If an alien came here and was more advanced than us and wanted to kill me because he was more advanced I certainly would think that was a great idea and would comply with his request. Seems obvious to me. Would you object? Extinction events are a part of evolution to be sure, so I would say that is natural selection.
Interesting. Certainly the humans arriving in Europe and Asia from north africa had something superior, allowing them to dominate Neanderthal-subspecies and Denisovan-subspecies that were well-established in Europe and Asia back then (both of which sub-species left some genetic material in modern non-African humans) and eventually replace them. It might be as you suggest. But then again, it might have simply been a superior technology (better spear-throwing; arrows; whatever) that they kept to themselves.
Surely it's not just the size of the brain. Elephants must have bigger brains than humans but they're not smarter, I mean, who works for whom? The organisation of the brain must be much more important.
I only said I had "an answer" as to why humans, rather than the significantly bigger brained and much stronger Neanderthals survived their mutual conflict; however, there is no evidence, and essentially zero use for spears of significant length and range in the forests of Africa, which back then was mainly forest. Man's domestication of grazing animals, especially the goat which eats the small growing saplings, converted Africa's forests into grassy plains or deserts. Without man and his animals, trees ALWAYS win the struggle for sunlight with shorter plants. (There is a joke about a small man applying for job with lumber company. He tells his prior job was cutting trees in the Sahara. Potential employer laughs and say the Sahara is a desert. Man replies: "Now yes - I've finished cutting the trees that were there.") Well about the time of the "out of Africa explosion" the Saraha was forested! For history of the spear thrower (the "atlatl") See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower#History With it the spear can travel 100 yards - a foot ball field but after about 20, only very skill can hit a man sized target. It effectively extends one's arm permitting higher tip velocity. There is a growing modern sport in using the spear thrower: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!which developed in many cultures, but not African ones, at least 30,000 years ago. Also it would be impossible to "keep better technology" of this simple type secrete for even a decade. A better way of perception would be impossible to teach, even if the "Out of Africa" new rulers of the world wanted to. I agree! And the most important "better organization" permits real time perception instead of perception after many neural processing stages have completed. That is how IMO, our smaller brained and much weaker ancestors killed off the Neanderthals, (except for a few sexy female ones they took as "spoils of war.")
I believe newer evidence shows not just thrusting spears, but throwing spears were in use several hundred thousand years ago in Africa by ancestors of homo sapiens. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/stone-tipped-spears-modern-humans_n_4282920.html the human ancestry tree is becoming ever more convoluted, as well: http://www.livescience.com/41679-oldest-human-dna-reveals-mysterious-homnid.html i suspect that we may well start to include neanderthal and denisovan as variants of humans; e.g. Homo sapiens sapiens (us), Homo sapiens neandertal, Homo sapiens denisovan, etc. since they were able to freely mate and produce viable offspring. it would be interesting to see if the mating was predominantly via females of those variants, as you suggested. sounds plausible.
there are as many ideas about beauty as there are people. random genetic variations will lead to variations in expression in the appearance of the person. additionally, some of the variations carry a fitness benefit. this will cause a slow variation over time in various isolated populations, forming 'races'. I believe neandertals and denisovans were at least different races, but more likely different sub-species of homo sapiens. there appears to be at least a third sub-species not yet identified by bones (only by dna); and there were likely others.
different races have different level of IQ, standard of civilization also varies, some are more civilized, some are more barbaric. like the black people in USA, if they remain in Africa, we won't have Michael Jackson etc. Can evolution theory explain why such a big difference?
