On Sunday, January 30, 2022 at 6:29:27 PM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On Sunday, January 30, 2022 at 2:41:24 PM UTC, DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves wrote:
>
> > > H.naledi had no access to super-
> > > abundant DHA. Nor did it need the heat-
> > > store that large brains provide.
> >
> > Lions, wolves, hyenas hunt in *groups* by chasing herds in
> > the open selecting the weakest/unluckiest individual prey.
> > Tigers & leopards & bears hunt as stealthy loners in
> > woodlands and forests, they can be surrounded and driven
> > away by *groups*.
> We don't know how the large omnivores
> in Africa before ~2 ma hunted prey.

No animal species in forests hunts in large groups, except Homo.

But
> I'd accept your broad categories.
> > A group of 12 - 20 adult Homo with
> > shields and sharp sticks and stones would be avoided by a
> > lone predator, with rare exception (sick/wounded/aged).
> You forget
> A) That chimps and female gorillas (and
> their young stayed up in trees to keep
> away from these predators -- even
> though they'd have have far better
> suited than early homo to cope with
> them -- they could run much faster
> and scoot up the nearest tree with
> their infants attached;
> B) Most predatory attacks are at night
> and hominins have almost no night-
> sight.
> C) It's inconceivable that hominins
> would ever allow their young on the
> ground when such predators were
> in the vicinity. And, given the wooded
> habitat you envisage, even in daylight
> they'd rarely be seen until it was too
> late.

Your usual vapid claims. 60 eyes experieced in scanning for food & predators, vocal complex language, domeshields in circular camps, spears, unbeatable.

Paul Crowley wrote:

> Once the genetic bauplan (the genotype) is
> set, it's not going to be altered for the
> environment. The organism cannot re-arrange
> its organs. It may starve if some or all don't
> get sustenance. Billions of humans have
> starved.
>
> There has been (over the past 30 kyr) strong
> selection against bigger brains in humans,
> which suggests that large size is unnecessary,
> -- set against the costs of finding the resources
> it needs.

it's been LESS than 30k years since brains jumped up in
size in places like Africa, and part of Asia. But you're
right: This is now a matter of genetics.

First, looking at diet:

https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2014/02/07/Omega-3-rich-diet-linked-to-more-developed-brain-networks-Monkey-data#

It's likely that our ancestors had an unrealized (or rarely
achieved) CAPACITY for smarter and/or larger brains,
to some limits, and Aquatic Ape brought them to these
limits.

They lived at the extreme limits of their physical (genetic)
capacity, just from being Aquatic Ape.

Then, any advantageous mutations that allowed for bigger
and/or smarter brains could be immediately exploited,
because of their diet. They never would have been realized
on a different diet, without the DHA, while they would have
been fully exploited by Aquatic Ape just from eating.

It's really all about potential. Genetics allows for a potential.
The Aquatic Ape diet provides the fastest/easiest/most
effective means for achieving that potential.

-- --

https://rumble.com/vr5fsv-confessions-of-an-ex-hippie.html

Op maandag 31 januari 2022 om 15:21:34 UTC+1 schreef I Envy JTEM:

Why do many aquatic mammals have larger brains than equally large terrestrials?
Is it only about diet? certain nutrients: DHA etc.? or °varied° nutrients?
Neandertals had larger brain than erectus, and were probably less aquatic than erectus.
Sirenia have rel.small brains: poor diet? slow & shallow diving? monotomous lifestyle?
They don't have to *find* their food, only have to eat & digest.
Are the costs of carrying a heavy brain lower in the water?

....
> it's been LESS than 30k years since brains jumped up in
> size in places like Africa, and part of Asia. But you're
> right: This is now a matter of genetics.
> First, looking at diet
> https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2014/02/07/Omega-3-rich-diet-linked-to-more-developed-brain-networks-Monkey-data#
> It's likely that our ancestors had an unrealized (or rarely
> achieved) CAPACITY for smarter and/or larger brains,
> to some limits, and Aquatic Ape brought them to these
> limits.
> They lived at the extreme limits of their physical (genetic)
> capacity, just from being Aquatic Ape.
> Then, any advantageous mutations that allowed for bigger
> and/or smarter brains could be immediately exploited,
> because of their diet. They never would have been realized
> on a different diet, without the DHA, while they would have
> been fully exploited by Aquatic Ape just from eating.
> It's really all about potential. Genetics allows for a potential.
> The Aquatic Ape diet provides the fastest/easiest/most
> effective means for achieving that potential.

littor...@gmail.com wrote:

> Why do many aquatic mammals have larger brains than equally large terrestrials?
> Is it only about diet? certain nutrients: DHA etc.? or °varied° nutrients?
> Neandertals had larger brain than erectus, and were probably less aquatic than erectus.
> Sirenia have rel.small brains: poor diet? slow & shallow diving? monotomous lifestyle?
> They don't have to *find* their food, only have to eat & digest.
> Are the costs of carrying a heavy brain lower in the water?

Omega-3s sealed the deal for me.

https://omegaquant.com/this-is-your-brain-on-omega-3s/

We had to be eating seafood.

They had to work a lot harder for their calories, spend more time eating but by turning
to the sea the found an abundance of proteins AND the Omega-3s they needed for
their brains.

Before Aquatic Ape, a mutation allowing for larger or smarter brains might've cropped
up dozens of times only to go extinct. BECAUSE there wasn't the nutrients they needed
to form these brains/connections.

-- --

https://rumble.com/vqwxtc-the-worst-of-watch-this-volume-ii.html

On Monday 31 January 2022 at 10:52:04 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>>> Now, between ice ages, trout are cold water fish, so less common,
>>> but during ice ages they were everywhere far more common, and
>>> easily caught with domeshield wicker frames in creeks...
>>
>> Imaginative nonsense -- a theory for which
>> you have no evidence.
>
> Hear, hear, the kettle!

PA never sees the forest; It doesn't even
see the tree. It focuses on a twig or
two, and regards 'that' as consisting of
the entire evidence. AND, if you can't
(for whatever reason) present the right
sort of twig, you're not (in their eyes)
supposed to be able to say anything
about forests, trees, nor anything made
of wood.

I always quote the evidence -- e.g. the
million or more Giza-pyramid-sized
heaps of bifaces, or the miniscule
number of hominin fossils. PA is a bit
like Father Dougal -- missing a faculty
usually acquired in early childhood

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0

PA (and all its practitioners) lack
the mental equipment for assessing
quantities.

On Monday 31 January 2022 at 13:01:34 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>> How come hominin fossils are so
>> exceedingly rare on the African
>> mainland?
>
> We don't even agree on the premise in that question.

Eh? You agreed that Lee Berger and his team
more than doubled the African hominin fossil
record with the h.naledi find.

A similar claim about any other terrestrial
taxa is close to unimaginable.

>>> Your state of mind is comparable to a creationist
>>
>> Note your ducking of the question.
>> (You could have said my theory
>> about islands/ swimming / hand-
>> axes / big brains / extinction of
>> all large predatory omnivores in
>> Africa . . . . . are undermined by X,
>> Y or Z.) But no.
>
> Don't pretend that your ideas have never been addressed in this forum.
> Together with others I've done so ad nauseam.

Almost entirely just with abuse. I'm
seeking to explain the extraordinary
nature of the fossil record. You
prefer to forget all that and look at
each tiny item, as though it was just
part of more-or-less normal fossil
collection.

> The comparison with creationism is based on the conclusion that we
> also do not even agree on the hinges on which the door of meaningful
> discussion much turn. And you probably know what Wittgenstein said
> about principles that cannot be reconciled.

We're talking about counting. There's
not a lot conceptual involved in that.
I refer you (again) to Farther Dougal
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0

Wittgenstein was talking about much
more complex issues.

> And you and I think
> principly different about the nature of the hominin fossil record.

Big piles and and tiny, little piles.

> > Give an example of a current 'meaningful
> > discussion' in PA -- in which an intelligent
> > layperson could have an interest.
>
> Do you consider yourself an intelligent layperson?
> I guess such a person would seek out a book such as:
>
> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/processes-in-human-evolution-9780198739913

Ducking again. A vague wave akin to
"It's somewhere on the Internet".

It really does look as though there are
NO "current 'meaningful discussions' . ."
anywhere in PA.

It's not an uncommon phenomenon.
Disciplines lose their way. Or they
experience a kind of trauma, such as
that involving racism in the first half
of the 20th century, and just stop
functioning.

> > Show how any of my suggestions might
> > 'get in the way' of it.
>
> That might be on the nature of the fossil record (representative),
> systematics (Sahelanthropus as the most basal hominin), anatomy
> (Ardipithecus as a biped), etc.

There are plenty of specialist PAs who
don't accept Ardi was a biped, or that
Sahelanthropus was a basal hominin.

>> You could readily spend a whole life in East
>> Africa as a fossil hunter and not find a single
>> hominin fossil. Whereas, in every hour on
>> a fossilferous strata you'll see dozens, if not
>> hundreds, of non-hominin fossils eroding
>> out.
>
> That may be the case at some very rich sites that sample a specific
> paleoenvironment, but you'll never find a real Plio-Pleistocene
> formation anywhere in Africa where a million bovid specimens are
> exposed for every hominin.

I don't get what you're saying. This does
appear (very roughly) to be the pattern
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoedjiespunt

> And then there are also single sites such
> as A.L.333 ("First Family"), that have produced dozens of hominins.

Badlands where amid the tens of
thousands of fossils that litter the land-
scape, the occasional hominin (or, in
this case, a group of hominin fossils)
have been found.

