Michael Odent on "Homo, the Marine Chimpanzee"

Discussion in 'Alternative Theories' started by CEngelbrecht, Jan 22, 2018.

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  1. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Comedians love to ask "who was brave enough to eat the first raw oyster?" He didn't present ID so I can't give you a name, but having spent time on several coasts I think he was the first person to think "if the otters are eating those things we can to!" Diving where the otters dove would be required, of course.
     
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  3. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    Or you just pick 'em up at low tide. Not without simian precedence.



    Do that for a few hundred thousand years, it will leave evolutionary markers on your physiology. Which apparently are so obvious, we can't even see them.

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    Traditional Japanese Ama diver.
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2018
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  5. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, but does wading count as "aquatic"?
     
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  7. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    When your ancestors are doing it for two million years, yes. Especially when your close ape cousins aren't doing it. Then genetic selection does its thing, fur falls off, brain grows from eating muzzles, suddenly the newborns get chubby for increased insulation and therefore survival. Every once in a while, a flash flood suddenly drowns the worse swimmers, and stronger swimmers survive to pass on these traits.

    You'd have to assume that was how all aquatic mammals started out, including whales 55mya and on.

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    We just left the water's edge 50,000 years ago. And have been losing our brain ever since.
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2018
  8. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    I don't have to assume anything from the Aquatic Ape theorists.
     
  9. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    And don't forget, women grow breasts so that their babies can latch on as they are floating by.
     
  10. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    *SIGH*

    Can you please explain to me... why is it such obvious nonsense to perceive the human being as an old beach ape???

    Myself, I've been trying to get a straight answer to that tiny question for twenty years now!!! All I keep getting is the repeated mantra of "the convential explanation is better supported by evidence." That still doesn't become truth from mindless repitition! The unique physiology of Homo sapiens amongst the apes makes no sense what so ever in any fully terrestrial scenario!!! As soon as you add water, it's the only scenario that makes any sense!!! All within Darwinian-Wallacian evolution!

    What the fuck do you mean, "Aquatic Ape theorists"??? What exactly is it you think, the aquatic idea is suggesting??? The usual mermaid bullshit???

    Do you have any idea how piss ass frustrating it is trying to have a rational discussion with people, that can't even be bothered to grasp what is actually being suggested??? Who think they know what they're talking about???

    Finally, we have an answer to where our brain comes from. It comes from two million years of seafood. We also have an answer as to why 100cc of brain mass have been lost in Homo sapiens the last 50,000 years. 'Cause we stopped eating them oysters and turned to big game. No other scenario on Planet Earth could've supported the growth of the hominin brain, that we're so bloody proud of! We now know how we hold on to that brain. We even know how to prevent mothers from tearing when giving birth to the next generation of humanity!!! Give labour in a frickin' bathtub!!!

    And you're still stuck in the same decades old, stupid prejudices about "Aquatic Ape theorists"!!! "These people think we descend from dolphins! We all know we grew all those traits on the savannah! We all know the Earth is the center of the Universe!!! We all know the shadows in Plato's Cave is the reality!!!"

    My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the sea-shores and to hunt for food, shell fish, sea-urchins etc., in the shallow waters off the coast. I suppose that they were forced into the water just as we have seen happen in so many other groups of terrestrial animals. I am imagining this happening in the warmer parts of the world, in the tropical seas where Man could stand being in the water for relatively long periods, that is, several hours at a stretch.
    - Alister Hardy, 1960​

    Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan.
    - Elaine Morgan & ALgis Kuliukas, 2011​

    Anything crazy in those assertions? Anything at all???

    Peak of evolution, my ass!!!
     
  11. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    I'm sorry, I could've sworn this site was for scientific discussion. Apparently, it's a fifth grade school yard as soon as someone says "tits"!
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Not when you post, apparently.

    I was referring to a graphic you posted that made that claim. Do you now think your post was unscientific?
    No one mentioned "tits" other than you.
     
  13. Bells Staff Member

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    Dear god, this again..

    You mean some our ancestors had abnormal growth's in their ear, just as some Homo sapiens develop it as well if they spend time in a colder environment? How strange and unusual.

