Re: A'pith Predatory Realities: not like those of extant chimps (Repost from 08/2003)

<claudiusdenk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1166920916.138162.279660@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Those animals are active
by night, and there is nothing the hominids could
do to stop them.

Nothing? I disagree. In the least they can be a nuisance, throwing
rocks, waving sticks, and just making a collective ruckus.

You are ignorant of basic facts. Primates
(such as hominids) have colour vision, so
they cannot see well at night. The
animals would just walk around them.

Its common knowledge that hujmans see just fine at night,

Do a web search on the topic. Some humans
(especially males) are 'colour-blind'. In fact,
many are 'differently sighted' in that they are
closer to the standard mammalian pattern;
they _can_ see better at night. There was
probably some selection which produced
this phenomenon -- or maintained it since we
were chimps. Had there been more (as your
scenario would require) then all humans would
be 'colour-blind' and the species would have
reverted to the standard for mammals. The
fact that they didn't is, in itself, overwhelming
evidence that your scenario is wrong.

Nevertheless I agree this would not be perfect. But, again, not only
would this lack of proficiency in their communal territorialism not be
a problem for the validity of my scenario/hypothesis but it is an
essential aspect without which my scenario would not work. Any
particular A'pith community did not have to be perfect to survive the
dry season. They just had to be a little bit better than the other
communities in their vicinity.

Wrong. They had to be 'better than'
(or at least 'equivalent to') the predators.
You have not begun to set out a scenario
where they could cope.

Idiotic. Why you say these things we will never know because you willl
never say.

Mammalian prey species (especially those
with a slow rate of reproduction) must
necessarily be 'equivalent to' their common
predators -- in that they will not suffer
predation unless they get sick or injured, or
old or unlucky. That's a necessary condition
for the survival of such species. Hominids,
including Apiths could not have survived
predation in the scenarios set out by you,
and by standard PA types. That's why
they never discuss it. They merely assume
survival -- in exactly the same way as you do.

The assumption is that the predators
would tend to collectively seek out the A'pith community site that is
most impoverished--it's members hungry, weak, fighting with each other,
starving, coming out of the trees often to get food--and ignore the
A'pith communities that still have enough resources to put up a good
fight against the opportunity seeking predators.

The predators would consume any animal
significantly weaker than themselves.
They'd eat every Apith they could find.
And, under your scenario, they'd find the lot.

Nonsense. You have no dispute with anything I'm saying so you come
back with these absolutistic notions that have nothing to do with
reality as we know it.

The 'reality as we know it' consists of HUGE
predators catching and tearing apart any
hominid it finds on its territory. A large
party of well-armed and well-prepared
hominids might IN DAYLIGHT cope with
such a predator. But they would never seek
to confront them at night. Nor would they
be able to raise young if such predators were
commonly in the vicinity.

Those are reasons why I see a continuing reliance
on off-shore sites (not unlike modern Zanzibar)
up to fairly recent times.

If you were to explicate the details of your scenario it would become
obvious that it completely lacks a communal (group) selective aspect.

That is not a problem at all. Whenever
they were not under pressure from predators,

In your scenario there is no pressure from predators.

Not so. The hominids would be fairly safe
-- if not entirely so -- on off-shore islands.
But they would be constantly seeking to
expand to (and then on) the mainland. They
would have needed very large, well-organised
tribes to do that successfully.

etc., they would have fought in much the same
way as their descendants do today (see Somalia,
Iraq, Congo, etc.) and as chimps do all the time.

Thus it has no group selelctive aspect. And you are just assuming
human behavior, you are not describing its selective origin.

Since chimps demonstrate it, there is no need
to describe 'its selective origin'. It is the
ancestral condition.

Eh? They could swim; they could observe
tides, and currents; they would have used
flotation aids, such as logs. Often the water
would be shallow enough for wading.

Predators couldn't swim also?

Predators could certainly swim, and would
occasionally arrive on off-shore islands,
where they might do a lot of damage before
they were eliminated. But they would have
stood little chance against hundreds of
hominids attacking them, and constantly
harassing them.

NO, I am not. I am trying to ask a sensible
question about your nonsensical scenario
-- which, I admit, is not easy. You say that
Apiths slept in trees. But tree-sleeping
primates select their sleeping-trees with
care. Most are quite unsuitable. None will
sleep in thorny acacias, for example. So
what kind of trees did Apiths sleep in?

We'll probably never know for sure. Just look at the fossil evidence.
Spores, etc.

You should be capable of discussing POSSIBLE
types of trees. Of course, since there aren't any,
you have a problem.

Do you have any evidence that trees didn't exist back then?

I was saying that there are no POSSIBLE
kinds of trees in which Apiths could sleep.
Your inability to suggest any is evidence
for that. In WHAT KINDS of trees did Apiths
sleep? It's a straightforward question. Were
they like those that baboons select (large
cedar type)? Or like those preferred by chimps:
big ones with lots of small branches where
each chimp can use all four limbs to cling on?


Paul.



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