> > The difference is massive. Hominins
> > were never a normal part of ANY East
> > African (or any other mainland African)
> > ecology.
>
> Again, you and I think principly different about that matter.

It's not 'thinking'. It's just counting.

I have a tiny pile of small pebbles;
You have a Giza pyramid. It's where
the quantitative difference becomes
a qualitative one.

OR -- IF you have an explanation
that could explain the difference,
let's hear it.

>>> The Turkana Database, one of the most comprehensive, lists 3045
>>> specimens of Cercopithecidae, 2294 Suidae, 671 Hominidae, 177
>>> Hyaenidae.
>>>
>>> https://www.museums.or.ke/turkana-checklist/
>>
>> So, over the 6 Myr, hominins were four
>> times as common as hyena in the area?
>
> Is that so impossible?

It IS impossible -- in effect.

Hyena have long been a part of the
African ecology. Their fossils are
representative. Hominins have not
been a part of that ecology.

>> Yet hominins were around -- as evidenced
>> by the massive quantities of bifaces found
>> in paleo lakes and rivers.
>
> Isn't that an indication that the makers were not so rare either?

It's all a most peculiar story. Every part
of it far beyond the grasp of any Standard
PA practitioner. But worse than that -- far
beyond the ambition of any PA person.
No, even worse -- far beyond the capacity
to realise that there's a problem.

On Monday, January 31, 2022 at 6:41:09 PM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On Monday 31 January 2022 at 13:01:34 UTC, Pandora wrote:
>
> >> How come hominin fossils are so
> >> exceedingly rare on the African
> >> mainland?
> >
> > We don't even agree on the premise in that question.
> Eh? You agreed that Lee Berger and his team
> more than doubled the African hominin fossil
> record with the h.naledi find.
>
> A similar claim about any other terrestrial
> taxa is close to unimaginable.
> >>> Your state of mind is comparable to a creationist
> >>
> >> Note your ducking of the question.
> >> (You could have said my theory
> >> about islands/ swimming / hand-
> >> axes / big brains / extinction of
> >> all large predatory omnivores in
> >> Africa . . . . . are undermined by X,
> >> Y or Z.) But no.
> >
> > Don't pretend that your ideas have never been addressed in this forum.
> > Together with others I've done so ad nauseam.
> Almost entirely just with abuse. I'm
> seeking to explain the extraordinary
> nature of the fossil record. You
> prefer to forget all that and look at
> each tiny item, as though it was just
> part of more-or-less normal fossil
> collection.
> > The comparison with creationism is based on the conclusion that we
> > also do not even agree on the hinges on which the door of meaningful
> > discussion much turn. And you probably know what Wittgenstein said
> > about principles that cannot be reconciled.
> We're talking about counting. There's
> not a lot conceptual involved in that.
> I refer you (again) to Farther Dougal
> ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0
>
> Wittgenstein was talking about much
> more complex issues.
> > And you and I think
> > principly different about the nature of the hominin fossil record.
> Big piles and and tiny, little piles.
> > > Give an example of a current 'meaningful
> > > discussion' in PA -- in which an intelligent
> > > layperson could have an interest.
> >
> > Do you consider yourself an intelligent layperson?
> > I guess such a person would seek out a book such as:
> >
> > https://global.oup.com/academic/product/processes-in-human-evolution-9780198739913
> Ducking again. A vague wave akin to
> "It's somewhere on the Internet".
>
> It really does look as though there are
> NO "current 'meaningful discussions' . ."
> anywhere in PA.
>
> It's not an uncommon phenomenon.
> Disciplines lose their way. Or they
> experience a kind of trauma, such as
> that involving racism in the first half
> of the 20th century, and just stop
> functioning.
> > > Show how any of my suggestions might
> > > 'get in the way' of it.
> >
> > That might be on the nature of the fossil record (representative),
> > systematics (Sahelanthropus as the most basal hominin), anatomy
> > (Ardipithecus as a biped), etc.
> There are plenty of specialist PAs who
> don't accept Ardi was a biped, or that
> Sahelanthropus was a basal hominin.
> >> You could readily spend a whole life in East
> >> Africa as a fossil hunter and not find a single
> >> hominin fossil. Whereas, in every hour on
> >> a fossilferous strata you'll see dozens, if not
> >> hundreds, of non-hominin fossils eroding
> >> out.
> >
> > That may be the case at some very rich sites that sample a specific
> > paleoenvironment, but you'll never find a real Plio-Pleistocene
> > formation anywhere in Africa where a million bovid specimens are
> > exposed for every hominin.
> I don't get what you're saying. This does
> appear (very roughly) to be the pattern
> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoedjiespunt
> > And then there are also single sites such
> > as A.L.333 ("First Family"), that have produced dozens of hominins.
> Badlands where amid the tens of
> thousands of fossils that litter the land-
> scape, the occasional hominin (or, in
> this case, a group of hominin fossils)
> have been found.
> > > The difference is massive. Hominins
> > > were never a normal part of ANY East
> > > African (or any other mainland African)
> > > ecology.
> >
> > Again, you and I think principly different about that matter.
> It's not 'thinking'. It's just counting.
>
> I have a tiny pile of small pebbles;
> You have a Giza pyramid. It's where
> the quantitative difference becomes
> a qualitative one.
>
> OR -- IF you have an explanation
> that could explain the difference,
> let's hear it.
> >>> The Turkana Database, one of the most comprehensive, lists 3045
> >>> specimens of Cercopithecidae, 2294 Suidae, 671 Hominidae, 177
> >>> Hyaenidae.
> >>>
> >>> https://www.museums.or.ke/turkana-checklist/
> >>
> >> So, over the 6 Myr, hominins were four
> >> times as common as hyena in the area?
> >
> > Is that so impossible?
> It IS impossible -- in effect.
>
> Hyena have long been a part of the
> African ecology. Their fossils are
> representative. Hominins have not
> been a part of that ecology.
> >> Yet hominins were around -- as evidenced
> >> by the massive quantities of bifaces found
> >> in paleo lakes and rivers.
> >
> > Isn't that an indication that the makers were not so rare either?
> It's all a most peculiar story. Every part
> of it far beyond the grasp of any Standard
> PA practitioner. But worse than that -- far
> beyond the ambition of any PA person.
> No, even worse -- far beyond the capacity
> to realise that there's a problem.

No mystery, Homo got recycled in forests, stones accumulated.
Homo, being nomadic, moved their camps along a stream, then moved to the next stream, etc. If they had been sedentary, their middens would have accumulated.

On Monday, January 31, 2022 at 9:44:44 PM UTC-5, DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves wrote:
> On Monday, January 31, 2022 at 6:41:09 PM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> > On Monday 31 January 2022 at 13:01:34 UTC, Pandora wrote:
> >
> > >> How come hominin fossils are so
> > >> exceedingly rare on the African
> > >> mainland?
> > >
> > > We don't even agree on the premise in that question.
> > Eh? You agreed that Lee Berger and his team
> > more than doubled the African hominin fossil
> > record with the h.naledi find.
> >
> > A similar claim about any other terrestrial
> > taxa is close to unimaginable.
> > >>> Your state of mind is comparable to a creationist
> > >>
> > >> Note your ducking of the question.
> > >> (You could have said my theory
> > >> about islands/ swimming / hand-
> > >> axes / big brains / extinction of
> > >> all large predatory omnivores in
> > >> Africa . . . . . are undermined by X,
> > >> Y or Z.) But no.
> > >
> > > Don't pretend that your ideas have never been addressed in this forum..
> > > Together with others I've done so ad nauseam.
> > Almost entirely just with abuse. I'm
> > seeking to explain the extraordinary
> > nature of the fossil record. You
> > prefer to forget all that and look at
> > each tiny item, as though it was just
> > part of more-or-less normal fossil
> > collection.
> > > The comparison with creationism is based on the conclusion that we
> > > also do not even agree on the hinges on which the door of meaningful
> > > discussion much turn. And you probably know what Wittgenstein said
> > > about principles that cannot be reconciled.
> > We're talking about counting. There's
> > not a lot conceptual involved in that.
> > I refer you (again) to Farther Dougal
> > ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0
> >
> > Wittgenstein was talking about much
> > more complex issues.
> > > And you and I think
> > > principly different about the nature of the hominin fossil record.
> > Big piles and and tiny, little piles.
> > > > Give an example of a current 'meaningful
> > > > discussion' in PA -- in which an intelligent
> > > > layperson could have an interest.
> > >
> > > Do you consider yourself an intelligent layperson?
> > > I guess such a person would seek out a book such as:
> > >
> > > https://global.oup.com/academic/product/processes-in-human-evolution-9780198739913
> > Ducking again. A vague wave akin to
> > "It's somewhere on the Internet".
> >
> > It really does look as though there are
> > NO "current 'meaningful discussions' . ."
> > anywhere in PA.
> >
> > It's not an uncommon phenomenon.
> > Disciplines lose their way. Or they
> > experience a kind of trauma, such as
> > that involving racism in the first half
> > of the 20th century, and just stop
> > functioning.
> > > > Show how any of my suggestions might
> > > > 'get in the way' of it.
> > >
> > > That might be on the nature of the fossil record (representative),
> > > systematics (Sahelanthropus as the most basal hominin), anatomy
> > > (Ardipithecus as a biped), etc.
> > There are plenty of specialist PAs who
> > don't accept Ardi was a biped, or that
> > Sahelanthropus was a basal hominin.
> > >> You could readily spend a whole life in East
> > >> Africa as a fossil hunter and not find a single
> > >> hominin fossil. Whereas, in every hour on
> > >> a fossilferous strata you'll see dozens, if not
> > >> hundreds, of non-hominin fossils eroding
> > >> out.
> > >
> > > That may be the case at some very rich sites that sample a specific
> > > paleoenvironment, but you'll never find a real Plio-Pleistocene
> > > formation anywhere in Africa where a million bovid specimens are
> > > exposed for every hominin.
> > I don't get what you're saying. This does
> > appear (very roughly) to be the pattern
> > See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoedjiespunt
> > > And then there are also single sites such
> > > as A.L.333 ("First Family"), that have produced dozens of hominins.
> > Badlands where amid the tens of
> > thousands of fossils that litter the land-
> > scape, the occasional hominin (or, in
> > this case, a group of hominin fossils)
> > have been found.
> > > > The difference is massive. Hominins
> > > > were never a normal part of ANY East
> > > > African (or any other mainland African)
> > > > ecology.
> > >
> > > Again, you and I think principly different about that matter.
> > It's not 'thinking'. It's just counting.
> >
> > I have a tiny pile of small pebbles;
> > You have a Giza pyramid. It's where
> > the quantitative difference becomes
> > a qualitative one.
> >
> > OR -- IF you have an explanation
> > that could explain the difference,
> > let's hear it.
> > >>> The Turkana Database, one of the most comprehensive, lists 3045
> > >>> specimens of Cercopithecidae, 2294 Suidae, 671 Hominidae, 177
> > >>> Hyaenidae.
> > >>>
> > >>> https://www.museums.or.ke/turkana-checklist/
> > >>
> > >> So, over the 6 Myr, hominins were four
> > >> times as common as hyena in the area?
> > >
> > > Is that so impossible?
> > It IS impossible -- in effect.
> >
> > Hyena have long been a part of the
> > African ecology. Their fossils are
> > representative. Hominins have not
> > been a part of that ecology.
> > >> Yet hominins were around -- as evidenced
> > >> by the massive quantities of bifaces found
> > >> in paleo lakes and rivers.
> > >
> > > Isn't that an indication that the makers were not so rare either?
> > It's all a most peculiar story. Every part
> > of it far beyond the grasp of any Standard
> > PA practitioner. But worse than that -- far
> > beyond the ambition of any PA person.
> > No, even worse -- far beyond the capacity
> > to realise that there's a problem.
> No mystery, Homo got recycled in forests, stones accumulated.
> Homo, being nomadic, moved their camps along a stream, then moved to the next stream, etc. If they had been sedentary, their middens would have accumulated.

