Sorry if this is in the wrong forum. It might get opinionated. And it’s pretty tame to be a great debate. Moderator, place it wherever you think it belongs. And I tried searching. If anyone can point me to some discussions along similar lines I’d appreciate it.
So:
What came first, the tool using brain, or the tool developed by the brain?
Seems to me like something is missing in human evolution. Without a powerful enough brain we can’t develop tools. But evolutionists always say (like on the history channel right now) that tools are what made having a big brain possible. Can someone smarter than me please explain?
I think the idea is that tools made a BIGGER brain possible. Not a big brain, as our australopithicine ancestors had big brains, just not as big as ours. The hypothesis (and it’s still a hypothesis, not a theory) is that tool use openned up the possibility of a better, more high energy food source that allowed the brain to grow even bigger. Without meat as a food source, we wouldn’t take in enough high-quality calories to support the brain we have. Again, it’s a hypothesis and has not been proven yet.
Anthropological evidence indicates that first came the thumb, then the tool, then the brain. The evolution of our opposable thumb allowed us a new manual dexterity with which to make the tools that would shape our ancestors’ history. Following the development of the opposable thumb, there was significant growth in the areas of the brain associated with hand-eye coordination and basic tool problem-solving (which all primates have, consider a chimpanzee choosing the correct twig with which to dig out the ants).
The consensus is that the modern hand allowed us the ability to craft modern tools, and the brain just went crazy evolving new ways to control this new survival skill. Those with better tool-making ability were selected for both naturally and socially, and passed their hand and brain genes on to their offspring.
Okay, but our australopithicine ancestor’s brain was bigger than the brain before. How did they get their bigger brain? The evolution had to start somewhere.
Oh, and that meat eating thing is a similar argument. I think it’s quite wrong to think that meat is what gives our brains the energy to funciton since millions or billions of vegetarians on the Earth seem to be doing quite well. We used to be herbivores. How did we “evolve” to eating meat? Someone had to start it and that animal was an herbivore. Meat was no benefit to him.
Well, if the tool was developed by the brain doesn’t the question answer itself?
If a brain can develp a tool it’s powereful enough isn’t it? Tools aren’t necessarily computer controlled milling machines. A simple stick or twig to pry with is a tool. Many pretty simple animals use tools. Some birds pick up a stone and drop it on things like nuts to break them open.
And evolutionary change doesn’t necessarily occur in huge jumps. If tools help improve brains and brains improve tools then the two can develop little by little in synchronism. Bootstrapping so to speak.
One thing that is really important is being gregarious and having the ability to learn by imitating others. Solitary animals have to rely on instincts to survive when young. No one teaches the young rattlesnake anything. However, young lions learn to hunt by watching the pride females at work. Young chimps learn to get ants out of a nest by use of a straw by watching others do it. And so on, and so on.
I’m sorry, but how on EARTH could someone with a small brain figure out how to use a stick to pick at ants. Or a rock to break open nuts? The higher apes AFAIK are the only animals that are capable of using tools, and their brains are already large. And they only BARELY use tools. How did they evolve their bigger brains?
A tool that is not crafted or used by the brain is not a tool. It is only a rock or a stick. What makes it a tool is the brain’s ability to see a purpose for something with no obvious purpose. How did this brain capable of seeing multiple purposes for things develop?
Oftentimes a trait evolves for one purpose and then enables something else. It’s quite possible that the brain grew to a certain size because of the survival advantage offered in developing comlex social relationships. That brain then became capable of tool use.
I don’t necessarily subscride to this hypothesis either, but that IS one hypothesis. The vegetarian argument isn’t too much trouble, though, as I don’t think you’ll find many (any?) hunter/gatherers out there today who sustain themselves on a vegetarian lifestyle. That eating pattern only shows itself in agrarian societies, which produce a diffent level and quality of vegetable calories than one finds in the wild.
Don’t a lot of hunter-gatherer groups, though, survive on a largely vegetarian diet? My understanding is that they generally mostly subsist on starchy, proteinous plants and that meat is consumed in smallish quantities (the vagaries of the hunt being what they are.)
I don’t know but they did. And apes aren’t the only tool users. Crows do too.
Apes modify branches into usefull tools by stripping off leaves and side branches. That’s modifying something in order to use the modified object for a purpose.
Go look at the monkeys currently in existence. As has been pointed out, many of them are ruidmentary tool users (as are many other creatures, including some birds). Baboons have moved out of the trees, for which their ancestors were adapted, into the plains, and have adopted an omnivorous life, much like our ancestors did. There’s another species of monkey, whose name escapes me at the moment, that have become grazers. They live off grass, which they pick with their hands. Because their hands are busy picking grass all day, they don’t have time to groom one another, which is the typical way for members of monkey society to socialize. So they’ve adopted a verbal “language”. They hoot at each other all day long. Etc, etc, etc.
The point is, all these things you seem to have a hard time accepting as the result of evolution are out there in nature in one form or another. They may not be as sophisticated or developed as they are in our species, but they’re out there, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how they could have evolved in our own history.
I’m sorry for being so unimaginative but (meat argument aside) I really don’t see how any small brain can learn to use tools. And since it’s been established by science and you guys, brains needed tools to evolve to be larger, without the use of tools. This is something that is black and white, not grey. One HAD to come first. I can see opposable thumbs evolving. I can see gills evolving. I can see lungs evolving. I can see all kinds of gradual changes like fins and feathers. But tool use is not a gradual change. There was a “lightbulb over the head” moment one day, like the scene in 2001. But for the lightbulb above the head to light, the brain had to be there to see the tool for it’s ascribed purpose. But science says that the brain wasn’t there, the tool came first. How can that be? The brain didn’t have the power to conceive of the tool yet!
