There were other species of hominids. Their fossils have been found pretty much everywhere except the New World and the Antipodes. Homo neanderthalensis was even quite successful, as noted. Neanderthals lived in Europe up until somewhere around 25,000 years ago, which is an eyeblink in the history of Earth. But it is indeed a species that arose in Africa, H. sapiens, which out-competed the Neanderthals and populated the entire planet. There were clearly no sapiens outside of Africa until around 70,000 years ago. That may be the time when the technology of language was invented, arguably the first Paradigm Shift, which fostered a quantum improvement in our ability to use memory, debate, reason, analysis, and other skills we take for granted, in the planning and execution of a great adventure. I've seen scholarly papers showing evidence that sapiens interbred with Neanderthals. Some populations of coyotes have wolf DNA, but they're still coyotes.
TimeTraveller: Actually, the testicle size of man is evidence that there was relatively small amounts of promiscuity in his past. Animals with tremendous promiscuity tend to have extremely large testicles. Moreover, there were not -thousands of people met-. He could not have mated with every female in the world, as every female in the world were spread out over thousands of miles of dangerous hinterland.
not mammals. you are talking about insects and other odd lifeforms. Some lifeforms clone each other, and these lifeforms that have reached this state don't evolve much anymore.
Thats ridiculously. It's obvious that men had more sex, because there were fewer people! In order to expand the population/tribe size they must have had as much sex as possible.
And they were living longer for awhile back then, so couples could have had 50 kids, eight on the Ark, thousands by the Tower of Babel, and millions by the time of Abraham.
TimeTraveler: Are you not aware that women are incapable of bearing more than one pregnancy at a time? Are you also aware that the population ratio of men and women rarely allows for a great deal of free women compared to men? And that settlements were few and far between, and really, were not settled until some 10,000 years ago? You had two choices when faced with a new group: Make war on them (and likely slaughter them all). Exchange people. If you were lucky, this exchange might give you more options. But those with kids and all ready claimed by others, would not be exchanged. Accordingly, it was mostly for the younger people that such women and men swapping would take place. Even this would be rare, though. There was probably a lot of relatively close breeding taking place. Not incestuous, mind you, but close enough to be near cousins. IceAgeCivilizations: STop. This is not the pseudo-science section.
I thought this was evidence of man's tremendous promiscuity. Hmm, I wonder why our opinions might differ?
I get my information from Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" in the chapter regarding human sexual relations. Got any specific references for yours, so we can compare?
In one of desmond morris' books it is described how our balls are rather large for primates. Much larger then the faithful gorilla for instance, suggesting our balls are made to fuck around. Actually they are a bit of a mixture between the two strategies. The old data suggested that the Danes have the largest balls in the world, but there was more recent research that suggest another nation could claim to have testicles the size of Dr Lou's. However, I can't remember which one.
I can't believe people think like this. Prince James wants to suggest that ball size has to do with mating habits? Thats RIDICULOUS. That's equal to judging intelligence by the size of someones head. It's really simple, man had to have sex with random women because there were no complex communication skills at the time. We are talking about a time when languages were still being invented. The differences between groups were the languages, because during this time, there was only two species, homosapian and neanderthals. It's obvious that when you live in a harsher environment and have a faster shorter lifespan, you have sex more. You can still see this now in the third world, people who are living harsh, have more kids, and not usually with the same women. Monogamy is not natural for most humans, it's an evolved trait, that some humans have, but most humans are polyamorous because most humans cheat and or divorce. If you know most humans are polyamorous today, then it's rational to assume this behavior evolved for a reason. I'm talking about human traits and behaviors as evidence for evolution and somehow people want to turn it into ball sizes and other silly pointless measurements. How do humans live, how do humans think? Thats how you know how they evolved. Humans, in specific male humans, typically want to have sex with lots of females. Female humans, typically want to have sex just as often, usually with lots of males. Females are limited by their pregnancies to one male at a time, and this is where serial monogamy comes in. Males however, can have unlimited girlfriends at a time, due to their anatomy, and it's safe to say that if males could do this, I'm sure a lot of them did do this. We are talking about a time where men and women couldnt communicate as well as we do now, where they barely had language, and most language was body language. A time like this, where there is a shortage of intelligent intellectuals for women to choose from, it was just a bunch of fools having sex with each other. Over time, out of these fools maybe a few intellectuals had sex with each other, and this made up the intellectual race of humans, but the fools always outnumbered the intellectuals. The more simple humans, if you think about it, would tend to have more sex because sex is among the most simple of simple activities. This only changed when intellectual humans began to have sex with other intellectual humans, and as this happened man learned to communicate better with woman thorugh larger vocabulary, became more conscious, more aware, and then developed social structures, farming, money, so that the mind became the controller of human nature moreso than simple physical attraction. So if you think about it, it's likely, that humans at some point were fucking around with neanderthals, and with each other, and the result was that the majority of humans remained stupid. It only likely changed when intelligence started to become attractive. By the way, there is a new article, it seems humans did evolve from Africa, and it seems homosapian was around during the same time as neanderthal. We don't yet know the interactions between the two species, we can only guess. It's possible that homosapians invented language as an advantage for dealing with neanderthals who likely could not speak or communicate. This might have been the defining difference between the two, but it's my best guess. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6253121.stm
Spuriousmonkey: Indeed. There is enough screwinga round in humanity to warrant us having larger balls than the gorilla. However, our balls are far smaller than the "community of wives" Bonobos enjoy. It shows that we haven't had a tremendous evolutionary pressure.
More children means a larger percentage of the gene pool has your genes. A species evolves fast if it has a short lifespan (see disease resistant bacteria) and if it has many offspring, and therefore a greater chance of mutations.
Good, but still not 100% comprehensive. If 2 organisms have exactly the same lifespan, number of offspring and gene mutation rate, then that organisms in an environment with the greatest selection pressure will evolve fastest.