Pygmies slit the stems of large broad-leaves and clothespin them to the wicker frame of their dome huts. Ancient Homo did the same with their domeshield, and used the same slit & pin method to hang and cure ultra-thin meat slices at streamside (sunnier there than under the forest canopy) before fire was domesticated. Killing a boar or sow required a strong sharp spear, the hunters stood behind shields next to trees, if charged they climbed 2' up the tree, safe since the boar couldn't raise it's head, unlike a bull or stag. (Russians do this, they cling to tree trunks just above the ground, no need to climb higher.)

On Tuesday 1 February 2022 at 11:04:35 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>> Eh? You agreed that Lee Berger and his team
>> more than doubled the African hominin fossil
>> record with the h.naledi find.
>
> No, I didn't.

You didn't dispute it.

> What strikes me as odd though is that someone as distrustful of PA's
> as you takes his word for gospel.

His claim here was a blunt statement --
about numbers. It was highly public
and it's either wrong or right. I've seen
no one contest it. Have you?

>> A similar claim about any other terrestrial
>> taxa is close to unimaginable.
>
> See how the number of new dinosaur taxa has increased exponentially in
> the last few decades:

I obviously meant roughly comparable
taxa. You could find plenty of exceptions
if you go into detail on (say) obscure
suids or rodents.
[..]

>> We're talking about counting. There's
>> not a lot conceptual involved in that.
>> I refer you (again) to Farther Dougal
>> ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0
>>
>> Wittgenstein was talking about much
>> more complex issues.
>
> If it's only about counting then I've done my job. I've given you the
> numbers from one of the most comprehensive databases,

It's misleading to call that list a "database".
It was only 'comprehensive' about the items
they had in their museum. It made no claim
to be representative of the locality.

> but you reject
> them because they do not fit into your world picture. That's on a
> deeper epistemic level than just counting.

Count the fossil sites listed for Africa here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
You'll see that the list is heavily weighted
towards 'hominins'. It would not claim to
be representative of true numbers of fossils
to be seen in Africa. But that's how you
would seem to take it!

>> It really does look as though there are
>> NO "current 'meaningful discussions' . ."
>> anywhere in PA.
>
> Sometimes something can be right in front of you, but you don't see it
> because you have a different search image.

I was asking YOU for YOUR example.
Seems like you have none.

>>> That might be on the nature of the fossil record (representative),
>>> systematics (Sahelanthropus as the most basal hominin), anatomy
>>> (Ardipithecus as a biped), etc.
>>
>> There are plenty of specialist PAs who
>> don't accept Ardi was a biped, or that
>> Sahelanthropus was a basal hominin.
>
> Not plenty,

But enough. It's apparently quite hard
to get access to the original fossils
(understandably) but also hard to get
copies or other necessary information.

> and the point is whether or not you can methodically
> reject the hypothesis on the basis of similar data as in Mongle et al
> (2019):

Specious claims are often made by scientific
experts, especially when their conclusions are
self-serving (eg the Piltdown fraud). Non-
specialists are rarely in a position to contest
them. We can only rely on broader issues,
and our assessments of the interests, conduct,
behaviours and reputations of those involved.

> and not just on the basis of a single character or preconceptions
> about the origins of bipedalism.

A single character is often good enough
to reject a hypothesis.

>> Hyena have long been a part of the
>> African ecology.
>
> So have Aardvarks (Orycteropodidae).
>
>> Their fossils are representative.
>
> In the Turkana Basin only 20 specimens of Aardvark have been found.

You mean that only 20 specimens are
noted or recorded in that museum?
There are probably 1,000 bits of aardvark
on the surface in that area, that nobody
has ever bothered to look at -- just bits of
some unrecognised quadruped.

>> Hominins have not been a part of that ecology.
>
> You think Aardvarks have not been part of that Ecology?

Aardvarks were (& are) a part of that
ecology. Not as integrated as hyena.
They're virtually parasitical on termites.
So never present in large numbers.

Hominins could not have been part of
that ecology since they could not have
raised young in the presence of large
predators (such as hyena).

Surely that's obvious?

Although it's nice to see it confirmed
-- and confirmed for the every site on
the continental mainland -- by the fossil
record, with the one exception, where
the local hominins had a safe place of
retreat: i.e. h.naledi with their caves.

On Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 2:55:18 PM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On Tuesday 1 February 2022 at 11:04:35 UTC, Pandora wrote:
>
> >> Eh? You agreed that Lee Berger and his team
> >> more than doubled the African hominin fossil
> >> record with the h.naledi find.
> >
> > No, I didn't.
> You didn't dispute it.
> > What strikes me as odd though is that someone as distrustful of PA's
> > as you takes his word for gospel.
> His claim here was a blunt statement --
> about numbers. It was highly public
> and it's either wrong or right. I've seen
> no one contest it. Have you?
> >> A similar claim about any other terrestrial
> >> taxa is close to unimaginable.
> >
> > See how the number of new dinosaur taxa has increased exponentially in
> > the last few decades:
> I obviously meant roughly comparable
> taxa. You could find plenty of exceptions
> if you go into detail on (say) obscure
> suids or rodents.
> [..]
> >> We're talking about counting. There's
> >> not a lot conceptual involved in that.
> >> I refer you (again) to Farther Dougal
> >> ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0
> >>
> >> Wittgenstein was talking about much
> >> more complex issues.
> >
> > If it's only about counting then I've done my job. I've given you the
> > numbers from one of the most comprehensive databases,
> It's misleading to call that list a "database".
> It was only 'comprehensive' about the items
> they had in their museum. It made no claim
> to be representative of the locality.
> > but you reject
> > them because they do not fit into your world picture. That's on a
> > deeper epistemic level than just counting.
> Count the fossil sites listed for Africa here:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
> You'll see that the list is heavily weighted
> towards 'hominins'. It would not claim to
> be representative of true numbers of fossils
> to be seen in Africa. But that's how you
> would seem to take it!
> >> It really does look as though there are
> >> NO "current 'meaningful discussions' . ."
> >> anywhere in PA.
> >
> > Sometimes something can be right in front of you, but you don't see it
> > because you have a different search image.
> I was asking YOU for YOUR example.
> Seems like you have none.
> >>> That might be on the nature of the fossil record (representative),
> >>> systematics (Sahelanthropus as the most basal hominin), anatomy
> >>> (Ardipithecus as a biped), etc.
> >>
> >> There are plenty of specialist PAs who
> >> don't accept Ardi was a biped, or that
> >> Sahelanthropus was a basal hominin.
> >
> > Not plenty,
> But enough. It's apparently quite hard
> to get access to the original fossils
> (understandably) but also hard to get
> copies or other necessary information.
> > and the point is whether or not you can methodically
> > reject the hypothesis on the basis of similar data as in Mongle et al
> > (2019):
> Specious claims are often made by scientific
> experts, especially when their conclusions are
> self-serving (eg the Piltdown fraud). Non-
> specialists are rarely in a position to contest
> them. We can only rely on broader issues,
> and our assessments of the interests, conduct,
> behaviours and reputations of those involved.
> > and not just on the basis of a single character or preconceptions
> > about the origins of bipedalism.
> A single character is often good enough
> to reject a hypothesis.
> >> Hyena have long been a part of the
> >> African ecology.
> >
> > So have Aardvarks (Orycteropodidae).
> >
> >> Their fossils are representative.
> >
> > In the Turkana Basin only 20 specimens of Aardvark have been found.
> You mean that only 20 specimens are
> noted or recorded in that museum?
> There are probably 1,000 bits of aardvark
> on the surface in that area, that nobody
> has ever bothered to look at -- just bits of
> some unrecognised quadruped.
> >> Hominins have not been a part of that ecology.
> >
> > You think Aardvarks have not been part of that Ecology?
> Aardvarks were (& are) a part of that
> ecology. Not as integrated as hyena.
> They're virtually parasitical on termites.
> So never present in large numbers.
>
> Hominins could not have been part of
> that ecology since they could not have
> raised young in the presence of large
> predators (such as hyena).
>
> Surely that's obvious?