The newspaper link Water gave in post 25, is based on this paper (It is pier reviewed, I think): http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0078092 It is interesting but I am very skeptical, at present - after looking at "proof claimed." Walter's post 25 newspaper link image of stones is larger than mine below. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Can open a coconut by putting pointed stone in one of the 3 weak holes and hit it with another; often breaking off tip. Caption of above article's Figure 2: A sample of Gademotta pointed artifacts exhibiting micro- and macrofracture features indicative of projectile weaponry. (A, B) fracture wings on transverse fractures; (C, D) fracture wings on burin-like fractures; (E) impact fractures on two fracture fronts on the distal portion. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Note the hammer speed is greater than those found at the site (green box) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!The main investigator seems to be Yonatan Sahle (He is the Email point of contact of the paper any way.), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s Human Evolution Research Center and co-author of the study. With this amazing change in our understanding of pre-human ancestor's level of technology, he knows he gets instant fame / recognition. I do not rule out fraud, as it has happened several times before in this field with much more complex supporting artifacts than a few scratches on some (five or ten only?)* obsidian stones. * Only 10 entries in the "impact table" and only 5 stones shown (right & left sides) in first figure above (A thru E with six sections magnified to show the 6 scratches all is based on!). The one specimen with two scratches is strange as inferred to have hit something hard enough to scratch at two significantly different velocities! (1068 & 1301 m/sec) Could it be that Sahle was not pleased with first scratch he added?
Because we now have to include both Denisovans and Neandertals as part of the human lineage (see: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Blo...s-inbreeding-and-interbreeding/3431387492164/ ), which shows a divergence into those sub-species circa 500,000 BC, and since those humans were present in Asia and Europe (which was not highly forested; and some parts of Africa were not, even if the Sahara was forested then), I don't have a problem with accepting that early humans were utilizing spears all over the globe.
My main problem with that much early date in non-forested regions, where certainly they would be more useful than a thrown rock, is how did they make a straight shaft?
most saplings grow up straight the first few years, and would make great shafts. one only needs a slightly woody area along a river-bank for such material, even if most of the land were grassland. also, here is another link to the same family tree of my preceding post: http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/evolution/dna.php it's towards the bottom of that page; i've included it because it's from a good source on evolution, and contrasting it with 'creationism'.
The words "nature" and "natural" exclude phenomena that are the result of intelligence. For example, the extinction of the dodo, the auk, the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet and the thylacine (a marsupial predator also known as the zebra wolf) were not "natural selection." They were killed off by humans. So if we are killed off by another intelligent species using sophisticated weapons, that will not be "natural" selection either. It will be very "unnatural," like the way the Chinese people are killing off the Yangtze dolphin and they don't even give a damn! Yes indeed. As important as cooking was to an obligate carnivore, it became even more so after the discovery of the technology of farming. In the Paleolithic Era, there weren't enough wild plants for humans to wish they were digestible. But the cultivated, irrigated farms of the Neolithic Revolution resulted in gigantic harvests of plant tissue--which our digestive system cannot process, except for some seeds and nuts. Cooking the tissue breaks down the cellulose and allows us to use the calories. But more important, cooking wheat, rice, barley, corn/maize, etc., unlocks the seeds (literally the "grains") which are rich in protein. The same is true of the "beans" which are the seeds of legumes: much of the world's population gets a large part of their protein from soybeans. It was the combination of cooking and farming that made the human population explosion possible. Nonetheless, it was our invention of flint blades that made our brains bigger in the first place. Hunters get more protein than grazers. Evolution is as subject to the force of coincidence as any other phenomenon. All primates except humans (monkeys, tarsiers, lemurs, non-human apes, etc.) have evolved much greater intelligence than most other mammals, yet they've done it without meat or cooking. Our ancestral species had that exceptional intelligence (as well as hands!) and broke out from the pack, so the evolution from herbivore to carnivore was more a fortuitous advantage for them than for the Carnivoran orders. Many cetacean species are