Re: Homo Erectus was *not* a hunter/runner.

On Dec 17, 11:03 am, claudiusd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
<snip>
http://tinyurl.com/8fomk
<snip>

Okay. I read this.... The ECOLOGICAL GATEKEEPER HYPOTHESIS

I have several questions.

1. Did East Africa also enter a time of increased glaciation about 10
mya? Does the fellow you quote, Yousef Khan, have a reference for
this?

2. You state that prior to 10 mya, there was little or no migration of
"relatively large mammals." Do you have a reference for this? It is
my understanding that migration has been on the planet for quite a
long time. For example, some birds migrate as a remnant of their
dinosaur ancestor inheritance. Also, prior to about 12 kya, their
were significantly more large mammals on earth than there are at the
present time. And there are ocean animals that migrate, implying that
the habit of migrating is quite ancient.

3. You state: "Other herbivores may not have directly competed with
them, but all of them brought predators with them: lions, tigers,
hyenas, dogs, etc. " I don't understand why this is important. I am
not being obtuse here. If the predators are following the migration,
then they would just keep on going, following the migration, and it
would have no impact on the community that it passes through. Let's
look briefly at when humans were the predators, following the herds of
animals from Siberia into North America. They followed them. They
didn't stop along the way and harrass the little rabbits or penguins
or whatever was in the way. I think you need to show, within your
hypothesis, how migration differs 10 mya from what we have today. Has
migration, as a function of nature, changed? Or, conversely, are you
saying that the migrators were arriving at our ancestors "treed
havens" as the end of a migration cycle? In that case, then I am not
certain, I am unclear as to how this would work, that our ancestors
could use "territorial based peskiness" to chase them away. That is,
a migration is a huge event, and it tends to overwhelm most of what is
there. I am thinking of all those wldebeasts (?) that drown during
migrations, or of lemmings going over cliffs. The migrating creature
is going to consume what it needs when it gets there, predators or
treed-habitats be-damned.

4. I am having trouble seeing how "our" territorial based peskiness
differs from that in the modern day chimpanzee. or in, say, my Betta
fish. Do you, meanwhile, make a distinction between territory and
mating behaviours? To my understanding, there are a lot of various
types of territory and mate-protection strategies in primates.

5. You state, "But our tree dwelling ancestors, being less mobile, had
fewer options." Were we less mobile? Gorillas, Chimps, and Humans do
not seem to be immobilized today. I live in North Carolina, a state
that was heavily... completely.... logged of trees since 1492.
However, it was said that a squirrel could travel from the mountains
to the coast and never touch the ground prior to this logging. My
point is that our ancestors were probably quite active in the trees,
very adept. Also, our ancient ancestor is believed to have come from
Europe... probably mostly via the trees... sometime prior to 21 mya.

6. I have questions about your comments on cooperation,
communicativeness and consciousness, but that can wait for now.

7. You say, "Additionally, this scenario is the perfect setup for
the scenario in my larger hypothesis (which I now realize is much more
dependent upon the pre-existence of a community), which better
explains the evolution of other hominid traits, such as our political,
ideological nature, our attentiveness to dance, art, storytelling, and
other artistic, our economic predisposition for trade, our complex and
logic oriented languages, and our pursuit of knowledge and truth." My
question is rather specific in this case. You use the word
"languages" with an "s." Isn't human language more likely to have
been a singular event? It occured more or less just one time, or at a
certain time in the evolution of our species, and at that moment,
there was only one language.

