Re: Baboons

From: William Morse (wdmorse_at_twcny.rr.com)
Date: 06/14/04 

Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 16:34:42 +0000 (UTC)

tmelka@webtv.net (Andrew Melka) wrote in news:caide8$2que$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

 
> It is easy to suppose that hominids would have an advantage over
> baboons by way of superior intelligence. However, baboons are likely to
> have had an advantage by way of higher fertility. To take a not very
> analogous example, there have been far more coyotes killed over the last
> 300 years than wolves. But only the alpha female of a wolf pack breeds
> every year, almost every adult female coyote breeds every year. This is
> one important reason there are so many coyotes compared with so few
> wolves. I don't know what the spacing of births in chimpanzees is
> compared with baboons. However, I suspect that the chimpanzee juvenile
> period, when parental oversight is still needed, is longer, and hence
> births are more widely spaced. I also suspected that birth spacing in
> australopiths was similar to spacing in chimpanzees.

But remember that the advantage of coyotes over wolves is only after the
appearance of farming technology and the subsequent high human population
density. Before that time, wolves dominated in arboreal ecosystems while
coyotes only dominated in desert and range ecosystems. So fertility alone
is not the answer. I am also not so sure that superior intelligence alone
would give an advantage to early hominids.

Yours,

Bill Morse

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