Re: Marc was right




Op 13-07-2007 01:58, in artikel
1184284733.529517.4560@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Lee Olsen
<paleocity@xxxxxxxxxxx> schreef:

On Jul 12, 12:54 pm, Marc Verhaegen <m_verhae...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No answer, no coconuts, no algae, no oysters for 2.4 million years
(until modern Homo), what a lame argument for evolution of early
Homo. Creationists must love you, all spiritual
phenomenon---no evidence, how sad.

Don't be ridiuculous, my boy: physiol.*facts*:
PV Tobias 1998
"Water and human evolution"
Out There 3:38-44
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm

The Savannah Hypothesis - From 1925 to 1995 almost everyone grew up on the
"received wisdom" that the Hominidae (the family of mankind) was born on the
savannah, believed to have been the ideal crucible in which the strange form
of locomotion known as bipedalism came into being. The idea is an old one.
Robert Broom, in his 1933 book The Coming of Man: was it Accident or Design?
stated: "Before Australopithecus was discovered some of us believed that the
ancestor of man would be found in an anthropoid ape which had left the
forest and taken to living on the plains and among the rocks; and here (in
Australopithecus, the Taung child) we have just such a form."
Raymond Dart's 1925 paper, that announced the features of the little fossil
child from Taung, included this passage: "For the production of man a
different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the
higher manifestations of intellect ­ a more open veldt country where
competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness
of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of
the species... in my opinion, Southern Africa, by providing a vast open
country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water,
together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a
laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human
evolution." (Emphasis mine) From the animal remains found with the
Australopithecus child, Broom (1933) wrote, "... we can safely infer that
the rainfall was then, as now, scanty, and that there were no forests in
that region, only grassy and bushy plains from which the hills and krantzes
arose." My generation grew up steeped in what more recently has been
called the Savannah Hypothesis. As Elaine Morgan has chronicled in her book,
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1997), this view was supported, directly or
indirectly, by numerous scholars, including Sherwood Washburn, Kenneth
Oakley, Richard Leakey, Peter Wheeler, Alan Walker. It was a paradigm that
lasted for about 70 years of this century. In 1980, the Africanist
archaeologist J. Desmond Clark put forward a modified version of SH which
favoured a mixed ecology. He said "there is little doubt that proto-hominids
(ancestors of hominids) were widely distributed throughout the tropical
savannahs. It seems certain that it was within habitats consisting of
mosaics of grassland, woodland, and forest that the hominid line first
became differentiated from that of the pongids (the apes)." Clark singled
out not only the great richness and diversity of plant and animal resources
in the savannahs compared with the forest, and the fragmentation of the
forest cover during the later Miocene-early Pliocene, which isolated some
hominid populations, but also the progressive expansion of grasslands from
that time onward, which made available "empty niches" into which hominids
could expand. These factors, he believed, "can be expected to have led to a
number of adaptations". In 1985, Elisabeth Vrba
suggested that the family of man was probably a "founder member" of the
African savannah fauna! That year, I published a chapter called "The
conquest of the savannah and the attaining of erect bipedalism" in which I
expressed the old idea: "The living apes of Africa are to be found
exclusively in the wet forest of the middle reaches of the continent. It is
likely that ancestral apes, too, were forest-dwelling creatures...The spread
of lighter woodland and savannah and the retreat of the margins of the
primaeval forests could well have created conditions in which the tendency
to uprightness and bipedalism was favoured. The ability to run across the
high grass cover of the savannah, perhaps from one woodland-girt stream to
another, might have held advantages for those apes which could 'walk tall'.
Uprightness gave its possessors a chance to see over the tall grass and to
watch out for predatory enemies like the lions and sabre-toothed big cats.
Seemingly it was under just such a set of conditions that the Hominidae made
their appearance upon the face of the earth." That
statement may well be the quintessence of the SH - and I believe it was my
last statement in support of it. By 1995, when I gave the Daryll Forde
Memorial Lecture at University College, London, I stated of the SH, "We were
all profoundly and unutterably wrong!"

