bears swim , so do elk ,deer , and many many other land animals . Even the cat who is said in wives tales not to swim . Throw a cat in the pool and see for your self . Now I have personally seen elk play in the water for many many hours. The first Time Me and my Dad saw elk swimming we said what are those elk doing in the water. Don't they have the good sense to get out. I think you want to be an aquatic- human ape man Arthur. You can if you want . I like water , but mainly I just shower in it to get the stink off . I have heard of dirt baths in areas of low precipitation. More like sand baths
This has to be a fake. Females don't fart. We just don't. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You have to admit that they are witty. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
So? What does that have to do with your contention that: (Emphasis mine - from your post # 25) To which I replied: (In post #28): Do you now withdraw your insistence that "none would hunt in it" as well as "Wild dogs and wolves don't hang out in the water"? These assertions are what I was replying to, which are patently and demonstrably false, as your own images provide more than ample evidence of. Time does not make a misrepresentation go away, only correction and consensus will do so. I told you before that I am intrigued by your hypotheses / theories, but not to the point of allowing obvious falsehoods to be promulgated. Deal?
I just think we maybe spent time gathering in shallow water...not so much heavy-duty swimmers, but that we were waders, edge-feeders. So an ability to rise and swim with the occasional big wave would improve survival if we were walking around digging molluscs out, or maybe herding small to mid-size fish into shore where we could stab them with sticks or kill them with rocks. It was yet another way to broaden our food base, methinks-useful in drought-prone Africa, maybe. But remember, the crocodiles and hippos would have been present in freshwater, and the tiger sharks would have been present in the salt. Of the two I think we would have been ocean shore waders-the crocodiles and hippos are amphibious, and if they want to kill you, they have NO problem chasing you up the bank. Hippos are vegetarian, just really territorial.
When we were evolving the numbers of primates in the water would have been a tiny tiny fraction of the many hundreds of millions of people who are in the water at any given time nowadays and yet even with this vastly larger number of people playing in the water every day of the year sharks are not a significant problem anywhere on the globe. Indeed, the place with the most shark attacks is the US (second is South Africa) and we only rarely have a fatality. The number of reported deaths from sharks over the entire globe is only about 4 or 5 per year. Sharks are a VASTLY over rated danger and indeed, most of the modern activities that attract sharks (surfing in black wetsuits in waters where White sharks hunt black seals) would not happen with our shoreline dwelling ancestors. Arthur
Not disagreeing with you...your chances in Africa of being attacked are going to be much higher in fresh water today, and it likely would have been so in the past.
Your right, it's a big world and so there is always the exception to the general rule. So yes, when huge numbers of fat Salmon are exhausted after swimming upstream and fairly easy picking in very shallow water, then yes even Wolves will be attracted to an easy meal in the water. Arthur
I think the biggest difference this type of environment is it allowed these primates to give up their nomadic existence. Instead of having to follow the seasons North and South for ripening fruit and seeds the tides would have brought in fresh food to the tidal pools twice a day allowing the band of shore dwelling primates to stake out a decent area and stay in one place rather permanently. A lot of our adaptions wouldn't have happened if we were always on the move or if where this primate band was living wasn't essentially safe from predator cats. Another big difference is that unlike our primate cousins that make tools at the time of use, once you aren't nomadic then tools could be reused, and thus more time making/improving a tool would also be something that would naturally occur. Arthur
Sub-Saharan Africa has rainy season and not throughout most of the continent, I believe...and when we evolved I seem to recall it being hotter. Unless you get a drought, in which case you just have not. So, unless you're talking about South Africa, where they have seasons, right?...it's mostly going to have been hotter and wetter. A complete diet wouldn't be all shellfish and small fish,remember. They'd still need to go inland to gather fruits, nuts, berries, possibly find fresh water-it's hard to find good drinking water right on the coast. Eventually they'd probably pick their favorite site clean and wander inland for some "turf" to match their "surf." I find it implausible that we "settled" much during the hardening of our genotype. I'm assuming these would be more likely to be habitual migration sites, we being of the long-legged and wandering persuasion. As far as tools go, that would have been evidence that might have survived. Or might not have. Or might be so worn now we no longer recognize them as worked objects. Maybe the first fabrics or leathers originated not as clothing, but as makeshift rucksacks, too. But we would have hung around until easy pickings were gone, then moved on. Why work hard? That just burns calories.