Sorry, I screwed up a sentence. Read this instead.
I’m sorry for being so unimaginative but (meat argument aside) I really don’t see how any small brain can learn to use tools. And since it’s been established by science and you guys, brains needed tools to evolve to be larger. This is something that is black and white, not grey. One HAD to come first. I can see opposable thumbs evolving. I can see gills evolving. I can see lungs evolving. I can see all kinds of gradual changes like fins and feathers. But tool use is not a gradual change. There was a “lightbulb over the head” moment one day, like the scene in 2001. But for the lightbulb above the head to light, the brain had to be there to see the tool for it’s ascribed purpose. But science says that the brain wasn’t there, the tool came first. How can that be? The brain didn’t have the power to conceive of the tool yet!
OK. Well, it turns out that in the monkey world in particular, there is a strong correlation between brain size and troop size. In other words, the larger the brain, the larger and therefore the more complex the society in which the monkey lives. The correlation is good enough that you could give a skull from an unknown species to an expert in primatology and he could give you a pretty good guess as to the size of the group in which it lived.
Complex societies require complex rules to govern them. Living in a society fosters things like learning and thought. As an example, there was a troupe of monkeys that were being studied in Japan. The researchers used to put out rice on the ground to attract them. Because the rice grains were so small, the monkeys had to hang around for quite a while to pick them up, one by one, out of the gravel, so the researchers had plenty of time to study them. Then one day, one monkey discovered that she could pick up handfuls of rice mixed with gravel, throw them into the water, then skim the floating rice off the top while the gravel sank to the bottom. Within a few days, every monkey in the group was doing this, and the knowledge has been passed on to subsequent generations.
When you have a complex society like this, all it takes is for one individual to figure something out - by accident or on purpose. The technique will quickly spread to all the others, thanks to the brain complexity that has evolved to allow living in a complex society. It’s a bit facetious, but I like to think of that Far Side cartoon, where a bunch of cavemen are using their hands to hold their meat in the fire and grimacing in pain. One of them says, “Hey, look what Og do,” and points to another caveman at another fire who’s roasting his meat on a stick.
It has not been established by “you guys” (the posters in this thread). John Mace mentioned that it’s an unproven hypothesis. And if it has been establised by science I’d be interested in seeing a cite.
There’s mention in this thread of several small-brained creatures using tools. If a crow can do it, it’s hardly rock science.
Largely, but not totally. We are omnivores (despite what the vegans may say), designed to get some, at least, of our nutrition from animal products.
Shush! Don’t you know that gathering (and conking small critters on the noggin before tossing them in the pot) is women’s work and that we all depend on the big, strong, and male hunters to bring home big slabs of mastodon? But really, those plants are much more starchy than proteinous and some amino acids we need are available pretty much only in meat.
Tools are also useful, though less glamorous, when you are gathering and preparing plant materials. How can you exploit a resource like mannioc roots if you can’t dig them up, shred them, and squeeze out the prussic acid before you cook them? Unfortunately for archeologists all of that is done with tools made of plant materials and they are unlikely to last a week, much less 50,000 years, so archeologists often make the error of presuming a physical culture centered on what did survive the millenia, the stone tools. I once tried to write a fake site report using a modern hunter/gatherer society as my model but had to give up because virtually nothing they owned and used would have survived in the ground for more than a few years.
Lightbulb moments happen all the time, and not just in humans. Was Smeghead’s monkey smarter than her fellows? Not necessarily. She just happened to see that rice floats and gravel doesn’t. This gave her an advantage over her fellows in that she could exploit a food source more efficiently. She and her descendents would therefore have more calories at their disposal so if there was a mutation for a larger brain at some point the resources would be there to build and power it. Because she lived in a group and the other members of her troop picked up the same behavior the odds are improved that one of their descendents will have a random big brain mutation. What I find especially cool about the evolutionary value of living in groups is that it might not be her direct descendents who benefit the most from her “lightbulb moment;” she could die as soon as the behavior had been picked up by another monkey because she had made her contribution to the future success of the troop. Does her insight result in immediate benefit for her troop? Yes. Did it result in immediate increase in brain size? No. Will it eventually? There are no guarantees, since we are depending on a random mutation, but the monkeys will be more likely to take advantage of a mutation if it occurs. When it happens, will that mutant monkey have a brain several times the size of her parents’? Not very likely. It will almost ceratinly be only a bit bigger but that will leave her more likely to have a lightbulb moment, improving the chances for her and her troop and setting the stage for another bump in brain size. The process is gradual, taking many generations, but in geological time it can seem instantaneous.
That doesn’t really make any sense. What is a “small” brain? And since it has been demonstrated beyond dispute that some birds (ie, crows/ravens) use tools, it’s not a matter of what you can’t see, but what you apparently refuse to see. The evidence is there. What do you dispute about it?
Wrong. No one has established this.
Do you know the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, as those terms are used by scientists? I hypothesis is essentially an educated guess that you attempt to prove or disprove by experimentation. A theory is a hypothesis that has passed the test of having empirical data to back it up. In the field you are attempting to understand, there are only hypotheses, no generally accepted theories. In the end, we really don’t know the whole story.
I already explained the error you are making. It’s possible that the brain became more complex (ie, more intelligent) for other reasons, and that tool making ability was a byproduct of that intelligence. There almost certainly were hundreds of “lightbulb” moments before tool use took hold and was passed on from one individual to another.
But really, those plants are much more starchy than proteinous and some amino acids we need are available pretty much only in meat.