    From the link you provided:

    For over a century, otolaryngologists have recognised the condition of aural exostoses, but their significance and aetiology remains obscure, although they tend to be associated with frequent swimming and cold water immersion of the auditory canal. The fact that this condition is usually bilateral is predictable since both ears are immersed in water. However, why do exostoses only grow in swimmers and why do they grow in the deep bony meatus at two or three constant sites? Furthermore, from an evolutionary point of view, what is or was the purpose and function of these rather incongruous protrusions?

    In recent decades, paleoanthropological evidence has challenged ideas about early hominid evolution. In 1992 the senior author suggested that aural exostoses were evolved in early hominid Man for protection of the delicate tympanic membrane during swimming and diving by narrowing the ear canal in a similar fashion to other semiaquatic species. We now provide evidence for this theory and propose an aetiological explanation for the formation of exostoses.

    He is essentially trying to argue that it is somehow beneficial.

    Reality of surfer's ear:

    Irritation from cold wind and water exposure causes the bone surrounding the ear canal to develop lumps of new bony growth which constrict the ear canal. Where the ear canal is actually blocked by this condition, water and wax can become trapped and give rise to infection. The condition is so named due to its prevalence among cold water surfers. Warm water surfers are also at risk for exostosis due to the evaporative cooling caused by wind and the presence of water in the ear canal.

    Most avid surfers have at least some mild bone growths (exostoses), causing little to no problems.[1] The condition is progressive, making it important to take preventative measures early, preferably whenever surfing. The condition is not limited to surfing and can occur in any activity with cold, wet, windy conditions such as windsurfing, kayaking, sailing, jet skiing, kitesurfing, and diving.

    Signs and Symptoms

    In general one ear will be somewhat worse than the other due to the prevailing wind direction of the area surfed[2] or the side that most often strikes the wave first.

    Cause

    The majority of patients present in their mid-30s to late 40s. This is likely due to a combination of the slow growth of the bone and the decreased participation in activities associated with surfer's ear past the 30's. However surfer's ear is possible at any age and is directly proportional to the amount of time spent in cold, wet, windy weather without adequate protection.[3]

    The normal ear canal is approximately 7mm in diameter and has a volume of approximately 0.8 ml (approximately one-sixth of a teaspoon).[4] As the condition progresses the diameter narrows and can even close completely if untreated, although sufferers generally seek help once the passage has constricted to 0.5-2mm due to the noticeable hearing impairment. While not necessarily harmful in and of itself, constriction of the ear canal from these growths can trap debris, leading to painful and difficult to treat infections.

    Does not exactly sound like it is beneficial.

    Evans also argues that you develop this condition if you spend a lot of time immersed in cold water (and then tries to argue about things like sonar, etc, which really, had me rolling in the aisle (if I had an aisle, but you get my point) in hysterical laughter when one realises that he is trying to argue the point of our human ancestors and underwater sonar.. Reality is that if you spend time on or near cold water with cold windy conditions, you can develop it. I mean, I could go on, but yeah, there's only so much energy I am willing to devote to this level of conspiracy driven theories.. Which moves me on to:

    From hysterical laughter to weeping at how your education system has failed you.

    The Homo genus (incorporating all of human ancestors) brain grew in size until Homo sapiens. Now, H. sapiens brains have shrunk, but that has only been over the last 10,000 to 20,000 years. And H. sapiens have been hunting big game since they first appeared on the scene, not just in the last 50,000 years. Humans were hunting (with tools) on land, a several hundred thousand years ago. What evidence there has been of the ingestion of seafood or from rivers and lakes by our hominid ancestors (and H. sapiens ancestors), has been from shallow water close to where these groups lived in nearby caves or further inland.

    Perhaps it is you who should do the maths.

    Anywho, I am moving this thread to Alternative Theories. For obvious reasons. Please stop posting this rubbish in the science sub-section.
     
  14. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    An historical assumption not supported by actual evidence. Same type of knee jerk assumption as human beings "obviously" deriving from good white man Europe, 'cause we gots the Piltdown Man. The mighty hunter hypothesis is no more. That the Eurasian ice age mammoth hunters were the very first stone age culture to be studied in detail by paleoanthropology from the 19th century and on doesn't make them representational of all human evolution. We're an old fishing ape, move on. THAT is what's supported by the evidence!

