Something that makes me curious is whether or not our bodies have somehow adapted to our toolmaking ability- the fact that we wear clothes to keep us warm, machines to help us perform tasks and get around, and drugs to keep us healthy. Many times we hear about people dying of ‘exposure’ in the wilderness, which makes me speculate that we are poorly adapted to live without the benefits of modern technology and tools.
We are much more devoid of hair than many other animals, which seems to pose as a disadvantage. Also, women’s breasts seem like they would make certain things, like running, difficult. I hear about many women who have to wear a bra all the time. How would these kinds of women survive if they couldn’t? If they had to do a lot of running/jumping/climbing around to survive? Other animals (including other primates) seem to get along lactating just fine without having to lug around to large mounds of flesh- has the aesthetic aspect of female breasts gotten to the point where they’re almost impractical for everything else? Not ever woman breastfeeds these days, which pretty often leaves them as veneer in terms of functionality.
Also, is the leg structure of human beings practical for running? If you compare how fast we can run to how fast many quadripeds can run, we’re way behind. I don’t think people are going to be chasing down gazelles for food. Even other bipeds, such as ostriches, have a different leg structure than us and can run much faster. What advantages do our leg structures have over quadripeds?
AHH! GOOD Q. In one way bodies of neolithic men and women were quite different. They were not eating anything with preservatives, so their internal organs and function was much different. There is some speculation that their appendix was much larger and contained gritty stoned for digestion.
Some neolithic men and women looked and were shaped just like most people today. Others were inherently shorter and stockier.
Females breast would have been much flatter, and not as voluptuous. Unless pregnant then they would swell again with milk.
The no preservatives thing in their food is very big, and would have made for extremely lean people. Also diet and exercise was an everyday thing for them. I don’t think there were many morbidly obese people at all.
sorry so abbreviated, I’m quite busy today. If you like to email me I can direct you to some cites…
I think you’re confusing Neolithic (New Stone Age) with Paleolithic (Old Stone Age). Neolithic Man was virtually identical to us. He/SHe was us, just a few 10s of thousands of years ago. You need to go back more than 100k yrs to find something appreciably different.
As for running, bipedal locomotion has been shown to be much more energy efficient, even if it is not as fast. We can catch up to a gazelle, but we can follow it until it gets tired. The big cats, especially the cheetah, has evolved in the opposite direction-- ie, great at short bursts of speed, but w/o much endurance.
I don’t think there are too many women who can’t survive without a bra, although going without one may be uncomfortable. Anyway, breasts are mostly fat, so I’d imagine most women would have smaller ones if they had to subsist on a hunter-gatherer diet.
r_k, that makes more sense than it would seem at first glance. With preservation, food lasts longer, so it can be gathered when plentiful and stores of food eaten when not plentiful. If you can’t preserve food, then you go hungry when food is not available to be hunted/gathered, and you become leaner.
Of course, I’m fairly sure that even Paleolithic man had some methods of food perservation, but they wouldn’t be as efficient as the freezer or canning.
On a purely physical level, our species is fairly poorly adapted to the vast ranges of climates and places in which we live. We certainly couldn’t have left africa/me as a species without at least some toolmaking ability and certainly not without clothing. Though we did pretty much make it to 6 of 7 continents without any ‘modern’ technology, and could likely survive as a species on them even if they were removed. However, without agriculture and modern industrial farming/animal rearing, we certainly couldn’t maintain 6billion people.
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Only a disadvantage if you forget that we evolved in a HIGHLY tropical climate that ranges from swealtering jungle, tropical savannah/forest, to arid desert. Not having body hair to trap all the heat in, or prevent sweat from evaporating to cool the body is a decided advantage. Same for having long noses to cool the air as it enters the body, and moisturize (with heated sweat) it as it exits; and the same for having sweat glands on our entire body.
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I know this isn’t politically correct to say, and I am not trying to use it in any way as an excuse for treating females a certain way today, but…In the times in which the human body evolved (the modern human), females were rarely required to run to survive. The majority of their lives were spent together in groups, caring for children, preparing meals, and gathering fruits, eggs, and wild vegetables. The only time a female would have had to run any distance would be the rare times a rabid or desperate animal attacked a camp. But for that matter, the males only had to run slightly more often, since we typically used tactics of ambush, range attacks, traps, and exhaustion to capture prey.
