism when they do form “social” groups around a common food source, these are transitory rather than lifelong tribal units. On the other hand, bears show an excellent grasp of mechanical conceptualization (despite their lack of gripping appendages) and do have an extended rearing period (2-1/2 to 3 years), which is comperable or longer than most large carnivores, despite the fact that bears, especially black bears, are not primary predators. Comparing their intelligence to that of a gorilla might be a bit of stretch but it’s not an enormous one.
Well, it’s not just food but also tools that can be carried, which is especially important if you are dependent upon tools but not especially good at making them. The erect hominids are unique in that they are the only species that can carry, rather than drag, large loads for any significant distance; contrasted with the biomechanical difficulty and complexity of erect stature and movement it suggests that load-carrying has some significant role in hominid evolution.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the previous poster had indicated a Lamarckian cause-and-effect transmission of protein availably as inheretic characteristic leading to larger brains. My point was that a protein-rich diet doesn’t strongly correlate with the development of “general” (conceptual) intelligence. Most of the large primary predators (large cats, sharks, large reptiles, et cetera), have a vary narrow range of intellectual capability, whereas omnivores with access to protein but whose diet consists significantly if not chiefly on carbohydrates and plant lipids and proteins tend to fill the “general intelligence” role better. And there are pure herbivores–horses and donkeys, for instance–that are intelligent but provision upon high-bulk, low protein vegetable matter.
Hmmm…well, I’ll allow that you have a point there and retract that statement. As you illustrate, the main food sources for Neolithic man on up were grains that required cooking to make them digestable. But (and this point is arguable, as the existing evidence isn’t definitive) grains and vegetables requiring cooking don’t seem to have been a major source of nutrition for most humans until the Upper Paleolithic period, while fire existed considerably before that–possibly as far back as late H. erectus or early H. sapiens. (H. egaster might have used fire, as suggested by some sources, but almost certainly didn’t make or control it.) So fire helped us expand our dietary abilities and therefore utilize more environments, but we didn’t develop fire for this purpose.
Stranger
I think we should take into account when fire was first controlled:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3557077.stm
I do think the interaction with our tools was what then guided our evolution; the relative sudden change from Australopithecus to Homo erectus can be explained by the control of fire.
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I think you may be labouring under a misapprehension here. The early hominids almost certainly couldn’t make fire, even long after they could use fire. There were several groups of stone-age people, notably in Australia, that couldn’t make fire, but they all used fire. Fire was carried from camp-site to camp-site using firesticks and fire-bowls.
So while there may be an enormous gulf between “starting a fire via flint spark or friction peg methods” and “smashing two stones together” no such gulf exists between pre-fire users and fire users. There the difference is purely between carrying a digging stick and carrying a fire stick. A chimpanzee may not be able to make fire but there is no reason why a chimpanzee couldn’t carry fire if she so desired.
That is all quite true, but also quite different from the original idea that having hands allowed hominids to carry food across deserts. The one thing I suspect that hominids have never carried across deserts is food.
We can’t simply discount the effect of diet because some omnivores with diets where protein isn’t limiting are smarter than some carnivores who are no more or less protein limited. The issue we need to be examining is not whether an increase in animal food extends an intelligence advantage ad infinitum. That path would lead us to examine whether a cat with 100% animal flesh intake is smarter than a wolf with 80% animal flesh intake and so on. There is no reason to believe that would be the case since both animals have a surfeit of animal-based resources. The real issue we need to be examining is whether an increase in animal food extends an intelligence advantage to groups that are on a diet where protein and lipids are limiting nutrients.
One important point to note here is that with almost no exceptions the stupidest mammalian predator is still intellectually streets ahead of the brightest herbivore in a comparable size range. While horses might be intelligent by herbivore standards they are still far les intelligent than the most retarded wolf. And of course horses have access to more protein than cattle precisely because they have a high volume diet, and horses are smarter than cattle. It is debatable how much of that is due to protein availability, but the take-home lesson is that animals on high protein diets are smarter with few exceptions.
