Re: Kudu runners?

On Jan 30, 2:38 pm, Marc Verhaegen <m_verhae...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Op 30-01-2008 22:44, in artikel
604dbf08-8834-4e78-948f-6e914d585...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
J.LyonLayden <JosephLay...@xxxxxxxxx> schreef:

On Jan 29, 7:53 pm, Marc Verhaegen <m_verhae...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.laputanlogic.com/articles/2004/01/24-0001.html

Savanna Fantasts are apparently too stupid to understand that living from
birth next to water is not the same as living in modern cities:
You think every kid that dies in a swimming pool under the age of four
lives in a modern city?

Why would I think that IYO?

FYI:
"In 2004, of all children 1-4 years old who died, 26% died from
drowning (CDC 2006).
Fatal drowning remains the second-leading cause of unintentional
injury-related death for
children ages 1 to 14 years (CDC 2005)"


I'll bet my next pay check that there are plenty of kids under four
who have died by drowning who live on waterfront property.

You may do what you want with your next pay check, but marsh Arabs (see link
above) don't usu.die of drowning.

He didn't say "marsh Arabs" you brainless idiot, he said kids, can't
you read?


And while you're calling people stupid, what's a fantasts?

1) Why do you think I should what "a fantasts" means?

He asked you, are you too stupid to give an answer?

2) I'm calling people stupid who are convinced that our ancestors 2 Ma ran
after kudus etc.

Calling people stupid is the only counter-argument you ever had.

 These ideas are ridiculous fantasy as anybody with a
little bit of biological insight knows.

What he really means is people who think mountain beavers are
semiaquatic
only know about fantasy.

 All the original "open plain" ideas
were obviously hypothetical,

That was 1926, today it is a proven fact.

but soon the general impression of human
ancestors coming out of the trees and colonizing the vast plains became set
in the minds of most anthropologists, and different ideas ­ some more
improbable than others ­ were put forward to explain how savannah-dwelling
ancestors might have found enough food and water to survive on the open
plains ­ as if the hypothesis had already been proven.

The process of elimination is called science. That some original ideas
are better than
others is part of the scientific process. Where have you been?

 Human
characteristics were discussed in an evolutionary setting that involved a
movement from the forests to the open plains, and reasons for these
characteristics always tended to revolve around the "open plain" theme (see
below).

Yep, now proven. You are finally catching on.


Even the most far-fetched of these ideas (eg, honey collection,
liver consumption, or food collection at noon on open plains) have been
seriously considered and published in scientific journals.
 Such ad hoc
explanations are comparable to the hypothetical "land bridges" between
Africa & South-America to explain Hipparions in Florida & France.

This idiot thinks a land bridge is the same as cut marks on kudu
bones?
What is this amateur doing here?


What is striking about these hypotheses is their combined diversity.

What is striking about AAT is Sir Hardy (a professional biologist)
claimed it
would have taken human ancestors spending half the day in the water in
order
to be of any significance to produce a more aquatic ancestor of ours
in the past.
Today we have an amateur science-fiction writer and wannabe biologist
who
thinks mountain beavers are semiaquatic claiming AAT is nothing more
than:
Message-ID: <42ec204f$0$24182$ba620e4c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Marc Verhaegen: “Our anatomical features prove we were totally unlike
all savanna dwellers. To the contrary, they suggest we were
littoral.”

Is this pompous ass calling Sir Hardy a liar? There is a big
difference between
half the time in the water and only littoral, a difference between
science and
lunacy.

Some
rely on hunting large game, others on small game, some on scavenging bone
marrow, or brains, or livers, or collecting seeds, or tubers, or honey.

Yes, that is a fact, do you have something different? Cut marks occur
on bones of
different sizes, what else did you think?


Some of these "open plain" models are more typical of slow-moving animals
(feeding on belowground resources), others of fast-moving mammals ("bouts of
strenuous activity"), others rely on endurance (following migrating
ungulates, or the dogged pursuit of prey).

Plains animals come in all sizes, catching them is called a
generalist, what
else did you think?



 This diversity of theoretical
models suggests that the "open plain" scenarios are not the result of usual
biological thinking.

That's because Homo is unique. Anyone see a lion make a handaxe? Of
course Marc sees
coconuts were there aren't any.



 In evolutionary biology, hypotheses are not just
"possible scenarios", but normally the result of solid analyses of
relationships between form & function.

Nothing solid about imaginary coconuts, algae, and crayfish where
there is
no evidence of them. That is called spiritual imagination.


 Biologists usually do not propose a
scenario to explain the evolution of an animal without a careful comparison
of different features of this animal with similar features (convergences) of
other, not closely related species.

Comparing sae otters with early Homo is really dumb.