There is a pretty good special/series that they play on the discovery channel/TLC/National Geographic every now and then called something like The World of Sex, which attributes the devolpment of pronounced breasts as a response to the evolution of upright walking. Since normally a female who walked on fours would only have to be, ahem, attractive from behind, human females had to develop ways to attract a mate from the front as well. A few million years of natural selection later, and you get pronounced breasts.
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Contrary to common sense, it is deceptively easy for a cunning human to ‘chase down’ a gazelle, or hell, a cheetah for that matter. All it requires is a little planning and luck. Find a large relatively flat area, with only sparse cover; stay downwind of a pack of gazelles, making as little noise and sudden movements as possible; toss a spear/arrow/axe/stone at any gazelle unlucky enough to get within range, hopefully injuring it at least moderately; and procede to jog after it as it runs away. As long as you can keep it in sight (hence the flat area with little cover), you can continue to chase it; its injury should prevent it from running so quickly that it goes out of sight; and you only have to run fast enough to get to it first when it collapses of exhaustion.
Two legs aren’t for speed, as someone else here mentioned, they are for effeciency.
And if you are a good enough tracker you can even let them get out of sight. You only need to be in moderately good condition to chase a gazelle and used to running long distances too.
I never thought of the efficiency of two legs! Well, I mean, having legs built this way has to be useful in some aspect, but I never thought of it in terms of endurance. Though I guess if you look at marathon runners, it makes sense. I don’t know many animals that could put up a chase over several HOURS.
So would large, voluptuous breasts be attributed to diet? But if that were the case, couldn’t women who need breast reductions just do diet+excersize rather than invasive surgery?
I don’t know. Have any of you seen the so-called Venus figurines from the Neolithic period? Perhaps an exageration, but them’s is some big boobs!
As for dieting, sure it works a bit. About as much as it does for women trying to loose weight off their butts. Of guys attempting to lose their spare tire.
Probably the most significant change you’d notice in our most recent ancestors (from, say 150k yrs ago) would be more exagerated brow ridges. And because there were so few of us then, it’s likely we’d consider them all to be of the same “race”, and probably not exactly likey any “race” today. Some geneticists have argued that they might have looked something like the !Kung/San found in certain parts of Africa today. If you’ve ever seen a pictur of a !Kung/San person, he looks a bit like an amalgomation of all the modern “races”.
I think this has much more to do with the average modern human’s lack of knowledge of how to survive in a harsh environment, than anything to do with our body structure. While it’s true that we cannot survive in the Arctic and other extremely nastsy areas without technology and tools (read clothing and shelter), a human that knows the tricks and tips of how to survive in a seemingly harsh area can do so with very little besides the natural resources available and good old ingenuity.
Thought you guys might want a woman’s input about how Neolithic women handled those pendulous breasts.
It’s a modern myth that heavily endowed women have to wear a bra. They don’t. But, if they don’t, over a period of years the breasts will stretch under their own weight, even hanging down to the waist or lower. Hence the term “long breasted woman” you sometimes used to hear, or can still find in historical accounts. Also, back issues of National Geographic with pictures from areas of the world where bras are unkown and clothing seldom worn will provide evidence of this.
The only reason women have to wear a bras is to keep their tits from stretching into 36E extra-longs.
I even ran down and caught a rabbit once (luck mostly I think) but I did it. I did get very good running after them and spearing them with homemade spears.
I could run dogs into the ground. Yes they were much faster than me but taking them out running they would get tired and I could still plod along. Eventually they would lay down and need to rest.
Now, I was REALLY in shape. However, I imagine Neolithic man was also very much in shape. I think the other posters talking about efficiency have it right.
Oh I’m pretty sure I was neolithic man. I said *Some neolithic men and women looked and were shaped just like most people today. Others were inherently shorter and stockier. **
The Iceman from the Italian Alps was 5’2 and proabably quite stocky, he most likely hailed out of the south. Also, neolithic man was very close to modern man. Nearly indistinguishable from us. Accept on the inside.