highly intelligent, and communicate using sounds that may turn out to be language. But without hands, there's a limit to what they're going to be able to accomplish. Vegetarians utilize the technology of cooking, so they get plenty of protein from cooked plant germ tissue. Wheat, rice, corn, peanuts, soybeans... Neanderthal evolution appears to have adapted them to the cold weather of Ice Age Europe. They could not run quickly or swim, but with their strong muscles they were capable of hunting the large, slow-moving herbivores of the tundra. As the weather warmed, the mammoths, woolly rhinos and cave bears were replaced by more nimble creatures, and the newly liquified rivers were full of edible fish--and Homo neanderthalensis was not built for this kind of hunting and fishing. At the same time, the Homo sapiens in the Middle East were chasing the receding snow line and wound up in Europe (the Cro-Magnon population). They had the physiology to thrive in the new European environment. Various hypotheses exist about their encounter with the Neanderthals, but since DNA analysis discovered that most people of ancient European stock (i.e., not the Jews, Magyars, etc.) have a bit of Neanderthal DNA, it's likely that there was enough food to go around so the sapiens merely interbred with the now-greatly outnumbered Neanderthals rather than killing them off. This contradicts the results of the massive studies of Dr. Cavalli-Sforza into the migrations of our species. His exhaustive DNA analyses show that the first human tribe to successfully migrate out of Africa (members of the San or "Bushmen" who now live closer to the southern end of the continent) went east, populating Australia and southeastern Asia in two waves, starting around 60KYA. Only much later, around 40KYA, as the ice age receded, did their descendants finally set their sights on Europe and encounter the Neanderthals. It's the size of the brain relative to the rest of the body that matters. In larger animals a large portion of the brain controls motion, interprets sensory input, etc. Notwithstanding that argument, elephants are indeed highly intelligent. Their handicap is not IQ-related. As I noted earlier, it's the fact that they do not have hands. This is the same problem the dolphins have. (Of course the prehensile trunk gives them a tremendous advantage over other herbivores.) Psittacines (the parrot order: parrots, macaws, cockatoos, conures, parakeets, etc.), on the other hand actually have something very close to a hand. Their zygodactyl feet (two "fingers" and two "thumbs") make them quite dextrous. In addition, their prehensile beak gives them something close to a third hand. Anyone who's ever lived with a parrot knows exactly how much trouble they can get into with those "three hands." They can take nuts and bolts apart and disassemble their cage from the inside! Having a parrot in the house is like having a four-year-old child who keeps getting smarter and more adventurous, without caring about the rules of civilization. Skin color is a very ephemeral characteristic. When a tribe moves south, they start getting skin cancer from so much sunlight. So people with more melanin in their skin, which makes it darker and blocks out the sun, live longer and reproduce. When a tribe moves north, they start to suffer from Vitamin A deficiency due to the weaker sunlight. So the people with less melanin absorb more sunlight and their bodies produce Vitamin A, and they're the ones who live longer and reproduce. The extremely light-skinned Latvians and the extremely dark-skinned Bengalis come from the same Asian ancestors about 4,000 years ago. Some of them migrated north and some migrated south, and today their skin color is totally different. As a matter of fact, they are so closely related that it's ridiculous to refer to them as separate "races." Humans do not have a large variance of DNA. At some point around 80,000 years ago, there was a disaster in Africa so only about 10,000 humans survived. We are all descended from that very tiny "tribe." The differences you see in modern humans are primarily in skin color. As I said, that can change in just a few thousand years. The epicanthic eye fold in East Asian people is a very recent mutation. We know this because the people in the Western Hemisphere do not have it. They migrated to the New World around 12,000 years ago, so at that time the people in Asia must not have had it either. No they don't. Some tribes don't get enough protein in their diet, and this slows down brain development. But give everybody the same food, and we'll all have the same range of IQ. This has nothing to do with "race." The Germans are, arguably, the most "barbaric" people on earth, after their attempt to completely annihilate the world's Jewish population. And the Germans are "white." Americans are just as barbaric, after killing off so many Indians and then treating the African slaves like cattle. And most of us are white too. Oh yeah, and we are the only people in history who actually used nuclear weapons, and we dropped them on civilians! So who's the barbarian? Some of the American Indian tribes are far more civilized than we are. There is no "big difference." Someone has been lying to you.