    No shit. Are you also not reading what this is idea is actually suggesting? Are you also rejecting some imaginary dolphin ape that has never been suggested? Does it even matter to you what people actually write? Everything can be ridiculed, if you're allowed to distort it to pieces. Creationists do that by standard.

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    Shellfish kitchen midden 300,000 years old in Southern France. Ergo Homo erectus. Some 250,000 years older than any solid evidence for big game hunting.
     
  15. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    Aaand the same answer every single time: Censorship. This idea doesn't go away. You're the creationists here. You just don't have a case against it, and you grow more and more stuck in your own arrogance. No wonder Trump could steal The White House.
     
  16. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    If we're "creationists" then you must be a flat-Earther.
     
  17. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    My only sin has been to read up on the litterature. You haven't, because you think you don't have to. And then it doesn't matter what evidence is being presented. Then it doesn't matter if them heretics are right.

    Can you even imagine how piss ass frustrating that is? To have to take such grotesquely unreasonable abuse for years from people, who can't even be bothered because of stupid human sociology? Who just keeps staring at the shadows in Plato's cave? How is that not EXACTLY what creationists are doing in the debate about evolution???

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    Who the hell will you listen to? This is decades delayed. How have we moved a single step since bloody Copernicus???
     
  18. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    So we're an old beach ape, so what? Answer me that simple question. So what if we're an old beach ape?
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The swimmers ear factoid is indicative, and has no "conventional" explanation. Advantage clear and mechanistically obvious.
    The subcutaneous fat layer likewise. Advantage obvious.
    The loss of fur seems dubious to me - plenty of aquatic mammals have thick fur, and the advantage of losing it is not obvious. They were too small, basically, to benefit from losing hair. The subsequent loss of hair as a daytime running adaptation seems more likely (and better accounts for the still-incomplete nature of the loss: people are covered with hair). Tossup. There is no indicated conventional explanation, though.
    The breath control and unique physiology of the upper throat and nasal connections has obvious aquatic advantages. The only "conventional" explanation I've seen is sexual display via vocalization (or the Just So story of abetting talking). That is possible - but has a jury-rig feel to it compared with the direct mechanical gain for swimming, and in particular does not account for the survival hit via various troubles (aspirated food, choking on things, SIDS, etc).
    There's the diet thing - humans are better adapted for a fruit and seafood diet than most (consider what complete diets need no cooking or special processing); there's the blood pressure and salt physiology and so forth, there are the behavioral cues (people love shorelines, water, etc). No solid conventional accounting for this stuff - maybe the fruit.

    And so forth - the cumulative effect is worth noticing.

    But the main one, imho, is bipedalism and foot/leg structure. The wade foraging explanation is so clearly based in mechanistic advantages of all kinds - including incremental ones ideal for Darwinian pressure - that it becomes plausible immediately upon encounter. But in addition, it highlights an overlooked matter: the conventional explanations make little sense, to the point of being an embarrassment. They have always been little better - even no better - than Just So stories, with no Darwinian mechanism of the slightest plausibility backing them. There are even published hypotheses, accepted in the conventional and scientific literature, that incorporate basic errors in Darwinian reasoning - such as abetting the ability to carry things in the hands. And the most common one - seeing over tall grass when venturing into savanna - was simply foolish long before it was obviated by better evidence of the timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus: there is no advantage in making oneself simultaneously slower and more visible in predator country far from trees, as early stages of the transition would demand. Grassland prey might occasionally stretch high for a quick lookout, but they don't stumble across the savanna on their hind legs with their heads in the air for hours on end. There is very little bipedalism among baboons. It's not a sensible idea. But that leaves bipedalism - the central and root-level modification from which all else sprang - unexplained, conventionally.

    The point being not that some tree-climbing wade-foraging ape phase is an established and sure thing - merely that it's the best and most sensible possibility on the table at the moment, for several features of human behavior and physiology. It's a normal, sane, reasonable, and interesting hypothesis.
     
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2018
  20. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    It's important because this is how we got hairless. You know, like the otters.

