Re: For eons- - - -
- From: John Roth <johnroth1@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:14:09 -0700 (PDT)
On Apr 13, 6:43 pm, Day Brown <daybr...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whether out of Africa, or the aquatic/savannah issue, so far as we can
tell hominids lived in small groups that therefore tended to be
inbred. One of the advantages of greater mental capacity would be the
ability to adapt to a different way of life when joining another
group- part of the process of improving genetic diversity.
I doubt if inbreeding was a significant problem, since most hominids
have a pattern where either the young males or females leave their
birth group to join a different one.
Adapting to a new group didn't seem to require additional mental
capacity for the remainder of the hominids which do that.
The original question was the erectus -> sapiens transition, which
occurred approximately 200 - 180 kya, or so I'm told. My position is
that we've had something resembling language for close to two million
years (in other words, erectus had something that was recognizably
language rather than animal signals). See some of the material on the
spotted hyena for comparison for the effect of large group sizes on
brain size.
The spotted hyena has been seen in social groups which jointly defend
territory as large as 90; it also has a significantly larger brain
than the other three existing species of hyena. It is, by the way, a
member of Carnivora on the cat (rather than the dog) side of the tree.
John Roth
.
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