Regards,
Charles



"Jim McGinn View profileECOLOGICAL GATEKEEPER HYPOTHESIS: an
addendum the Ideological Ape Hypothesis This addendum resolves a
significant shortcoming that I had with the larger hypothesis.
Strangely enough, it was only after I had hit upon this addendum that
it even occurred to me that my larger hypothesis had this
shortcoming. (Talk about falling in love with one's own pet theory.)
What was the shortcoming? It has to do with the transition from the
chimpanzee lifestyle (small, rambling bands) to the more situated,
property oriented, communalism. I had assumed the transition would
have been natural, a direct result of implications associated with the
change in environmental conditions (seasonal dessication, patchiness
of the remaining forested habitat, etc.). It turns out I was right.
It was natural. But I was wrong to have assumed that it would have
been (or could have been) just as simple as that. More specifically,
I had them cooperating, communicating, (In the context of a situated
community) and evolving consciousness before they really had an
evolutionary upramp to begin being selected for such behaviors. With
this addendum I think this problem is solved. Additionally, this
addendum provides a better understanding of why and how bipedalism and
manipulative abilities began to be selected in the earliest years of
hominid evolution. Additionally it seems to explain the human
predisposition for sports fanaticism and the human tendency to be
confrontational to and otherwise controlling of other species. Let me
begin by showing you two posts that triggered my thinking:
******************************************************* From
sci.bio.paleontology: <snip> . . . about 10mln years ago the Earth
entered climatic roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and
retreating glaciation. <snip> <snip> . . . . the very fact that the
Earth became a colder and more inhospitable place to live, led to the
creation of man, so we shouldn't complain too loudly about how cold it
is outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet, then we'd just have
big, dumb, lumbering creatures who would just eat easy-to-find plants
all day long -- doesn't require the development of much intelligence.
<snip> Yousuf Khan
******************************************************* From
sci.bio.evolution: I fail to understand why people are sports fans.
They spend a lot of money, and they yell and scream when their home-
town football team wins. When they move to another town they just as
ardently yell and scream for their new home-town team, although the
new team may have been the opponent of the previous team. This
behavior seems to defy rational analysis. Why scream and yell, anyway,
just because a bunch of millionaires beat each other up in a public
arena? Is this behavior possibly a leftover from eons ago when it was
important (a survival factor) to look up to tribal leaders, to cheer
them on, and to claim solidarity with them? It seems to me that, in
this day and age, evolution would favor survival factors in the
intellectual arena, and yet, here are these masses of people who get
excited about strangers who beat each other up, as in football.. Can
anyone explain the phenomenon? Walter
******************************************************* The relevance
of this second post will become obvious once you get into this
explanation. The first of these two posts is the most important. It
really jarred my perspective into considering something I hadn't
considered before: previous to 10mya there was little or no migration
but there has been a lot since then. (I'm thinking mostly of
relatively large mammals here. Let's say about the size of a housecat
and bigger. But it really includes any and all species that migrate.)
I started to wonder if there might not be more than a coorelation
between the observation that hominids appeared at or about at the same
time that large mammals started to become migratory. Might it be
causal? In other words, might an environment that is characterized by
migrating species be an environment that provides selective factors
that triggered hominid evolution? With this question in mind, I
started thinking about migration in the context of the environmental
assumptions of my hypothesis: seasonal dessication, spatial polarity
of resources (patches of forest that persist near sources of perrenial
water, lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, areas of high ground water).
(For a more comprehensive description of the environmental assumptions
of this hypothesis see a post I put on this newsgroup recently
entitled: Questions Regarding Selective . . . ) Then I asked myself
what kind of migrational patterns would I expect given these
assumptions. The answer was obvious. During periods increasing
dessication and resulting scarcity there would be a tendency for all
of the species in this environment to begin to migrate toward and into
these treed havens, our ancestor's "community sites." And with the
onset of the rainy season they would migrate back out again. Then I
started thinking about how all of this would appear from the
perspective of our earliest, recently rainforest dwelling, prehominid
ancestors. Every year their patches of remaining forest, their
"community sites," got overrun with other species. Many of these
species would have competed directly with them for food and thus would
have caused the depletion of resources at a time when these resources
were increasingly scarce, the dry season. Other herbivores may not
have directly competed with them, but all of them brought predators
with them: lions, tigers, hyenas, dogs, etc. The negative
implications are obvious. When these inmigrating species had depleted
the resources at these community sites they would simply migrate over
to other less depleted areas (other community sites). But our tree
dwelling ancestors, being less mobile, had fewer options. They were
now left vulnerable to starvation and/or predation. Lacking the
ability to run fast, they didn't have much choice but to stay put,
wait out the predators, and hope the rains returned. Surely their
population would often have been decimated as a result. Among a number
of other adaptations, which I will get to shortly, I predict that
territorial based peskiness will have begun to be selected among our
chimpanzee-like ancestor. This would have been a direct result of the
above described factors associated with migration. The reason I
believe this scenario predicts the relatively rapid adaptation of
territorial based peskiness behaviors among these still tree dwelling
apes is because apes that have such predisposition will tend to harass
any other animals that it percieves to be trespassing on its
territory. This will act as a deterent to these inmigrating species
who--all other things being equal--will follow the path of least
resistance to their migratory goals. If one patch of forest is
associated with pesky apes--regardless of the fact that these pesky
apes may be mostly harmless to them--and another patch of forest is
relatively free of pesky apes then the inmigrating individuals would
follow the path of least resistance to the patch that is relatively
free of pesky apes. More specifically, how and why do I contend that
these above mentioned implications predict the rapid adaptation of
territorial peskiness amongst our earliest prehominid ancestors? I
think the answer to this question is fairly obvious. The members of
community sites that reduced inmigration, even if only marginally
(let's say, for example, they reduced it by only 10%), would increase
their own community's probability of surviving through and, at one and
the same time, reduce the probability of survival of those who reside
at other, neighboring, community sites who, lacking territorial based