Obvious: Homo were not specialized for open plains, but did live along their margins along forested streams.
Obvious: Hyenas specialize in eating carcasses.
Obvious: Homo carcasses were eaten by hyenas.
Obvious: Few articulated remains of Homo were left for PAs to find.
Obvious: Numerous stone tools indicate Homo lived in the vicinity.
Obvious: Homo is defined as a super-social terrestrial ape.
Obvious: Homo infants, toddlers & youths were very well protected.
Obvious: Naledi caves were death chambers for water-seeking Homo able to climb down narrow vertical shafts despite utter darkness, they were certainly not their homes but their morgues.

Of course, none of this will be obvious to Atlanteans.

>
> Although it's nice to see it confirmed
> -- and confirmed for the every site on
> the continental mainland -- by the fossil
> record, with the one exception, where
> the local hominins had a safe place of
> retreat: i.e. h.naledi with their caves.

On Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 8:36:28 AM UTC-5, Pandora wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Feb 2022 13:39:46 +0100, Pandora <pan...@knoware.nl>
> wrote:
> >>Count the fossil sites listed for Africa here:
> >>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
> >>You'll see that the list is heavily weighted
> >>towards 'hominins'. It would not claim to
> >>be representative of true numbers of fossils
> >>to be seen in Africa. But that's how you
> >>would seem to take it!
> >
> >One thing it shows is that hominins were all over Africa during the
> >Plio-Pleistocene, from Koro Toro in Chad to Sterkfontein in South
> >Africa.
> The former is a particularly interesting case as it is more than 1000
> km away from the nearest coast and about as far inland as you can get
> on the African continent:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_bahrelghazali
>
> Assuming that it came from an island population somewhere along the
> African coast and came to Koro Toro more or less through a random
> walk, it must have taken years to reach the location. While on its way
> through several different ecozones, how did it survive?
> What did it eat?
> Where did it sleep?
> How did it defend itself against predators?
-

You know my claims, won't repeat them here.
I've been wondering if the inland Levantine corridor was transited seasonally, and the Levantine coast was transited during the apposite season. The months of R are good for tasty shellfish foraging. The non-R summer months may have been cooler in the forest/woodland shade.

The earliest Pleistocene record of a large-bodied hominin from the Levant supports two out-of-Africa dispersal events
Alon Barash cs 2022 Scientific Reports 12, 1721

The paucity of early-Pleistocene hominin fossils in Eurasia hinders an in-depth discussion on their paleo-biology & -ecology.
Here we report on the earliest large-bodied hominin remains from the Levantine corridor:
juvenile vertebra UB-10749 from the early-Pleistocene site of ‘Ubeidiya, Israel, discovered during a re-analysis of the faunal remains.
It is a complete lower lumbar vertebral body, with morphological characteristics consistent with Homo sp.
Our analysis indicates:
UB-10749 was a 6- to 12-yr-old child at death, displaying delayed ossification pattern vs Hs.
Its predicted adult size is comparable to other early-Pleistocene large-bodied hominins from Africa.
Paleo-biological differences between UB-10749 & other early Eurasian hominins supports at least 2 distinct out-of-Africa dispersal events.
This observation corresponds with
- variants of lithic traditions (Oldowan, Acheulian),
- various ecological niches across early-Pleistocene sites in Eurasia.

On Friday, February 4, 2022 at 5:42:41 AM UTC-5, Pandora wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Feb 2022 16:35:26 -0800 (PST), "DD'eDeN aka
> note/nickname/alas_my_loves" <daud....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 8:36:28 AM UTC-5, Pandora wrote:
> >> On Wed, 02 Feb 2022 13:39:46 +0100, Pandora <pan...@knoware.nl>
> >> wrote:
> >> >>Count the fossil sites listed for Africa here:
> >> >>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
> >> >>You'll see that the list is heavily weighted
> >> >>towards 'hominins'. It would not claim to
> >> >>be representative of true numbers of fossils
> >> >>to be seen in Africa. But that's how you
> >> >>would seem to take it!
> >> >
> >> >One thing it shows is that hominins were all over Africa during the
> >> >Plio-Pleistocene, from Koro Toro in Chad to Sterkfontein in South
> >> >Africa.
> >> The former is a particularly interesting case as it is more than 1000
> >> km away from the nearest coast and about as far inland as you can get
> >> on the African continent:
> >>
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_bahrelghazali
> >> U
> >> Assuming that it came from an island population somewhere along the
> >> African coast and came to Koro Toro more or less through a random
> >> walk, it must have taken years to reach the location. While on its way
> >> through several different ecozones, how did it survive?
> >> What did it eat?
> >> Where did it sleep?
> >> How did it defend itself against predators?
> >-
> >
> >You know my claims, won't repeat them here.
> >I've been wondering if the inland Levantine corridor was transited seasonally, and the Levantine
> >coast was transited during the apposite season. The months of R are good for tasty shellfish foraging.
> >The non-R summer months may have been cooler in the forest/woodland shade.
> >
> >The earliest Pleistocene record of a large-bodied hominin from the Levant supports two out-of-Africa dispersal events
> >Alon Barash cs 2022 Scientific Reports 12, 1721
> >
> >The paucity of early-Pleistocene hominin fossils in Eurasia hinders an in-depth discussion on their paleo-biology & -ecology.
> >Here we report on the earliest large-bodied hominin remains from the Levantine corridor:
> >juvenile vertebra UB-10749 from the early-Pleistocene site of 繕beidiya, Israel, discovered during a re-analysis of the faunal remains.
> >It is a complete lower lumbar vertebral body, with morphological characteristics consistent with Homo sp.
> >Our analysis indicates:
> >UB-10749 was a 6- to 12-yr-old child at death, displaying delayed ossification pattern vs Hs.
> >Its predicted adult size is comparable to other early-Pleistocene large-bodied hominins from Africa.
> >Paleo-biological differences between UB-10749 & other early Eurasian hominins supports at least 2 distinct out-of-Africa dispersal events.
> >This observation corresponds with
> >- variants of lithic traditions (Oldowan, Acheulian),
> >- various ecological niches across early-Pleistocene sites in Eurasia.
> Stay focussed D., we're not talking about Pleistocene Homo in the
> Levant, but about a less derived Pliocene Australopithecus in the
> central Sahara at 3.5 mya, apparently without any lithic tradition.

Oops, sorry, must have been half asleep, mistook island for israel, plus the ref. to giza pyramids. I recall that there are 2 areas called bharelghazali, and there might be an extension of the Benue Trough, might have been a east-west river system connecting the Atlantic.

On Wednesday 2 February 2022 at 12:39:51 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>>>> Eh? You agreed that Lee Berger and his team
>>>> more than doubled the African hominin fossil
>>>> record with the h.naledi find.
>>>
>>> No, I didn't.
>>
>> You didn't dispute it.
>
> Because I do not consider it "on record" in a scientifically
> appropriate format. I don't deal with wild guesses and gut feelings
> dispersed through the popular media (and Lee Berger has a wide gut).

This is a political response, well up to
the Boris Johnson 'standard'.

It's NOT a wild guess that before h.naledi
(publ 2015) there were ~2,000 hominin
fossils (each tooth and bit of bone counted
separately) from the whole of Africa. That
is the important number.

A figure of 2,000 -- spread over 4 or 5 Myr
for almost any other terrestrial mammal
taxon would be regarded as a joke -- not
enough to warrant study.

The 'scientific' literature is just not
designed for dealing with these sorts of
questions. This topic is not discussed --
there may be an element of deliberation
but it's probably more cock-up than
conspiracy.

But that's how you (and the whole PA
community) is so astonishingly ignorant
about vitally important questions.

>>> If it's only about counting then I've done my job. I've given you the
>>> numbers from one of the most comprehensive databases,
>>
>> It's misleading to call that list a "database".
>> It was only 'comprehensive' about the items
>> they had in their museum. It made no claim
>> to be representative of the locality.
>
> I'm not sure if you even understand what a database is.

"A database is an organized collection of structured information, or data"

> Every specimen collected in the area has been numbered, identified,
> and catalogued with information about year of discovery, area,
> horizon, etc.
> If protocol is to collect anything identifiable than you may assume
> that it's representative.

Sure -- for ONE organised dig in a tightly
delineated area, or for a series of them.
But this is a museum, meant mostly for
education and entertainment. Not unlike
the Natural History Museum in South
Kensington. You don't use the collections
there as 'a database' on which you base
judgements about the density of a species
population.

Lake Turkana is 270 km in length. A lot
more than 20 aardvarks died and were
fossilised on its banks over the last 7 Myr.