The omnivores are often exceptions, but they are also not particularly relevant. At some point a diet becomes saturated in protein and lipids. Beyond that point they are simply burned as energy rather than being utilised as a resource. Bears and other omnivores have reached that point so it’s not really of any relevance to compare them with pure carnivores since both types have excess protein and lipid in the diet. They can be justifiably contrasted with pure herbivores, and of course they are far smarter than any herbivore. Protein and probably lipids remain limiting in the chimpanzee diet and were thus probably limiting for early hominids as well. Because of that any change in behaviour that removed that limitation had the potential to be hugely advantageous.
Grains may not have been all that widely available in many areas, and certainly they would be seasonal. Tubers would have been a far more important potential food source, along with unripe fruit. Both those food source also require cooking to make them digestible but unlike grains they are available year round in the tropical and subtropical regions where erectus and earlier hominids primarily lived, and unlike grains they are both food sources that are unavailable to almost all other species. Those characteristics gave a huge advantage to any organism that could exploit them through the use of fire.
The other point to realise is that the advantage of fire to the first fire users would be even greater than it is today. Those first fire-users would have been living at much lower densities precisely because they couldn’t exploit all that potential food. As soon as one clan could cook food they could support far higher densities of people on exactly the same territory, and for the first several generations they would be rendered immune to seasonal fluctuation or droughts. As with agriculture the initial relative benefits of this new technology would have been huge.
Well no, that simply isn’t true.
The one thing we know about current and recent HGs that used Neolithic and even Palaeolithic technology is that grains, vegetables and unripe fruit made up around 30% of the diet, with meat making up around 50% and the remainder being fruit. You can’t possibly say that one third of the diet isn’t a major source of nutrition.
You are correct that there isn’t much archaeological evidence of vegetable based food, but that’s because using stone-age technology the material was collected with wooden tools and cooked on an open fire. Neither of those things leaves any evidence for more than a year. We do have evidence in the form of grindstones used for processing grains dating back some 30, 000 years, but the very nature of the stones makes such finds extremely rare. There is even less archaeological evidence that stone-age people used fruit as a food source. There’s plenty of evidence for the use of meat and shellfish because those things leave remains, but that should never be taken as evidence that meat and shellfish were more important food sources than fruit and vegetables.
The problem with any argument that vegetables and grains weren’t important until recently is that it requires some mechanism to explain why all known and observed Palaeolithic and Neolithic people (and remember those periods didn’t end until late last century for some people) have relied heavily on grains, tubers and unripe fruit for their nutrition. It’s hard to believe that the San, Aborigines, Andamanese and other disparate stone-age peoples all worked out how to exploit vegetable resources using fire to the extent that the comprised a third of their diet, and yet other human groups never managed to do so.
It is far simpler and safer to assume that vegetables and grains have always been major food sources for our species and that cooking them was part of the repertoire we inherited form H. erectus. Evidence of increased exploitation certainly appeared when people started making semi-permanent villages and using agriculture, but that is quit unrelated to the importance of these food sources to nomads.
Put simple if all known stone-age people used vegetables as major source of nutrition why should we assume that the unknown groups were different when there is no evidence to contradict the idea?
Of course we can never know why we developed fire. We may have developed it for precisely that purpose. Given the huge advantage presented it certainly isn’t implausible. As you pointed out above, people carry tools with them to enable them to exploit food sources. If a hominid can carry a digging stick then why wouldn’t she carry a fire-stick? And if the fire stick will guarantee that she wouldn’t go hungry when she arrives at the new camp site it seems inconceivable that she wouldn’t carry it.
Your point would have merit if any of our “earliest tool using anccestors” (per my post) did any of those things. I’m not talking about Homo erectus. I’m talking about the first hominid to strike two stones together to make a sharp edge.
I must add here that roving packs of lions in four-by-fours have now surpassed sharks with lasers mounted on their heads in my personal ranking of things to worry about.
They are, however, still less scary than tyrannosaurs in F-14s.
“Drive George! Drive! This One’s Got a Coathanger!”
CITE. please.
CITE, please
I believe this technique has been around for awhile.
Since gibbons, gorillas and chimpanzees all live in groups it would appear that orangutans are the odd man out.
I have already posted a quote disproving this claim, albeit in the wrong thread ** Blake** has seen it
CITE, please.
Hunting & Feeding
This part isn’t bad, but things like the “hundredfold increase” sound like something coming from off the head. So CITE, please to anything you used.
Kniz I have no idea what point you are trying to make here.