Well, its possible the evolution of humans happened much quicker than originally thought. Once all the ducks are in a row (so to speak). I say, could humans have been a separate species of ocean creature? For visualization purposes: a dolphin, seal and a mixture of one or two other. Like the little fish jumping out of the water...and each time he take a little more air...he jump a little higher. ...and you know, the ocean make a good incubator.
I think that we would have been led to the ocean by following a river too wide to cross, and at the location where river meets ocean would be the kind of unique place I'm thinking about that could sustain us without needing to wander. Below is part of the coast of Angola. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! If you notice those green bands running to the coast, those are rivers, that are in generally very dry areas and you can see how following one either leads to mountains on one side or the ocean on the other. Since it's presumed (by many) that Homo Sapiens is an unbroken line going back several million years and you also assume the information about a "mitochodrial eve" is correct then this group existed as recently as a quarter million years ago and was the one "tribe" from which we are all descended. More to the point, the size of the group we descended from is estimated to be in the many thousands of individuals (~5 to 50k) and according to Wiki: Tishkoff et al. (2009) using data from many loci (not just mitochondrial DNA) extrapolated that the Angola-Namibia border region near the Atlantic Ocean is likely to be near the geographical point of origin of modern human genetic diversity. So this confluence of ocean/river makes sense, in the ability to sustain so many people with varieties of food and fresh water but also to satisfy the requirement that little to nothing would necessarily remain from our time there. What I'm also suggesting is unlike the AAT where a semi-aquatic life was the driving force for such things a bipedalism, I think it's more likely that a semi-aquatic period came much later in our development and it's what changed us (Behavioral modernity)from the other Homo species that existed at the same time. Which brings us to fire I can't see a forest or savannah living primate sticking around to investigate a fire, but driftwood normally accumulates where rivers join the sea shore. One fortuitous lightning strike and you have a nice bonfire. While the initial reaction would be a cautionary one, when the fire doesn't spread, their natural curiosity would cause them to investigate. Fire opens mollusks, even the largest ones (which are somewhat difficult to crack open) and cooks them quite nicely with no shell fragments from smashing them open, so one can envision these very early man collecting and then tossing clams next to the fire and even gathering wood into a pile to invite a lightning strike. On an open beach, their success would be relatively certain. The next step is to simply keep the fire going by adding wood as necessary. I have a hard time envisioning man taming fire in a forest or savannah setting, but the beach setting seems tailor made for such an event. It's natural to assume we would then have spread along the coasts, not the rivers. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/asu-emh_1081009.php Arthur
Some somewhat supporting research: http://www.becominghuman.org/node/news/early-human-use-marine-resources-and-pigment-south-africa http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7164/full/nature06204.html Arthur
Not true. Meat is a complete diet for humans. It contains all the amino acids (protein), vitamins and minerals we need. Paleolithic humans augmented their diet with fruits and nuts because they were free calories and required less effort than hunting game, and they added herbs for the flavor. In the Iron Age, which began around 1500BCE, the human population began to explode. There wasn't enough cropland to grow feed for enough livestock to feed everybody meat, so their diet became more grain-intensive. That was when malnutrition became a major problem, because grains have a lot of protein but not many vitamins and minerals. In the Roman Era, the life expectancy of an adult who was lucky enough to survive childhood was about 25, except for the aristocrats who were able to obtain meat. Our pre-human ancestors were grazers like the gorillas and chimpanzees still are. But once we invented tools that made it possible to add more meat to our diet, our intestinal tract began to shorten, until it no longer had enough bacterial culture to break down cellulose and digest the nutrients trapped in