>> Count the fossil sites listed for Africa here:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
>> You'll see that the list is heavily weighted
>> towards 'hominins'. It would not claim to
>> be representative of true numbers of fossils
>> to be seen in Africa. But that's how you
>> would seem to take it!
>
> One thing it shows is that hominins were all over Africa during the
> Plio-Pleistocene, from Koro Toro in Chad to Sterkfontein in South
> Africa.

It shows that truly remarkably TINY
number of hominins died and were
fossilised on the African continental
highlands over the past 5 Myr.

Until PA recognises that fact, and
seeks an explanation, it's largely a
waste of time.

>>>> It really does look as though there are
>>>> NO "current 'meaningful discussions' . ."
>>>> anywhere in PA.
>>>
>>> Sometimes something can be right in front of you, but you don't see it
>>> because you have a different search image.
>>
>> I was asking YOU for YOUR example.
>> Seems like you have none.
>
> It doesn't matter, because whatever I would suggest is pissed on by
> you.

And there was no party, or if there was,
you weren't there, or if your were there,
it was a business meeting, and if someone
gave you cake, you didn't know what it
was for . . . . . .

If you can recite the benefits of Brexit,
you have all the necessary qualities to
be a government minister.

> > We can only rely on broader issues,
> > and our assessments of the interests, conduct,
> > behaviours and reputations of those involved.
>
> If a non-specialist is someone who knows jack shit about modern
> phylogenetic systematics then they have no business in evolutionary
> biology. Go find yourself another hobby.

That might be sound advice -- if PA people
could count. Until they master that skill,
we can't rely on their judgements on a
range of important topics.

> >> and not just on the basis of a single character or preconceptions
> >> about the origins of bipedalism.
> >
> > A single character is often good enough
> > to reject a hypothesis.
>
> Please tell, which one is your favorite?
> My guess is that it's the abductable hallux of Ardipithecus, on the
> premise/preconception that you can't be a biped with a divergent big
> toe.
> Never mind the derived anatomy of the pelvis or the basicranium. You
> can always reject those on the basis of the claim that they are biased
> or merely a wild guess.

I would have been nice if we could have
seen the actual 'derived anatomies' of the
pelvis and basicranium -- but they came
in squashed distorted fragments. Those
who 'reconstructed' them took a very
long time, and numerous attempts before
they 'got them right'.

The concept of 'double blind' -- as seen
throughout science, especially in medicine,
is so far removed from PA, that it might
as well have been on the other side of the
Big Bang.

Accuse them of unconscious bias?
They'd see that as libelous.

>>> In the Turkana Basin only 20 specimens of Aardvark have been found.
>>
>> You mean that only 20 specimens are
>> noted or recorded in that museum?
>> There are probably 1,000 bits of aardvark
>> on the surface in that area, that nobody
>> has ever bothered to look at -- just bits of
>> some unrecognised quadruped.
>
> Sure, why not millions?

You're probably right. 1,000 bits of
fossilised aardvark in every km2?

> When you live in fantasyland and talk is cheap
> you can make up any number that suits your story. And of course it's
> only PA's who are looking for fosslis. Never mind vertebrate
> paleontologists who are interested in something other than hominins,
> like Lars Werdelin and Margaret Lewis who did the Koobi Fora volume on
> carnivora
> (https://www.calacademy.org/scientists/anthropology-publications-koobi-fora7)
> or Martin Pickford who really likes aardvarks.

I'm sure that they all did a thorough job
on the small plots under investigation.

>> Hominins could not have been part of
>> that ecology since they could not have
>> raised young in the presence of large
>> predators (such as hyena).
>>
>> Surely that's obvious?
>
> That depends on the species. Hominins have little to fear from species
> such as Aardwolf, Brown and Striped Hyena. And even Spotted Hyena
> rarely hunt hominins.

Note my 'such as'. Infant hominins (and
their mothers) would have good reason
to fear even the smaller carnivores.
You might say that every infant was
carried at all times. But that's a strong
argument against bipedalism (since the
mother can't do much else, including
running & climbing).

>> Although it's nice to see it confirmed
>> -- and confirmed for the every site on
>> the continental mainland -- by the fossil
>> record, with the one exception, where
>> the local hominins had a safe place of
>> retreat: i.e. h.naledi with their caves.
>
> Safe? I'm not so sure, they may have died there.

We all die sometime. The issue is
whether or not we can keep a
population going over numerous
generations. Caves with constricted
entrances are more comfortable
and safer from predators (or even
from hostile hominins) than trees.

On Thursday 3 February 2022 at 13:36:28 UTC, Pandora wrote:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_bahrelghazali
>
> Assuming that it came from an island population somewhere along the
> African coast and came to Koro Toro more or less through a random
> walk, it must have taken years to reach the location. While on its way
> through several different ecozones, how did it survive?

Generally following rivers it would have
found USOs, and lived in much the same
way as in its native habitat -- although
as adult adventurers and not as members
of a established population living there.

> What did it eat?

Prey animals probably didn't see it as
a predator, and allowed it close enough
for easy kills. Or it might have set
snares.

> Where did it sleep?

In whatever shelter it could find.
Probably carried rush matting or
some other covering.

> How did it defend itself against predators?

Predators would not have seen it as
prey; much as sharks don't usually
attack humans, except when they
mistake them for seals.

On Thursday 3 February 2022 at 09:45:50 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>> I always quote the evidence -- e.g. the
>> million or more Giza-pyramid-sized
>> heaps of bifaces,
>
> Those require a lot of hominins to manufacture.

Or a huge number of generations --
which is what we have.

Most generations of coastal hominins
would have had an excess. They'd
have gone inland, nearly always as
refugees; predominantly young
males, but sometimes some females,
and maybe some young. As I see it,
few would have survived into the 2nd,
3rd or 4th generations. But while
attempting to do so, they would have
done their best to clear their local
area of dangerous predators. Bands
of predominantly males might have
done their best to establish 'home-
lands' in the hope of attracting
females to settle there with them.
They would also have devoted most
of their lives to clearing their area of
predators. A near-hopeless task, of
course. Kill off the local predators
and fresh ones move in. But what
else to do, except to keep at it?
Generations upon generations upon
generations of failed attempts would
have created those enormous piles
of bifaces.

When eventually they succeeded in
reducing the predators to near-
extinction, females began to think of
raising children, but cold at night
would remain a serious problem.
However, this state (at the end of each
inter-glacial) would be brief. An an ice-
age descended, when most life-forms
had to retreat to refugia. The world
fixed itself after 40 or 100 Kyr, and
the cycle repeated.

On Saturday 5 February 2022 at 10:29:11 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>>> Assuming that it came from an island population somewhere along the
>>> African coast and came to Koro Toro more or less through a random
>>> walk, it must have taken years to reach the location. While on its way
>>> through several different ecozones, how did it survive?
>>
>> Generally following rivers it would have
>> found USOs, and lived in much the same
>> way as in its native habitat -- although
>> as adult adventurers and not as members
>> of a established population living there.
>
> Going from the coast all the way to Koro Toro in the central Sahara it
> would have encountered many different environments with different
> unfamiliar species. You are always stressing the concept of niche, but
> in this case you are suggesting that it was adaptable to the point
> that it didn't have one.

It's species that occupy niches. Vagrants
are usually in the wrong place, but could
be looking for a similar habitat. For
hominins that was somewhere females
could come (willingly or otherwise) and
raise young. The hominin failure rate
would have been around 99.999%

> >> Where did it sleep?
> >
> > In whatever shelter it could find.
>
> Nice handwaving.

Silly question.

> > Probably carried rush matting or
> > some other covering.
>
> We're not talking Late-Pleistocene Homo, but Pliocene
> Australopithecus. Suggesting that they could make snares and weave
> mats is suggesting that they had the cognitive ability to also make
> stone-tipped spears and bows and arrows, or that an ape slightly more
> derived than a chimp can do all that.

This is really bad (if traditional) PA
'thinking'. What is the ONE advantage
that hominins have over other taxa?
It's their intelligence and adaptability.
That's WHY they went bipedal. It was
NOT the other way around.

Brain size is a hopelessly inappropriate
guide. H.naledi (with brains close to
chimp size) had ropes and candles,
and practised funerary ceremonies.

Mat weaving was probably one of the
earliest of ground-living technologies.
It took only ONE bright hominin to
develop it, and the rest copied.
Minimal 'cognitive capacity'.

>> Predators would not have seen it as
>> prey; much as sharks don't usually
>> attack humans, except when they
>> mistake them for seals.
>
> An Australopithecus sleeping on the ground would look very similar to
> a chimp.

Few potential predators would have seen
a chimp (They were in distant forests).
But it's the very different behaviour that
would have bemused them. Hominins
didn't run away -- no point, since they
were so slow. (But the predators would
not have realised that for a while.) Their
rock-throwing was also probably fairly
good. Of course, having small children
around was out of the question.

On Saturday 5 February 2022 at 11:19:17 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>>>> I always quote the evidence -- e.g. the
>>>> million or more Giza-pyramid-sized
>>>> heaps of bifaces,
>>>
>>> Those require a lot of hominins to manufacture.
>>
>> Or a huge number of generations --
>> which is what we have.
>
> If the total is millions then it doesn't matter whether it's a x b or
> b x a, but the presence of thousands of stone artifacts from single
> horizons at single sites, such as FwJj20 at Koobi Fora, is evidence
> that not many generations were involved in the making of large
> artifact accumulations.

Only 2,633 artefacts in that horizon
-- as far as I can see. One season's
work for a group of hominins. Maybe
ten year's work for a small group,
keeping the local predators at bay;
killing and eating some.

