absolutely correct, i was insinuating that men are mammals and women are some form of reptilian species that has yet to be correctly identified and categorized actually :p. please don't tell my gf i said this or she will hit me again
Your funeral
very true, but our only real (at the time i originally posted that, several have pointed out some reasonably odd and surprisingly effective evolutionary traits we posses since) advantage is intelligence which in and of itself i don't see as an "advantage". for example, having a high iq is nice... but it doesn't actually have any real value in and of itself. for iq to be useful you have to add in knowledge and the opportunity to use that knowledge in a practical way. its like if someone had a supercomputer in their living room. thats an amazing tool in the grand scheme of things. but it has 0 value if you don't know to turn it.
but is that part really true? sure, we have invented things along the way to dominate the globe. but have we really adapted to any environment on any part of the globe? or have we modified the environment to suit our needs? i don't grow in a "winter coat" to survive ohio winters. i just walk over and turn up the heat. same for the summers. i don't shed for the summer, i turn off the heat and turn on the ac. "i" don't consider that to be a adaptation though. maybe it is...
I'm combining these parts because I think they come together nicely for what I'm going to type.
When thinking about adaptations, one cannot compare a human to a turtle or a whale. You have to look at our close relatives and our ancestors. We are apes. Our closest relatives are other apes. Going from that base, we can look at what separates use from them. They are well adapted to wooded areas and can climb generally well. But they can't run for shit. Not a single one of them is bipedal. A huge, HUGE adaptation that helped humans become dominant was the evolution of bipedalism and the ability to run. The gluteus maximus on humans is quite large and powerful compared to other apes. Our Achilles tendons are significantly larger as well. Our hips realigned, and our backs became S shaped. Every one of those changes, and many many more, allowed early humans to stand up and run. Running was useful for scavenging, in that one would see birds circling and they'd run there to get the meat before other predators got there; and also useful for running prey to exhaustion. Both of these behaviors are seen in indigenous groups of humans today.
Another adaptation over other apes is our incredibly long development. This would be the main reason for our increased intelligence. A genetic change caused our hominid ancestor to have a longer period of development, which allowed a longer opportunity for learning in the period when learning is most useful. The brain case in our skulls also got larger, increasing the size of our brains and allowing for far more connections. Hair loss seems to tie into this, as it was likely a neoteny that caused the increased development time. A neoteny is when a juvenile form continues to adulthood, like a muduppy. If you look at pictures of many baby apes, they look far more like adult humans that do their adult forms. The theory is that our ancestor went through a neotony, leading to "baby" looking adults, with less hair and more learning. The less hair ended up helping with heat loss. (I just
looked this up, because i wasn't sure why it was evolutionarily beneficial)
Going further back, an adaptation over other monkeys gave our ancestor an advantage in looking for food: Color vision. This adaptation came about because of a gene duplication for one color sensing gene that then evolved to sense another color. It is present in our line of primates, but not other lines. This allowed our ancestors to see the bright colors that can mean ripe or dangerous. This gave them the ability to get the best food.
it is ridiculous. i may have misrepresented my meaning there, my apologies if i did. that sentence and really the entire paragraph before it i intended to be seen as being ridiculous because there is no logic to it. including the main point of why under pretty close to any healthy situation in nature humans are really not seen as a food source by any animal. which.... really seems odd because there should have been a time when we were on the menu as it were. at least one would think..?
outside of sexual selection does it really? how much heat is really retained by arm hair? maybe that explains why women are always cold? all that leg shaving n such :p
We have been prey for animals in the past. We just evolved the hands and smarts to create tools, which we used as weapons. The animals then learned to stay away for the most part.
As for the hair, I was pretty much guessing, but now, as I liked above, I've looked it up, and that seems to be a good explanation.
really interesting info. do you happen to have any links on the proof of controlled fire bit? that i was not aware of at all. if thats true it is extremely interesting. 10 years ago or so i heard about a theory that stated cooked meat may promote an increase in intelligence and may have been a factor in the evolution of human intelligence. i don't know if that study ever went anywhere or not. but if there is merit to that thought that would be extremely interesting... i think i will go research that a bit. will reply later :).
remember, i am in no way an expert in this or any other field. i just babble weird [Mark May] out loud (far more often than i should) in an attempt to educate myself. mostly because im illiterate. but also because reading is dumb. the book always ruins the movie and the movie is almost always quicker to watch than reading the book. so its really about time management. hell i wouldn't even be here if i thought clarity was working on a script
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Controlled fire is still a hotly (haha get it) debated topic among anthropologists. There are claims that evidence shows controlled fire from ~1.6 million years ago. More conservative estimates, relying on habitual use of fire, put the date closer to 300-400,000 years ago. Whatever is actually the correct time, controlled fire was achieved before Homo sapiens evolved. I got that info from
here. Coincidentally, that article also discusses cooking leading to increased intelligence. "Longer chronologies for the use of fire include Wrangham’s recent hypothesis that fire was a central evolutionary force toward larger human brains: eating cooked foods made early hominin digestion easier, and the energy formerly spent on digestion was freed up, enabling their energy-expensive brains to grow. Using fire to prepare food made early humans move away from the former feed-as-you-go-and-eat-raw-food strategy and toward the sharing of cooked foods around fires, which became attractive locations for increased social interaction between individuals."
I love talking about this, and anyone interested in it and trying to increase their knowledge of it, it cool by me.
