Re: Help me settle an argument...

"Vend" <vend82@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:f00bhk$4ru$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I think that it's more due to accidents during hunting rather than
intra-species fights,

That's plain silly. Did males need much
heavier jaws than females because they
sometimes fell on them?

Did you have tried running across the trees on a rough terrain?

I've fallen when running, but never
on my jaw. Nor have I ever heard of
anyone else doing that.

Btw, my suggestion was a joke.
I had no idea you would take it
seriously.

anyway we were never chimps.

Chimps and gorillas are often morphologically
near-indistinguishable.

What do you mean? They seem easly distinguishable.

Both chimps and gorillas are highly
variable in size -- and in behaviour.
In practice, many (dead) individuals
have initially been assigned to the
wrong species.

Yet they split around
8 mya -- a couple of million years before
hominids split off. How could either species
have changed significantly since?

Yet we were never chimps.

Is this a statement of faith? Or something
doctrinal? Clearly humans were never
chimps (pretty much by definition0 but
I believe that human ancestors were chimps
in the sense that without something like a
DNA study, no difference would be
visible.

Fighting
with knives is (and used to be) common
in many societies resulting in high death
rates. Sicilians (for example) are not known
for their long arms.

Do Sicilians have a knife fighting tradition?

Yes -- or they used to. Guns have
probably taken over now.

I could have referred to the relative smallness
of Asiatic chins or male hands -- all of which
have the same basic cause. When bamboo
knives are cheap and available, the death rate
(i.e. the selective effect) resulting from damage
to bones (in the skull, chin, or hands) is much
lower. Beards protect chins, but were needed
less in the Far-East.

Can a beard protect the chin against a kinetic impact (punch, kick or
blunt weapon)? I don't think so.

Boxers grow beards to the maximum
extent they are allowed -- which is not
much. I'm pretty sure that there is a
significant cushioning effect, but
they probably greatly reduce grazing
and cuts.

What do you think beards are for?

At most a long beard migth offer minimal protection to the throat
against sharp weapons, since human hair is difficult to cut (that's
why razor blades need to be, well, razor-sharp).

Why do asiatics have minimal beards?

Another related question in this field is the
extraordinary weakness of human bones
(and human muscles) -- by comparison with
(a) almost all other comparable species, and
(b) with our own ancestors.

Maybe lighter bones and muscles make us better runners.

Quite unlikely. They certainly don't help in the
hundred-yard dash -- which is what is usually
needed for hunting or for escape from predators.

Actually we hunted manly using endurance running.

That is almost complete nonsense
-- no matter how fashionable the
'theory' is at present. Many other
species (such as dogs) would be far
better than humans at this -- were it
commonly possible. That is
transparently obvious to every
human who has exercised a fit dog.

Another animal with weak bones and muscles
is the sloth -- probably a better model for
human ancestry than most.

F = ma, thus lighter bones with the same muscles imply more
acceleration, and also less power consumption (important in endurance
running).

If this argument had any validity, then
numerous prey species would have
muscles as weak, and bones as fragile,
as those of humans. They don't.

Moreover, muscle strength is proportional to cross-section while mass
is proportional with volume, meaning that for the same body layout, a
smaller animal will be genrally capable of higher accelerations
(compare a domestic cat and a tiger). And smaller muscles also reduce
power consumption.

I can see a promising future for you
producing crap figures in some
crap science.


Paul.


.

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