On Saturday 5 February 2022 at 14:20:06 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>>> Because I do not consider it "on record" in a scientifically
>>> appropriate format. I don't deal with wild guesses and gut feelings
>>> dispersed through the popular media (and Lee Berger has a wide gut).
>>
>> This is a political response, well up to
>> the Boris Johnson 'standard'.
>
> It's a matter of objectivity, of materials and methods, so that
> anybody in your field can check what you've done and how you've
> arrived at your conclusions.
>
>> It's NOT a wild guess that before h.naledi
>> (publ 2015) there were ~2,000 hominin
>> fossils (each tooth and bit of bone counted
>> separately) from the whole of Africa. That
>> is the important number.
>>
>> A figure of 2,000 -- spread over 4 or 5 Myr
>> for almost any other terrestrial mammal
>> taxon would be regarded as a joke -- not
>> enough to warrant study.
>
> Whole monographs have been written about taxa represented in the
> fossil record by less than 20 specimens:
>
> https://pfeil-verlag.de/publikationen/archaeopteryx-the-icon-of-evolution/

I did say 'terrestrial mammal'. If archaeopteryx
had been found in the usual mammalian
pattern -- small random bits -- it would
also have been ignored.

>> The 'scientific' literature is just not
>> designed for dealing with these sorts of
>> questions.
>
> It's exactly designed for these kind of questions, applied to
> materials such as the Turkana Database and appropriate statistical
> methods. It's not designed for telling fancy stories.

Classic missing of the wood for the trees.
Which 'scientific' journal has published a
paper on the ENORMOUS discrepancy
between the number of hominin fossils
and non-hominin fossils in Africa?

They are used for large-scale quantitative paleoenvironmental and
paleoecological reconstructions, such as:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0232

>> Lake Turkana is 270 km in length. A lot
>> more than 20 aardvarks died and were
>> fossilised on its banks over the last 7 Myr.
>
> The same goes for hominins, all still buried under tons of sediment,
> never to be exposed and discovered.

The same does NOT go. For about every
100K of aardvark fossils, you'll get one
hominin -- a tooth or the like. Aardvark
lived there. They were endemic. Hominins
were rare vagrants.

>>> One thing it shows is that hominins were all over Africa during the
>>> Plio-Pleistocene, from Koro Toro in Chad to Sterkfontein in South
>>> Africa.
>>
>> It shows that truly remarkably TINY
>> number of hominins died and were
>> fossilised on the African continental
>> highlands over the past 5 Myr.
>
> It says nothing about the number of hominins, it only says something
> about their distribution across the continent.
> For Australopithecus and Paranthropus something like this:
>
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_the_fossil_sites_of_the_early_hominids_(4.4-1M_BP).svg>

An intelligent reading of any such 'database'
would inform you that hominins were rare --
far too rare to be part of the local ecology.

> More widespread than chimpanzees, for which we have virtually no
> fossil record.

Chimps live (feed and sleep) in trees
thereby avoiding floods and they keep
well away from bodies of water. So they
rarely get fossilised. No one claims that
hominins were similar, nor anything
like it.
[..]

>> I would have been nice if we could have
>> seen the actual 'derived anatomies' of the
>> pelvis and basicranium -- but they came
>> in squashed distorted fragments. Those
>> who 'reconstructed' them took a very
>> long time, and numerous attempts before
>> they 'got them right'.
>
> You may doubt the result if you have similar or even superior
> knowledge of primate anatomy and experience with reconstructing
> specimens from fragmentary remains, when you think parts have been
> misidentified and/or additional parts have been discovered since.
> This was the case for example with the rib cage of the Turkana Boy,
> which leads to a different interpretation tof he evolution of human
> body shape:

> Doubt has it's place in the scientific language-game, but yours is a
> priori of any empirical content. Your kind of doubt undermines the
> possibilty of even playing this language-game.

That's nonsense. Would you let candidates
for university places (e.g. in medicine) mark
their own exam papers? Would you trust
the result of a US Presidential election run
by Donald Trump? Is Tim White more
trustworthy than Trump? I don't know,
but science should not depend on trust.
Here, you expect us to trust the 'science'
of a group of people, every one of whom
knows what they are all hoping for -- the
only desirable result.

Expertise is to be respected. But you
should never trust an expert who cannot
(or is unwilling to) explain the basis of
their reasoning -- ESPECIALLY when their
conclusions are self-serving.

If they had shown some humility,
acknowledged the problem, and made
some slight effort to mitigate it, then
I'd be more inclined to give them the
benefit of the doubt.

>> I'm sure that they all did a thorough job
>> on the small plots under investigation.
>
> That's how it works. Much more efficient/thorough/productive than
> digging at random here and there in an area of a few hundred square
> kilometers in the hope of finding something of interest.

How it works is that they found some
hominin fossils on (or very close to) the
surface, and then did a thorough
investigation of the surrounding area --
maybe within 100 metres of the original
find. Any similar area, picked at random,
would (99.999% of the time) reveal
ZERO hominin fossils.

Their exercise was well worth doing --
but it's not to be taken as an objective
measure of the density of hominins
present at that location at any time.

>> Note my 'such as'. Infant hominins (and
>> their mothers) would have good reason
>> to fear even the smaller carnivores.
>> You might say that every infant was
>> carried at all times. But that's a strong
>> argument against bipedalism (since the
>> mother can't do much else, including
>> running & climbing).
>
> She may have to drop whatever she carries in her hands:
> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIrasWBUQAAUDhh?format=jpg&name=small

An image that comes from the Daily Mail
School of Science.

>> We all die sometime. The issue is
>> whether or not we can keep a
>> population going over numerous
>> generations. Caves with constricted
>> entrances are more comfortable
>> and safer from predators (or even
>> from hostile hominins) than trees.
>
> Tell that to the chimps.
> A cave might just as well be a leopard den.

Proposed habitations must always be
checked out first. Then, at night, or
when leaving it empty, the door must
be shut (i.e. a boulder or a thorn bush
is jammed in the entrance hole).

Op maandag 31 januari 2022 om 23:29:59 UTC+1 schreef I Envy JTEM:

> > Why do many aquatic mammals have larger brains than equally large terrestrials?
> > Is it only about diet? certain nutrients: DHA etc.? or °varied° nutrients?
> > Neandertals had larger brain than erectus, and were probably less aquatic than erectus.
> > Sirenia have rel.small brains: poor diet? slow & shallow diving? monotomous lifestyle?
> > They don't have to *find* their food, only have to eat & digest.
> > Are the costs of carrying a heavy brain lower in the water?

> Omega-3s sealed the deal for me.
> https://omegaquant.com/this-is-your-brain-on-omega-3s/
> We had to be eating seafood.

Yes, no doubt, but why exactly? Sirenia also eat sea-food.
Why were larger brains advantageous for slow-shallow-diving erectus?
Why did neandertals (probably more wading than erectus, and more fresh-water) had even larger brains?

> They had to work a lot harder for their calories, spend more time eating but by turning
> to the sea the found an abundance of proteins AND the Omega-3s they needed for
> their brains.
> Before Aquatic Ape, a mutation allowing for larger or smarter brains might've cropped
> up dozens of times only to go extinct. BECAUSE there wasn't the nutrients they needed
> to form these brains/connections.

littor...@gmail.com wrote:

> > Omega-3s sealed the deal for me.
> > https://omegaquant.com/this-is-your-brain-on-omega-3s/
> > We had to be eating seafood.

> Yes, no doubt, but why exactly? Sirenia also eat sea-food.

The claim is that we evolved from arboreal animals. Well the Sugar
Glider is an arboreal animal, why didn't we evolve into tree top
gliders?

> Why were larger brains advantageous for slow-shallow-diving erectus?

Even now there are plenty of stretches of beaches where you can collect
shellfish all day every day without diving. The further back you turn the
clock, the more abundant the sea food.

They only needed to dive under one of the two following conditions:

#1. They were attached to a specific area or somehow geographically limited.

They could not simply consume & move on. They had to extract as much as
they could from a given area.

#2. They stopped surviving and started living.

They were no longer concerned with feeding themselves, but with acquiring
specific foods which they had a fondness for.

We know humans have preferences. Heck, we know for a fact that grazing
animals have preferences! Why shouldn't humans? The more abundant
the resources were, the more picky they could afford to be... the more work
they might invest into a specific food.

> Why did neandertals (probably more wading than erectus, and more fresh-water) had even larger brains?

My pet theory is that humans got "Smarter" by growing bigger brains and better brains.
Some populations grew bigger than others, some relied more on "Better" than bigger.
But eventually the advantages of "Bigger" won out, particularly when "Bigger" didn't
displace any "Better brain" genes.

-- --

https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/675396082168184832

On Monday 7 February 2022 at 11:53:52 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>>> horizons at single sites, such as FwJj20 at Koobi Fora, is evidence
>>> that not many generations were involved in the making of large
>>> artifact accumulations.
>>
>> Only 2,633 artefacts in that horizon
>> -- as far as I can see.
>
> Only 2,633?

That's the figure in the paper -- all in one
shallow layer, and all sharp, showing no
signs of wear or of use.

> 50 of such sites throughout the basin could easily produce 100,000 or
> more artifacts within the time of a single horizon. Multiply by dozens
> of horizons.

Vast quantities were laid down. Whether
or not they are around Koobi Fora and FwJj20
I don't know. But there is no shortage of
geological time.

>> One season's work for a group of hominins. Maybe ten year's work for a small group,
>> keeping the local predators at bay; killing and eating some.
>
> Obviously not the work of a vagrant, an ephemeral passerby hanging
> around for a few days or weeks. More like the central place of a group
> with intimate knowledge of the environment, occupied for at least a
> season.