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  21. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    If it's so unimportant, why are you so obsessed with your pet theory being accepted regardless of the shaky and circumstantial evidence?
     
  22. Bells Staff Member

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    And if only you had actual evidence instead of well, nothing that supports your contention.

    Are you seriously going to argue that the evidence found, the weapons, the marks on bones dating back hundreds of thousands of years, is not "evidence" that our human ancestors were hunting?

    I am trying really hard not to ridicule you at the moment.

    No, this is a losing battle.

    Your suggestion that our ancestors were water apes, has no basis in reality. All evidence points to land based mammals who hunted animals and would have eaten or caught what they could in shallow water. You know, like bears catch salmon in shallow water... And some monkeys are known to get little shellfish in shallow water in estuary's and the like.

    Riigghhtt..

    In that same year, 1981, incontrovertible evidence of early human butchery came to light, in the form of linear striations on fossils which were identified as cut marks made by the stone tools found in abundance at the FLK Zinj site. Bunn and, in a separate study, Rick Potts from the Smithsonian Institution and Pat Shipman from Pennsylvania State University, used a scanning electron microscope to demonstrate that these marks were different from the shallow, chaotically oriented scratches seen on some fossils. Thissedimentary abrasion is thought to be the result of sand grains rubbing against the bones as they tumbled around in rivers or were trampled on by animals. The cut marks, by contrast, were shorter, deeper, and often located on the parts of bones where muscles attach. They seemed to show conclusively that early humans were proficient hunters of the extinct antelopes, zebras, and similar animals found alongside the early human fossils and stone tools in the 1.8-million-year-old deposits.

    Although more than one kind of early human had been found at Olduvai, for several decades the thousands of Oldowan stone tools and hundreds of cut-marked bones were attributed exclusively to the fossils of our genus, Homo. With a new report of a jaw from the site of Ledi Geraru in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the fossil evidence of our genus now extends back 2.8 million years. Until recently, Ethiopia has also yielded the earliest evidence of stone tools and cut marks on animal fossils (from 2.5 to 2.6 million years ago) at the sites of Bouri and Gona, and the earliest Oldowan stone tools from Gona, dated to 2.5 million years ago. Altogether, a tidy package of archaeological evidence of the earliest butchery and stone tools—in other words, carnivory—seems to have emerged by at least 2.5 million years ago with the origins of our genus.

    [...]

    The earliest evidence of what we might call persistent carnivory —part of the intensification and expansion of meat-eating—comes from Kanjera South, a research site in Kenya run by Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution and Tom Plummer of Queens College at the City University of New York. In 2013, Joe Ferraro of Baylor University, Potts, Plummer, and I and other colleagues announced that we had documented this evidence on more than 3,700 animal fossils and 2,900 stone tools in three separate layers going back about two million years. The archaeological and fossil evidence includes dozens of bones bearing cut marks and percussion marks. The indications are clear that early humans, most likely Homo habilis or Homo erectus(given the time period), processed more than 50 animal carcasses during repeated visits to the same location over hundreds to thousands of years. Most of the carcasses were fairly complete small (goat-sized) antelopes, along with some parts of larger (reindeer-sized) antelopes.

    [...]

    At some point, though, there must have been a shift in the ways early humans obtained meat, because the fossil record clearly shows that our ancestors were getting access to the best parts of larger animals by at least 1.5 million years ago. In an article published in 2008, I examined butchery patterns on more than 6,000 animal bones from three sites at Koobi Fora, Kenya, that date back to that period. The early humans there (probably Homo erectus) butchered many different bones from animals both large and small; at least nine different animals had been transported to each site for consumption. The result was more than 300 bones that showed signs of butchering, including a number of the choicest bones—those from which the meat is usually eaten first by carnivores.

    You might want to go back and check those dates again.

    Yes, Trump is in the White House because the scientific community sees the whole water ape theory as being rubbish.

    And Censorship would have seen me close the thread, delete it and ban you from ever discussing it here again.

    As tempting as that may have been, for now, it remains in alternative theory, although it probably belongs in pseudoscience, since I would not even classify what you believe a 'theory'.
     
  23. CEngelbrecht Registered Senior Member

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    And yet it moves.

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    Last edited: Jan 24, 2018
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