Whereas modern biology sees evolution as a sequence of overlapping niches
(Kemp 2007), the proposed "open plain" lifestyles of these early human
ancestors are discontinuous and have little or no overlap.

http://tinyurl.com/257kfd
"All these anatomical features make humans surprisingly good runners.
Over long distances,
we can outrun our dogs and give many horses a good race," says Daniel
Lieberman, a runner,
dog owner, and professor of anthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
"What these features
and fossils appear to be telling us is that endurance running evolved
in order for our direct
ancestors to compete with other carnivores for the protein needed to
grow big brains."




 Frequently they
are incompatible with each other.  Moreover, they suppose that humans
collected foods without the typical adaptations that other mammals use when
they collect the same foods.  We have no large digging-claws, eg, we are
slow runners (only some 36 km/hr over short, and some 20 km/hr over long
distances), and we are very prone to dehydration by depletion of water and
salts.  We are heavily-built creatures with extensive fat tissues and (in
archaic Homo) heavy bones, features that are not seen in cursorial species..
Our cheekteeth lack the seed-grinding adaptations of baboons, while the
human gastro-intestinal tract and digestive anatomy and physiology resemble
frugi-omnivores such as suids, not carnivorous mammals (Stevens 1990).  This
contradiction has been labelled the "baboon paradox", because we would
expect humans to be more similar to baboons if we evolved on the savannah as
they apparently did (Bender 1999).

http://tinyurl.com/257kfd
"All these anatomical features make humans surprisingly good runners.
Over long distances,
we can outrun our dogs and give many horses a good race," says Daniel
Lieberman, a runner,
dog owner, and professor of anthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
"What these features
and fossils appear to be telling us is that endurance running evolved
in order for our direct
ancestors to compete with other carnivores for the protein needed to
grow big brains."


The collection of waterside food resources OTOH is compatible with the
presumed lifestyle of early apes, and fits with modern human food-gathering
strategies.

Then why are other apes, who have spent so much more time in the
swamps
than early Homo, not littoral also if there is so much benifit to be
had in them?


Shifting from a fruit-based diet to a diet including more
waterside foods such as coconuts & shellfish does not require significant
behavioural modification.

Spiritual imaginationists dream of evidence they don't have.
Gona 2.6 mya = eating kudus on the savanna. Not too difficult to grasp
is it?


 The use of tools to open hard-shelled nuts &
fruits is easily transferable so that the meat of certain molluscs can also
be procured (capuchin monkeys use tools to open fruit, nuts & shellfish),
shellfish, like fruits & nuts, are sessile food resources that need only be
found & gathered, not chased or hunted. From such fruit, shellfish, plant &
egg-gathering it is not difficult to envisage the incorporation of waterside
catching of insects, frogs, fish or birds, and the butchering of turtles,
crabs, whale or bovid carcasses found at the water¹s edge.

http://tinyurl.com/257kfd
"All these anatomical features make humans surprisingly good runners.
Over long distances,
we can outrun our dogs and give many horses a good race," says Daniel
Lieberman, a runner,
dog owner, and professor of anthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
"What these features
and fossils appear to be telling us is that endurance running evolved
in order for our direct
ancestors to compete with other carnivores for the protein needed to
grow big brains."

http://www.indigenouspeople.net/tarafeat.htm
"The public was amazed at the prowess of the runners and even more so
when the papers reported
that there were better ones at home. One of them was called "The Tiger
of the Sierra"; he had run for
three consecutive days that same year, near Norogachic, Chihuahua,
covering a distance of 300 kilometers,
or 186 miles, of mountainous country."

"Specifically, longer, more linear bodies are better adapted
for heat loss in dry open environments, where evaporative
heat loss from sweating is very effective. All modern-day tall
"elongated"
African (e.g., Nilotics) are restricted to such environments."
Alan Walker and Richard Leakey editors.
1993 The Nariokotome Homo Erectus Skeleton.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge

"Two indepandent lines of research converged on the
conclusion that early Homo was an efficient runner, the first human
species to be so Leakey (1994:55)."


http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/master.html?http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/1206/1206_samplings.html
Mr. Karoha runs down another ill-equipped-for-savanna kudu.

"The earliest Eurasians preferentially occupied
grasslands and open scrub- and wood-lands, as in
East Africa. Homo ergaster/erectus in East Africa after 1.7 Ma is
associated with hot and dry conditions, and open
grasslands; its post-cranial anatomy, with its long
limbs was geared to long-distance walking across
open ground, and to heat dispersal through upright
posture (Dennell 2003:442)."



http://tinyurl.com/7u5wo
" In fact, he walked and ran with better mechanics than we do today.
The mechanics of his femur, femur head, pelvis, and lower back are
superior to those of today. We have had to sacrifice some of that
efficiency of walking and running to give birth to children with
larger brains."


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17584912/
"Just because humans have long legs doesn’t make us less aggressive.
Rather, the longer legs are a product of humans’ specialization for
distance running."