Modern refugee camps can be in place for
decades. Their equivalents ~1.0 ma would
have been occupied by a succession of
different people, but all with the same
predator-suppression technology. At the
time the hominins made those bifaces
they saw predators as a threat, and were
keeping them at bay.

On Monday 7 February 2022 at 11:57:08 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>> It's species that occupy niches. Vagrants
>> are usually in the wrong place, but could
>> be looking for a similar habitat.
>> For hominins that was somewhere females
>> could come (willingly or otherwise) and
>> raise young. The hominin failure rate
>> would have been around 99.999%
>
> So the probablity of a hominin like "Abel" (KT12/H1) ever reaching
> Koro Toro in the central Sahara would be practically zero.

Doesn't follow at all. Refugee bands could
well keep travelling for a decade or more,
hoping to find a place they could settle.
At the time of 'Abel' some of the predators
they encountered might have begun to
recognise the vulnerability of hominins,
meaning they had to move on.

> Multiply by
> the probabilty of this rare individual becoming a fossil and the
> probability of us finding it exposed on the surface 3.5 million years
> later would indeed make the total probability astronomically small.
> The fact that we have "Abel" is evidence that your story doesn't make
> any sense, at all.

No logic here at all. Hominin bands would
have spread out from their homelands
(presumably on the East African coast) more
or less indefinitely. Nothing to stop them.

>>>>> Where did it sleep?
>>>>
>>>> In whatever shelter it could find.
>>>
>>> Nice handwaving.
>>
>> Silly question.
>
> You've asked it many times.

I ask it about hominins supposedly settled
on the savanna (or the like), raising infants
and children, while surrounded by large
predators. You are asking me about what
were (at any one time) a band of transient
males, not seen as likely prey by local
predators.

>> Mat weaving was probably one of the
>> earliest of ground-living technologies.
>> It took only ONE bright hominin to
>> develop it, and the rest copied.
>> Minimal 'cognitive capacity'.
>
> Those neurons are not there to generate heat. Any neuroscientist will
> tell you that they are organized in delicate networks that underly
> perception, affection, cognition, and action.
> Pick up a copy of that big book by Kandel et al.:
> https://www.mhprofessional.com/9781259642234-usa-principles-of-neural-science-sixth-edition-group

Organs often have more than one function.
Brains were originally for what you say -- as
in nearly all animals. But they also act as a
store of heat. In some marine animals they
have evolved great size specifically for that
purpose. No good reason that should not
also apply to huminins.

> Chimps and humans are not much different when it comes to raw
> perception, emotion, and action. The big difference is in cognition.
> It's those higher-order integrative cortical association areas
> involved in cognitive processing that make up the bulk of the bulbous
> human brain. Chimps and Australopithecus have/had much less of that:
>
> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz4729

There's next to nothing in such material.
Empty verbiage. Is there one meaningful
(i.e. testable) proposition in any text ever
written on the subject of "cognition"?

> Weaving a mat from fiber is a multistage proces that in humans
> requires significant cognitive processing, from selecting appropriate
> raw materials to preparing them for the purpose of weaving and the
> weaving process itself. It's not a programmed instinctive behaviour
> like nest-building in birds.

Google images of "palm fronds". The leaves
fall off and litter the ground. Early ground-
sleeping hominins making beds, would
collect a lot and lay them down, one layer
North-South, the next East-West. The
notion of interweaving them (so that they
didn't clump) would occur around Week 2.
All other hominins would copy.

>> (But the predators would
>> not have realised that for a while.) Their
>> rock-throwing was also probably fairly
>> good.
>
> So they DO have a means of defending themselves.
> Never accepted when I suggest it.

I'm talking about naive predators, running
into a band of male hominins, not knowing
what they were. They'd take a few weeks or
months to realise that hominins were easy
prey -- especially at night. Whereas you
always talk of hominins living, sleeping,
and raising children in the same habitat
as those predators.

On Monday 7 February 2022 at 13:59:13 UTC, Pandora wrote:

>> Classic missing of the wood for the trees.
>> Which 'scientific' journal has published a
>> paper on the ENORMOUS discrepancy
>> between the number of hominin fossils
>> and non-hominin fossils in Africa?
>
> Because hominins constitute only a single tribe (Hominini), while
> non-hominins constitute everything else. It's trivial that a taxon at
> the level of tribus is dwarfed by the rest of the animal kingdom.

If hominins had been living in East Africa,
and were a part of the ecosystem, then
there should have left many more than
2,000 findable fossils -- at least 1,000
times that number.

>> Chimps live (feed and sleep) in trees
>> thereby avoiding floods and they keep
>> well away from bodies of water. So they
>> rarely get fossilised. No one claims that
>> hominins were similar, nor anything
>> like it.
>
> Study has shown that chimpanzee remains do accumulate on the forest
> floor and may occasionally get washed into nearby drainage channels.
>
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248483710638

The Kibale forest over that past 10 or
20 years is very different from that before
1900 AD, or that around 1 ma. Humans
have drastically reduced the numbers
and diversity of carnivores (and of
omnivores).

> Wittgenstein: "I really want to say that a language-game is only
> possible if one trusts something ("I did not say "can trust
> something"). (OC 509)

Your reading of Wittgenstein is shallow.

“How can I know that I mean something when I speak”

> In the case of the scientific language-game this trust concerns the
> assumption that your collegues have been as objective as possible,
> have done a thorough job, etc. That's the a priori of this
> language-game, its foundation, its rules. (sometimes it's violated, as
> in the case of fraud).

“The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.”
(19692166)

A top-class modern medical researcher
will have a very different conception of
what "being as objective as possible" is,
as opposed to that of a typical 19th
century (or earlier) one, or a poor modern
one. The best scientists know that the
easiest person to fool is yourself and the
next most easiest people are those in
your own team.

> You may contest their results and conclusions, but as rule not on
> grounds of lack of expertise, lack of objectivity, lack of
> trustworthyness, etc.

You've heard of the "Replication Crisis"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
It's merely a recent example of the "lack
of objectivity" that most educated adults
know is likely to be prevalent in any field
of human activity. Yet I'm not surprised
that you seem ignorant of it -- since PA
is your field -- one where, in a most
peculiar manner, credulousness is the
rule.

Partly this comes from regarding any kind
of 'speculation' with an atavistic horror
while working, without the slightest
question, under the superstition known
as the 'Biblical assumption'. Under this
everything is assumed to be as late as
possible and can only be given an
earlier date when it has near-cast-iron
evidence.

> That's exactly where you go wrong. Your lack of trust is based on
> paranoia, prejudice, your own presumptions about human evolution,
> bitterness, frustration, disrespect, etc.

PA should operate like other sciences
with passionate efforts made to test all
hypotheses with as much objectivity
as can be devised. Maybe copies of
the Ardi fossils should have been made,
along with similar ones for a modern
chimp and an australopith, squashed
and distorted in a similar way. These
then given to teams of cranial & other
surgeons who were asked to arrange
them as best they could.

I'm not saying that such an exercise
was practical, but the investigators
should have looked into a whole
variety of possible devices to check
that their thinking was objective.
But such an idea didn't occur to
them,

No one should trust the efforts of
those whose interests were so
intertwined with the outcomes.
That's show-business -- not science.
>> How it works is that they found some
>> hominin fossils on (or very close to) the
>> surface, and then did a thorough
>> investigation of the surrounding area --
>> maybe within 100 metres of the original
>> find. Any similar area, picked at random,
>> would (99.999% of the time) reveal
>> ZERO hominin fossils.
>
> Yes, and probably also zero hyenas, elephants and aardvarks.

Nonsense. You'll never see a fossil-
hunter interested in hyenas, elephants
or aardvarks complaining about the
scarcity of fossils. The notion that he
or she (and colleagues) would have to
live with only 2,000 (painfully collected
over 100 years) from the whole of
Africa would be unimaginable. More
like 2 billion for each taxon.

PA must first learn to count -- if it's
ever to make progress.

>>> She may have to drop whatever she carries in her hands:
>>> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIrasWBUQAAUDhh?format=jpg&name=small
>>
>> An image that comes from the Daily Mail
>> School of Science.
>
> You think she's an actrice?

In effect -- a perfectly flat stage (in a
zoo) that she has walked 10,000 times.
Given highly desirable food in a form
that occupies all her fingers. The
camera-person patiently waiting
through numerous 'takes'.

>> Proposed habitations must always be
>> checked out first. Then, at night, or
>> when leaving it empty, the door must
>> be shut (i.e. a boulder or a thorn bush
>> is jammed in the entrance hole).
>
> Home sweet home, almost like a house.

Hominins have not changed their
fundamental behaviour since they
first occupied their ground-living
niche. They've always had 'a home'
-- as can readily be seen from their
infants and children.