Repudiation of the Savannah Hypothesis - My disavowal of SH was based in the
first place on evidence which had been coming forth from excavations in S.&
E.Africa. From StF, suggestions of greater woodland cover at the time when
Australopithecus was deposited in Member 4, had emerged from studies on
fossil pollen, but these were not compelling. Then Wits team member Marian
Bamford identified fossil vines or lianas of Dichapetalum in the same Member
4: such vines hang from forest trees and would not be expected in open
savannah. The team at Makapansgat found floral and faunal evidence that the
layers containing Australopithecus reflected forest or forest margin
conditions. From Hadar, in Ethiopia, where "Lucy" was found, and from Aramis
in Ethiopia, where Tim White's team found Ardipithecus ramidus, possibly the
oldest hominid ever discovered, well-wooded and even forested conditions
were inferred from the fauna accompanying the hominid fossils. All the
fossil evidence adds up to the small-brained, bipedal hominids of four to
2.5 million years ago having lived in a woodland or forest niche, not
savannah. The evidence for the presence of big forest trees supports the
idea we had gleaned from the bones of "Little Foot" that tree-climbing had
been a part of the lifeways of these early African hominids. At least, one
could conclude, there had been trees big enough to bear the weight of the
Australopithecines (for which stunted acacias of the savannah would have
been unsuitable). To a large London audience in 1995 I said: "All the former
savannah supporters (including myself) must now swallow our earlier words in
the light of the new results from the early hominid deposits... Of course,
if savannah is eliminated as a primary cause, or selective advantage of
bipedalism, then we are back to square one."

Humans are not savannah-adapted animals - In rejecting the SH, I was moved
primarily by the evidence unearthed in S.& E.Africa. Meanwhile, Elaine
Morgan had been piecing together a nr of other arguments against the SH,
based on some anat., biochem.& physiol.data of modern humans, much of which
was collected by Belgium's Dr Marc Verhaegen, which contrast sharply with
the traits in present-day animals that are truly adapted to savannah life.
As examples, modern humans lack sun-reflecting fur & are virtually hairless.
The cooling system in our skin is quite unfit for hot, dry, exposed
environments: we have numerous sweat glands , we waste water & sodium - not
very suitable for life on the savannah. Our ability to concentrate our urine
is poor & too low and if ever our earliest ancestors were savannah dwellers,
we must have been the worst, the most profligate urinators there. Adapted
savannah-dwellers need to drink more water at a time, but most humans are
not able to drink much at a time. The quantity of our subcutaneous fat,
which would insulate us against heat loss, is never found in truly
savannah-adapted animals. In our bodily functions,
chemistry and microscopical anatomy, we should be hopeless as
savannah-dwellers. So Marc Verhaegen & Elaine Morgan, in her remarkable
book, The Scars of Evolution, came to the same conclusion that we had
reached from quite different lines of evidence: the old SH° was not tenable.
All former savannah supporters must recant , this I did in London. It was an
exciting moment - living thru a change of paradigm. Max Planck, the German
physicist & Nobel laureate, once wrote these words on the replacement of an
outworn paradigm: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows that is familiar with it." That
must be one of the masterpieces of cynicism on the scientific process.
Paradigm changes, I like to think, flow overwhelmingly from new evidence
and, where the evidence is sound and even irresistible, they should be
embraced just as lief by the old as by the young. It was three weeks after
my 71th birthday and I went on to declare, "A change of paradigm shakes us
up; it rejuvenates us; and, this above all, it prevents mental fossilisation
- and that is good for all of us."



"However, the tortoise bones and ostrich-egg fragments are more
closely associated with the lithic artefacts; their systematic
presence in both Lokalalei sites may show a possible hominid
collecting strategy (Roche et al 1999 page 59)."

H. ROCHE, A. DELAGNES, J.-P. BRUGAL, C. FEIBEL, M. KIBUNJIA, V. MOURRE
& P.-J. TEXIER
Early hominid stone tool production and technical skill
2.34 Myr ago in West Turkana, Kenya
6 May 1999 Nature 399, 57 - 60 (1999)
Where does one find an ostrich? Not swimming to Dmanisi or China.
http://www.gonomad.com/lodgings/0611/namgallery-images/ostrich.jpg

My little boy, there nothing in the above that contradicts that Homo has
always been waterside. Got it? Keep running after your kudu.

.

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