it, at which time we became full-time hunters: the apex predator on this planet, that dines on both bears and sharks. Cooking, of course, breaks down cellulose and makes grains digestible, but the taming of fire is a relatively recent technology and we had to get along without it for quite a long time after we had already invented the tools that made us such fabulous hunters. In other words, humans are carnivores, the only predatory species of ape. We don't need no stinkin' veggies. Our pre-human ancestors were migratory. They followed the game, like all hunters. They established camps that they circled back to periodically, or in which they may have settled down for a few weeks during the season when game was plentiful. But the building of permanent settlements was a technology that arose in the Neolithic Era, after farming and animal husbandry were developed and humans no longer had to chase their food across the landscape. This happened approximately 11,500 years ago. The first cultivated crop in the Old World was figs, and in the New World it was peppers. The technology of clothing was invented roughly 70,000 years ago. We know this from the speciation of body lice, which can only live on creatures who wear clothes. Rent the movie "Milo and Otis." Milo the cat does an incredible amount of swimming and none of it is special effects. He clearly enjoys it. Not just water bags, but salt water bags. The salinity of our blood is approximately the same as seawater. In effect, we carry a little bit of the ocean around with us and that's where our metabolism takes place.
The richest source of meat for early humans, before the specialized technology and difficult techniques of inland hunting, would have been tide pools and estuaries and similar shallow water habitat. Oysters and crayfish and the like are much easier to harvest than small mammals and birds, and better food eaten raw. And simple, crude tools are much more useful in such circumstances - a bang rock, a casually shaped stick, the first interlaced twig approach to twisted rope or woven netting, are all immediately useful in shallow water foraging - much more so than in the more demanding employments of inland hunting. The initial stages of a cultural evolution feedback are ready to hand.
Agreed. Anything you can catch with your bare hands or kill with a rock would have been human food. Although...didn't I read somewhere that Homo Erectus used tools also? Yes, they made hand axes... http://www.wsu.edu/gened/learn-modules/top_longfor/timeline/26_h_erectus_tool_adapt.html And archaeologists strongly believe they were the first to use fire: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/humans/humankind/k.html So...I'm certainly not discounting the tide-pool feasting theory, by any stretch. Not at all. But it actually looks like we might have evolved already knowing how to make primitive tools and use fire. Homo Erectus seems to have been using fire and making primitive tools before we came along. Meaning we evolved to eat cooked food. Can you-all possibly get behind that? Now...I do really keep in mind, that when being predatory, we are going to follow the rule all predators live by: "Eat the easiest thing first." Why risk getting injured going after a wildebeest if you can spear fifty frogs, smack open a bunch of clams, gather some berries, and cook dinner? I'm just thinking a big enough band would pick one area clean, then move on. We are designed to walk long distances: http://www.howstuffworks.com/bipedalism.htm
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH) is an internet meme, not a subject of any serious scientific research or consideration. It’s discussed prolifically on the internet but I’ve hardly ever seen it crop up in a scientific context. The AAH exists mostly because of Elaine Morgan, the AAH’s most prolific proselytiser who has published books on the idea as well as spruiked it on talking tours. It’s just one giant thought experiment with no way to positively verify it. It exists only by taking isolated factoids and selectively interpreting them in the light of the AAH. It is not required to explain human evolution and cannot displace exiting terrestrial theories of human evolution. The AAH is not taken seriously by even a small percentage of scientists in the evolutionary biology field. Example:
We wandered around a lot, in other words? I can see seaside foraging as something we did...if food was scarce inland, it would increase our food base very nicely. It would explain our tendency to lay on subcutaneous fat and our swimming ability. I just doubt we were ever a single-strategy species. We adapt, that's why we do so well.