That first page you linked to showed a person who is clearly not using stone-age technology and is clearly not in a desert. As such I can’t quite see how it supports any belief concerning stone-age people. Can you please explain the relevance?
Your other references show that sometimes food may be preserved so it doesn’t rot. Is that supposed to somehow refute my claim that carried meat rots? This seems to be headed towards a three legged dog.
Your next reference talks about gibbons living in groups. But we were specifically discussing great apes. Even the quote of mine you provided specifically refers to great apes. Gibbons are not great apes. Within the great ape lineage only ‘our’ branch (ie the gorilla chimp lineage) are social animals. That is precisely what I said in the passage you quoted. Once again, can you please explain the relevance?
Your next quote, far form disproving the claim, says that maybe Australopitheines used fire and that if they did then maybe it was to deter predators. No evidence is given that establishes either claim. As such it proves nothing. Even the authors don’t claim that it proves anything, they just say it’s a possibility. I never said it wasn’t a possibility, I asked why fire would deter a predator that will happily pull animals out of flames.
Your next reference also seems irrelevant. I said that cats that hunt in the daytime would hardly have trouble stalking a human at night. You produce an (erroneous) reference saying that not all cats hunt in the daytime. How does that even dispute my assertion about cats that do hunt in daytime?
I say that your reference is erroneous because it claims that cheetahs are the only diurnal hunter amongst the big cats. Anyone who has ever seen a wildlife documentary knows that this is not true. Before the 1970s it was almost impossible to film lions hunting except in the daytime, yet hundreds of hours of footage of lion hunts existed. Where do you think that footage came from, CGI? The fact is that while most other cats are primarily nocturnal hunters and cheetahs are primarily diurnal it is not by any stretch true to say that cheetahs are the only diurnal hunters. All big cats will hunt in the daytime if that will be successful.
Next time you may want to find a more reputable website for your references. Try putting “Site:.edu” on the end of your Google search. It will weed out a lot of these erroneous sites and return ones like the following:
Lions (n ¼ 52) and hyenas (n ¼ 4) did not differ in their penchant for diurnal and nocturnal attacks… three-quar- ters of the attacks by both species occurred at night.
http://pondside.uchicago.edu/ceb/Biol_Cons_2004.pdf
Jaguars are very adaptable and exhibit diurnal and nocturnal habits throughout their range.
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exdelgui.html
Panthera pardus (Leopard) - Africa, S of Sahara. Asia minor (extinct), Middle East, Turkmenia, India, Malaysia, Java, S & C China, Korea, Amur region of Siberia. Very adaptable. 30-80 kg. Solitary. Frequently climb and swim. Diurnal & nocturnal.
http://www.uvm.edu/~jdecher/Lecture28.html
And so on and so forth. Cleraly the claim of the baove webpage that only cheetahs are ever diurnal is bollocks.
Kniz at about this stage I think you need to just come out and say quite specifically what exactly it is that you are disputing. All those ‘references’ seem to be totally irrelevant, and one of them is factually erroneous.
Oh,a nd thatother referenve, the one to a PETA type site that says that circuses are cruel because animals fear fire without providing any evidence? That’s hardly acceptable evidence for GD is it?
In contrast science says:
"Since fire is a natural part of the environment for many animals, Komarek (1969) hypothesized that these animals lack an innate fear of fire and that some sensing mechanism and behavior patterns certainly must give warning in sufficient time for large mammals to move out of danger. His observation of large mammals showed their relative disregard of fire.
Ivey and Causey (1984) reached a similar conclusion in a study of radio-tagged white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Immediate and short-term responses of deer during burning activities showed deer to use streambeds and other moist sites as refuges from fire. Deer were observed feeding to within 65 ft (20 m) of approaching fire with no apparent alarm. At no time were deer observed running in response to fire. "
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/habitat/fire/lgmammal.htm
Remember we are talking here about early hominids. These were exclusive savananna dwellers, and savannas are characterised by regular fires. As a result savanna animals lack any innate fear of fire. There may be a few exceptions (though I know of none), but in general animals that are regularly exposed to fire show no more fear of it than it deserves. And all savanaa species are regularly exposed to fire by the very definition and mechanisms of savanna.
Hey, you’ve discovered my form of cooking!
A fellow bachelor I see. 