"He showed that even the slowest human runners could, with even a
slight head start, outrun lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas, and wild
dogs, not by speed, but by out distancing them (Donald Mitchell)."
QUARRY CLOSING IN ON THE MISSING LINK by Boaz, Noel T. 1993 (ISBN:
0029045010)

"From our spring-loaded ligaments to our muscular behinds to our
ability to sweat,
the human body took the ideal shape of a long-distance runner starting
some 2 million years ago,
the researchers say. The long, lean build helped us scavenge widely
scattered kills
and could also have been an advantage when hunting down prey over long
distances."
"We're lousy sprinters, but we're really great long-distance
runners,"
said Daniel Lieberman, an anthropologist at Harvard University.


http://tinyurl.com/dcxyw

"A long-distance runner has beaten a leading endurance racehorse over
a distance of 80 kilometres in the United Arab Emirates."



 We do not know
exactly how this waterside lifestyle evolved,

That's because it didn't.

but obviously the limited
diving skills of humans came about as a result of increased time spent
foraging under water.

"Limited" is hardly the word for it:
http://tinyurl.com/y44rnt
http://tinyurl.com/233kfr

 As to how frequently our ancestors may have dived or
waded or collected fruit from trees or foods along the shore at low tide, or
how long our ancestors¹ waterside phase or phases may have lasted, these are
all questions requiring further investigation.

This idiot is calling Sir Hardy a liar. He already said, half a day in
the water.



Although the savannah model still dominates anthropological thinking, most
leading PAs no longer follow it automatically.

Yes, thaose are the ones still stuck in 1926 or have never heard of
Gona.



 No other than professor
Phillip Tobias recently stated: "Š 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. Š" (Tobias 1995, 1998).

1995??? What are you, a creationist? Never heard of cut-marked bones
on the
savanna 2.6 mya? Go back to school you illiterate clown and read the
literature
after 1926.



Savanna hypotheses of human origins are incredibly diverse & far-fetched -
everything if it only happened on the savanna = just-so thinking:

That's what the 1926 crowd still thinks I guess. Try something more
recent:

Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo et al.

Journal of Human Evolution
Volume 48, Issue 2, February 2005, Pages 109-121
Abstract
"Newly recorded archaeological sites at Gona (Afar, Ethiopia) preserve
both stone tools and faunal remains. These sites have also yielded the
largest sample of cutmarked bones known from the time interval 2.58–
2.1 million years ago (Ma). Most of the cutmarks on the Gona fauna
possess obvious macroscopic (e.g., deep V-shaped cross-sections) and
microscopic (e.g., internal microstriations, Herzian cones, shoulder
effects) features that allow us to identify them confidently as
instances of stone tool-imparted damage caused by hominid butchery. In
addition, preliminary observations of the anatomical placement of
cutmarks on several of the recovered bone specimens suggest that Gona
hominids may have eviscerated carcasses and defleshed the fully
muscled upper and intermediate limb bones of ungulates—activities that
further suggest that Late Pliocene hominids may have gained early
access to large mammal carcasses. These observations support the
hypothesis that the earliest stone artifacts functioned primarily as
butchery tools and also imply that hunting and/or aggressive
scavenging of large ungulate carcasses may have been part of the
behavioral repertoire of hominids by c. 2.5 Ma, although a larger
sample of cutmarked bone specimens is necessary to support the latter
inference."



  Raymond Dart 1960    

ROFL.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Marc says hominids were waterside Re: Tobias open to AAT Re: afarensis = fossil Gorilla?
    ... Hadza camp a twenty minute walk from water sources. ... early humans could get food in the lowlands ... Study claims early humans evolved to run long distances ... "We're lousy sprinters, but we're really great long-distance runners," ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: skinny runners
    ... Bramble and Lieberman in a recent paper in Nature propose that early Homo ... "have the dexterity of amphibious animals in the water". ... runners, evolutionary theory would predict the acquisition of features ... adaptations Bramble and Lieberman ascribe to ER could not be explained by ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: 2 new publications on the waterside theory
    ... Typical human features are, eg, very large brain, voluntary breath control, ... bases of endurance running capabilities in humans and other mammals. ... in terms of speed, cost, and distance," says Lieberman. ... "The public was amazed at the prowess of the runners and even more so ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: Savanna evidence
    ... Typical human features are, eg, very large brain, voluntary breath control, ... bases of endurance running capabilities in humans and other mammals. ... in terms of speed, cost, and distance," says Lieberman. ... "The public was amazed at the prowess of the runners and even more so ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • OT: The key to a shapely human
    ... Survival of the endurance runners. ... "These esoteric anatomical features make humans surprisingly good ... Lieberman suggests running may have ... M. Bramble, a professor of biology at Utah. ...
    (rec.martial-arts)