On Wednesday, February 9, 2022 at 7:21:15 PM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On Monday 7 February 2022 at 13:59:13 UTC, Pandora wrote:
>
> >> Classic missing of the wood for the trees.
> >> Which 'scientific' journal has published a
> >> paper on the ENORMOUS discrepancy
> >> between the number of hominin fossils
> >> and non-hominin fossils in Africa?
> >
> > Because hominins constitute only a single tribe (Hominini), while
> > non-hominins constitute everything else. It's trivial that a taxon at
> > the level of tribus is dwarfed by the rest of the animal kingdom.
> If hominins had been living in East Africa,
> and were a part of the ecosystem, then
> there should have left many more than
> 2,000 findable fossils -- at least 1,000
> times that number.
> >> Chimps live (feed and sleep) in trees
> >> thereby avoiding floods and they keep
> >> well away from bodies of water. So they
> >> rarely get fossilised. No one claims that
> >> hominins were similar, nor anything
> >> like it.
> >
> > Study has shown that chimpanzee remains do accumulate on the forest
> > floor and may occasionally get washed into nearby drainage channels.
> >
> > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248483710638
> The Kibale forest over that past 10 or
> 20 years is very different from that before
> 1900 AD, or that around 1 ma. Humans
> have drastically reduced the numbers
> and diversity of carnivores (and of
> omnivores).
> > Wittgenstein: "I really want to say that a language-game is only
> > possible if one trusts something ("I did not say "can trust
> > something"). (OC 509)
> Your reading of Wittgenstein is shallow.
>
> “How can I know that I mean something when I speak”
> > In the case of the scientific language-game this trust concerns the
> > assumption that your collegues have been as objective as possible,
> > have done a thorough job, etc. That's the a priori of this
> > language-game, its foundation, its rules. (sometimes it's violated, as
> > in the case of fraud).
> “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing..”
> (19692166)
>
> A top-class modern medical researcher
> will have a very different conception of
> what "being as objective as possible" is,
> as opposed to that of a typical 19th
> century (or earlier) one, or a poor modern
> one. The best scientists know that the
> easiest person to fool is yourself and the
> next most easiest people are those in
> your own team.
> > You may contest their results and conclusions, but as rule not on
> > grounds of lack of expertise, lack of objectivity, lack of
> > trustworthyness, etc.
> You've heard of the "Replication Crisis"?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
> It's merely a recent example of the "lack
> of objectivity" that most educated adults
> know is likely to be prevalent in any field
> of human activity. Yet I'm not surprised
> that you seem ignorant of it -- since PA
> is your field -- one where, in a most
> peculiar manner, credulousness is the
> rule.
>
> Partly this comes from regarding any kind
> of 'speculation' with an atavistic horror
> while working, without the slightest
> question, under the superstition known
> as the 'Biblical assumption'. Under this
> everything is assumed to be as late as
> possible and can only be given an
> earlier date when it has near-cast-iron
> evidence.
> > That's exactly where you go wrong. Your lack of trust is based on
> > paranoia, prejudice, your own presumptions about human evolution,
> > bitterness, frustration, disrespect, etc.
> PA should operate like other sciences
> with passionate efforts made to test all
> hypotheses with as much objectivity
> as can be devised. Maybe copies of
> the Ardi fossils should have been made,
> along with similar ones for a modern
> chimp and an australopith, squashed
> and distorted in a similar way. These
> then given to teams of cranial & other
> surgeons who were asked to arrange
> them as best they could.
>
> I'm not saying that such an exercise
> was practical, but the investigators
> should have looked into a whole
> variety of possible devices to check
> that their thinking was objective.
> But such an idea didn't occur to
> them,
>
> No one should trust the efforts of
> those whose interests were so
> intertwined with the outcomes.
> That's show-business -- not science.
> >> How it works is that they found some
> >> hominin fossils on (or very close to) the
> >> surface, and then did a thorough
> >> investigation of the surrounding area --
> >> maybe within 100 metres of the original
> >> find. Any similar area, picked at random,
> >> would (99.999% of the time) reveal
> >> ZERO hominin fossils.
> >
> > Yes, and probably also zero hyenas, elephants and aardvarks.
> Nonsense. You'll never see a fossil-
> hunter interested in hyenas, elephants
> or aardvarks complaining about the
> scarcity of fossils. The notion that he
> or she (and colleagues) would have to
> live with only 2,000 (painfully collected
> over 100 years) from the whole of
> Africa would be unimaginable. More
> like 2 billion for each taxon.
>
> PA must first learn to count -- if it's
> ever to make progress.
> >>> She may have to drop whatever she carries in her hands:
> >>> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIrasWBUQAAUDhh?format=jpg&name=small
> >>
> >> An image that comes from the Daily Mail
> >> School of Science.
> >
> > You think she's an actrice?
> In effect -- a perfectly flat stage (in a
> zoo) that she has walked 10,000 times.

Cite?

Probably a photo taken at the Wamba forest reserve or similar,
Japanese research stations on chimps & bonobos.

Clue:

In 1973, a 35-year-old Japanese researcher named Takayoshi Kano, the first scientist to study bonobos extensively in the wild, spent months trudging through the dank forests of what was then Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) before he finally encountered a foraging party of ten adults. To lure them out of the trees, Kano planted a field of sugar cane deep in their habitat. Months later, he spied a bonobo group, 40 strong, feasting on the cane. "Seeing them so close, they seemed more than animals, more a reflection of ourselves, as if they were fairies of the forest," Kano told me when I visited him in 1999 at Kyoto University's Primate Research Center.

> Given highly desirable food in a form
> that occupies all her fingers. The
> camera-person patiently waiting
> through numerous 'takes'.

There are photos of bonobo crossings shallow dream bipedally with piggyback toddler

> >> Proposed habitations must always be
> >> checked out first. Then, at night, or
> >> when leaving it empty, the door must
> >> be shut (i.e. a boulder or a thorn bush
> >> is jammed in the entrance hole).
> >
> > Home sweet home, almost like a house.

Dome suite dome, the first house, portable, brought into leaky drafty caves or set into the cave entrance as a gate.

> Hominins have not changed their
> fundamental behaviour since they
> first occupied their ground-living
> niche. They've always had 'a home'
> -- as can readily be seen from their
> infants and children.

On Wednesday, February 9, 2022 at 7:14:30 PM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On Monday 7 February 2022 at 11:57:08 UTC, Pandora wrote:
>
> >> It's species that occupy niches. Vagrants
> >> are usually in the wrong place, but could
> >> be looking for a similar habitat.
> >> For hominins that was somewhere females
> >> could come (willingly or otherwise) and
> >> raise young. The hominin failure rate
> >> would have been around 99.999%
> >
> > So the probablity of a hominin like "Abel" (KT12/H1) ever reaching
> > Koro Toro in the central Sahara would be practically zero.
> Doesn't follow at all. Refugee bands could
> well keep travelling for a decade or more,
> hoping to find a place they could settle.
> At the time of 'Abel' some of the predators
> they encountered might have begun to
> recognise the vulnerability of hominins,
> meaning they had to move on.
> > Multiply by
> > the probabilty of this rare individual becoming a fossil and the
> > probability of us finding it exposed on the surface 3.5 million years
> > later would indeed make the total probability astronomically small.
> > The fact that we have "Abel" is evidence that your story doesn't make
> > any sense, at all.
> No logic here at all. Hominin bands would
> have spread out from their homelands
> (presumably on the East African coast) more
> or less indefinitely. Nothing to stop them.
> >>>>> Where did it sleep?
> >>>>
> >>>> In whatever shelter it could find.
> >>>
> >>> Nice handwaving.
> >>
> >> Silly question.
> >
> > You've asked it many times.
> I ask it about hominins supposedly settled
> on the savanna (or the like), raising infants
> and children, while surrounded by large
> predators. You are asking me about what
> were (at any one time) a band of transient
> males, not seen as likely prey by local
> predators.
> >> Mat weaving was probably one of the
> >> earliest of ground-living technologies.
> >> It took only ONE bright hominin to
> >> develop it, and the rest copied.
> >> Minimal 'cognitive capacity'.
> >
> > Those neurons are not there to generate heat. Any neuroscientist will
> > tell you that they are organized in delicate networks that underly
> > perception, affection, cognition, and action.
> > Pick up a copy of that big book by Kandel et al.:
> > https://www.mhprofessional.com/9781259642234-usa-principles-of-neural-science-sixth-edition-group
> Organs often have more than one function.
> Brains were originally for what you say -- as
> in nearly all animals. But they also act as a
> store of heat. In some marine animals they
> have evolved great size specifically for that
> purpose. No good reason that should not
> also apply to huminins.
> > Chimps and humans are not much different when it comes to raw
> > perception, emotion, and action. The big difference is in cognition.
> > It's those higher-order integrative cortical association areas
> > involved in cognitive processing that make up the bulk of the bulbous
> > human brain. Chimps and Australopithecus have/had much less of that:
> >
> > https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz4729
> There's next to nothing in such material.
> Empty verbiage. Is there one meaningful
> (i.e. testable) proposition in any text ever
> written on the subject of "cognition"?
> > Weaving a mat from fiber is a multistage proces that in humans
> > requires significant cognitive processing, from selecting appropriate
> > raw materials to preparing them for the purpose of weaving and the
> > weaving process itself. It's not a programmed instinctive behaviour
> > like nest-building in birds.
>
> Google images of "palm fronds". The leaves
> fall off and litter the ground.

Cite?

Only after hurricanes. They hang and dry and root, few land on the ground in usable condition.

Early ground-
> sleeping hominins making beds, would
> collect a lot and lay them down, one layer
> North-South, the next East-West. The
> notion of interweaving them (so that they
> didn't clump) would occur around Week 2.

PC fantasy 47.

> All other hominins would copy.
> >> (But the predators would
> >> not have realised that for a while.) Their
> >> rock-throwing was also probably fairly
> >> good.
> >
> > So they DO have a means of defending themselves.
> > Never accepted when I suggest it.
> I'm talking about naive predators, running
> into a band of male hominins, not knowing
> what they were. They'd take a few weeks or
> months to realise that hominins were easy
> prey -- especially at night. Whereas you
> always talk of hominins living, sleeping,
> and raising children in the same habitat
> as those predators.