Dogs are considered on average to be endurance runners/hunters, yet like andymurph64 mentioned, they will tire out more quickly than you or I. Most of the books on early evolution I have read suggested that our earliest ancestors (those that eventually became chimps and australopithicenes) probably were like chimps in that they could walk on either 2 or 4 legs, but only upright for short distances. As the jungles of south africa became more and more sparse and eventually grew into savannah/open forest, the ancestor had to spend more and more time on the ground walking between the trees (to get food). Since walking upright would have required less energy, the more upright an individual was naturally, the less food it would have required, and therefore the less likely to starve, and more likely to viably reproduce during the especially lean times. That push is what turned the very chimplike ancestor into the upright australopithicus africaansus(sp?). It wouldn’t have become a hunting advantage until much later with the introduction of homo ergaster and erectus, the first mostly carnivorous men.
The commonly used term of art in anthropology is “anatomically modern Homo sapiens”. Meaning, people who were identical physically to modern day humans. So the question the OP should have asked is: when did anatomically modern Homo sapiens appear? And the answer is about 100,000 years ago. There were still many populations of archaic Homo sapiens running about…Neanderthals, and several other heavy-boned specimens. The Neanderthals were still around 30,000 years ago, but became extinct soon after.
What you have to remember is that “Paleolithic”, “Mesolithic”, and “Neolithic” are CULTURAL terms. Most times, when you find stone tools there are no human remains associated with them, so you have no direct evidence about the kind of people that made the tools. The terms just mean old stone age, middle stone age, and new stone age, and were based on the kind of tools that were found, from simple stone tools to complex. Paleolithic essentially means 99% of human history, back to the first hominids to make stone tools. But Cro-Magnons, anatomically modern humans, were also Paleolithic.
The Neolithic refers to the period after the invention of agriculture, but before the invention of metalworking. After the invention of metalworking, we have what is called the Bronze Age, then the Iron Age.
Note that all these “ages” were worked out in the 1900s before the invention of radiometric dating. So archeologists knew that certain sites were older than others, but not exactly how old. Stone tools were the oldest, then Bronze, then Iron, but no one had a clear idea exactly how old these things were unless there was some sort of historical record, which pretty much started with the Sumerians and Egyptians, already in the Bronze Age.
So after all that, the short answer is that Neolithic people lived from about 10,000 to 4,000 years ago, and were anatomically modern people. They were identical to us, even on the inside. They didn’t have giant appendixes, any more than modern subsistance farmers today do. Their culture was probably pretty similar to the various isolated subsistence farmers of today in South America, Africa, and Asia. Notice that the definition of Neolithic includes farming, so Neolithic people are different than hunter-gatherers.
Also, why the assumption that stone-age women can’t have worn bras? If they’re killing animals, then they could wrap a strip of hide around/under the breasts. Victoria’s Secret it ain’t, but it’s got to help, right?
About bipedalism: Efficiency is a nice benefit, to be sure, but I had always understood that that’s just the icing on the cake. Isn’t the primary benefit that it leaves our forelimbs free for carrying things?
Culturally, you are certainly correct. But anatomically, we have not made any signifigant changes since hunter-gatherer times. Since the majority of our species history is during hunter-gatherer cultures, and we have made no significant changes since leaving the lifestyle, it can be said that fundamentally, we are/were built or adapted for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Eventually this may change (and probably will), but for now, we have adaptations that predispose us to that lifestyle on the average, and it could be said therefore than anything true of a hunter-gatherer human, should be true for all humans, physiologically.
I have read books/seen specials which have leaned one way or the other. The most compelling argument I read though (and I apologize for not having the cite handy, the book is at home and I do not know the authors name off the top of my head) suggests that at the time the first ‘upright apes’ the australopithicenes were evolving, they still ate their food mostly on the spot the way a chimp does. Meaning, they would walk to a tree, climb it, sit on a limb, pick a fruit, and eat it; or conversely chase monkey around, knock it out of tree, climb down, sit, and eat it. It would have been rare that they would have carried anything that required both hands for anything more than a couple of feet.
While it is true that the development of ‘arm-like’ limbs, as well as dextrous hands in primates and other tree dwelling creatures probably evolved for holding and carrying food/young, these things developed LONG before the upright walking did.
It is hard to picture the ability to carry food around in the relatively safe environment of australopithicenes as something that would be a compelling prod of natural selection. However, with the regular droughts and famines of the time, any adaptation that meant you needed to eat less food than your peers would have been a compelling prod of natural selection.
(though I guess you could argue that competition within the pack could see the ability to carry food away from the pack and eat it in secret would also be a selective advantage; but IIRC that would require a rewrite of the whole pack/troup model of homonid development)