peskiness behaviors, would now have to deal with more inmigration and,
of course, more of the negative implications thereof: more depletion
of resources, more predators, and more resulting decimation. This
comprises a classic group selectionist scenario: behavior that
increases one's own communities survival decreases the survival of
other communities. This is not to say that the members of these
respective communities would have had the ability to recognize that
they were competing against other communities on a community vs.
community basis. In fact it seems unlikely--especially in the
earliest years of hominid evolution--that they would have even had the
ability to recognize that they were members of communities. Regardless
of wether they were capable of realizing it, apes that had whatever
behavior and/or morphology that would enable or cause them to dissuade
other species from migrating into their community site would have a
tremendous selective advantage over those that lacked such. The more
their behavior dissuaded inmigration the greater the selective
advantage to their own community and the greater the selective
disadvantage to neighboring communities. It is, of course, normal to
be hesitant about asserting group selective factors such as those that
I have asserted here. But in the context of this scenario this
hesitancy is, I contend, completely unwarranted. This contention is
based on the group selective implications of the two factors mentions
above, 1) the patchiness of the remaining forested habitat which
divided our ancestors up into "communities" between which gene flow
(interbreeding) was greatly reduced, and 2) the fact that the grim
reaper,seasonal dessication, focussed on whole communities whose
territorial resources at their community sites had become, for
whatever reason, deplete. So, the selective realities of our ancestors
shifted from those of the chimpanzee lifestyle--focussed only on being
successful individuals and members of successful breeding groups
(bands, extended family units)--to those of the A'pith lifestyle--
focussed on being successful individuals and members of successful
breeding groups AND on being members of communities that successfully
effect the preservation of resources at their community sites in the
face of the onslaught of multi-species inmigration to their community
sites. It is also important to point out that there is a positive
feedback aspect associated with inmigration. Specifically this has to
do with the herding or grouping instincts of the inmigrating species:
if one or a few members of an inmigrating species is able to
infiltrate a community site then the probability is higher that more
members of the same species, and/or members of ecologically related
species, will follow. When this aspect is considered in conjunction
with the fact that this scenario clearly indicates the community as
the group entity that is being selected, it is apparent, I contend,
that the better a community is at closing the gate of its ecosystem--
sealing its borders--the more likely the members of the community will
survive the grim reaper of this habitat, seasonal dessication (the dry
season). In the context of these peculiar selective factors, we can
start to ask ourselves what other adaptations, in addition to
territorial peskiness, would we expect to evolve? This can be more
explicitly delineated in the context of what is mentioned in the above
paragraph: what additional behaviors or morphologies would cause/
enable these chimpanzee-like territorially pesky apes to be better
able and/or more inclined to "close the gate" and effectively seal the
borders of their community sites? I propose the following:
Cooperation (in the context of mob oriented harassing behaviors): The
tendency to confront and attempt to prevent inmigrating species
collectively rather than just individually. This would involve
collecting into larger groups from neighboring and other closely
situated "properties" (see below) within a community site and
confronting inmigrating species: throwing rocks, sticks, and generally
making a big racket. As I envision it, this would involve the same
kind of emotion based behaviors that we currently associate with a mob
mentality, including sports fanaticism. Communicativeness: The
ability to communicate the relative level of threat associated with
potential inmigrating species so that mobs can form at vulnerable
infiltration points quickly and efficiently. This also involves such
behaviors as cheering, booing, and other behaviors that would tend to
draw attention of other members of a community to such events.
Consciousness: Awareness of the meaning of emotional outbursts
that they might see or hear in the distance so that one might be
excited into being additive to whatever mob oriented activities are
taking place in one's vicinity. Awareness of the property of others
due to the implications of the, below mentioned, selective benefits of
property oriented communal territorialism. Property Oriented Communal
Territorialism (rather than just communally oriented
territorialism): Property oriented communal territorialism
involves a community being comprised of subgroups each of which has
its associated property in the context of the larger community site.
The reason, I contend, that we would predict property oriented
territorialism is because this would, firstly, cause them--by way of
their percieved incentive--to spread out to the different infiltration
points of the community site so that they will be in position to
better effect the collective sealing of the community sites borders.
Secondly, property oriented territorialism will give them the
percieved incentive to defend "their" property. (Which, as indicated
above, could also include calling out to one's neighboring property
holders for assitance to effect a mob and/or responding to one's
neighbors call for assistance.) The particular group that I envision
as the entity that maintains ownership of the different intracommunal
"properties" of a community site would be based upon the band or
extended family unit, similar in size and composition to that of the
bands that extant chimpanzees tend to form. Gamesmanship: I
think it's possible that the behavior that is indicated in this
hypothesis was to they themselves little more than a game. Those who
were passionate about the game achieved the survival of themselves and
their whole community (by way of driving off inmigrating species).
(In other words, we're descended from sports enthusiasts.) Also, this
scenario gives us a sense of how and why we evolved to be so
controlling of other species. It even suggests how we began to
develop our weapon oriented hunting skills and inclination, not to
mention our weapon oriented and mob oriented approach to intraspecies
conflicts (war). (I can foresee there being "Hunting Hypothesis,"
variants of this hypothesis.) Additionally, this scenario is the
perfect setup for the scenario in my larger hypothesis (which I now
realize is much more dependent upon the pre-existence of a community),
which better explains the evolution of other hominid traits, such as
our political, ideological nature, our attentiveness to dance, art,
storytelling, and other artistic, our economic predisposition for
trade, our complex and logic oriented languages, and our pursuit of
knowledge and truth. However, the beginning of the dynamics in my
greater hypothesis (the Intraspecies Capitalism stuff which is very
difficult to explain), may have to be pushed forward in time all the
way up to the transition to homo. But this may be a good thing in
that it better coorelates to the growth of brain capacity in the homo
lineage (which, as you know, is greatly lacking in the A'pith
lineage). Regard to all, Jim
More options Jul 31 2002, 12:39 pm "
.

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