I said: "This small tribe “exploded out of Africa” killing off all others as in battle they percieved the thrown rock or spear where it really was, not where it was ~0.1 seconds earlier. They could better duck, and not only in battle but when the hidden lion sprang up out of the grass. Having a real time understanding of your enviroment, is a huge survival advantage.- Far more important than a bigger brain and stronger body that the Neanderthals had. Once evolution stumbled on even a crude form, it was refined and modern humans ALL have it, but very few know that. The completely in conflict with many facts POV of "learned" cognitive scientists prevails! " And your text about the first migration out of Africa, which I agree fully with, does not contradict even one word I posted. That first migration took advantage of the fact there was so much water stored on land as Ice and snow, that sea level was ~100m lower, (as I recall) and only short voyages by small boats or even rafts, if any, were need to get to a then much larger and closer to SE Asia, Australian land mass. If any of these deep ice age people were stupid enough to head north to Europe the Neanderthals would not need to kill them to protect their turf - the weather would have done that - much like it did later for the Russians defeating Napoleon. I would be very interested to know if the Australian aborigines have the RTS I postulate all other humans do, of if they do have the slightly (~0.1 second) delayed perception modern cognitive scientist's theory of perception claims is correct. One test for this is very simple and I have described it more than once. Briefly a computer screen displays a smoothly moving spot and the RTS lets you know where spot actually is. Then at random a beep occurs. Even human's having the RTS will perceive this unpredictable beep with brief many stages of neural processing delay. The subject moves the cursor to the location where the spot was when he perceived the beep.* If the aborigines do NOT have the RTS, then on average they will be nearly correct, as both spot location and beep are perceived with delay; but most humans will place the cursor cross hairs on the spot trajectory at a later than true point. * How rapidly he does this is of no import as there is also a fine 2D static multi-colored grid on the screen and a faint "ghost trail" of the spot's trajectory that fades out in 7 seconds or so. I.e. he just mentally notes that the spot was near where a red horizontal line is crossed by a blue vertical one when he heard the beep but was on the ghost trail. He could even light a cigarette before placing the cursor cross hair there and then hitting the "I'm done" button. Test is not disturbed by "reaction time" problems. If you (or anyone reading) have the computer skills to set up this simple test of the RTS, PLEASE do so. It is almost a "make or break" test of my RTS postulate. Using a tiny spot which is moving at say 3 cm or more per second, the RTS predicts human subjects will place the cross hairs a some point on the ghost trail, several mm beyond where the spot actually was when the 0.03 second duration beep sounded. Play around a little is the spot speed and shortest beep duration possible to make even an 0.05 second neural processing delay easily measured. Also play the beep via small "in ear" head phones, it possible, so any delay is almost entirely due to neural processing, not sound wave thru air transit time. As a reward for your efforts, if the RTS is supported by the results, co-author with me one of the most important papers for many years in the field of perception. Almost all cognitive scientists think the RTS is totally wrong and their "perception emerges after many sages of neural processing" theory is correct, despite 15 or 20 well established fact it conflicts with which do support the RTS instead. I gave link about the RTS in post 20, but here, for your convenience it is again: For more RTS details, and evidence supporting my RTS view of how perception, experiences and qualia and "yourself" arise within the RTS, see: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66 But that post is focused on how genuine free will might be possible despite the firing of every nerve being deterministically controlled by the laws of neuro-chemistry and physics As building the computer test is an effort, please ask any questions about the RTS and I will do my best to clarify or give additional proof it, not the accepted POV, is correct.
Not only skin color, but differ in many aspects, features of the face, average "height, size of body, weight", when you put an Asian and a White people together, they are not the same!
I oversimplified my account of the migration out of Africa. Actually the first wave of humans left at the deepest point of an ice age, when rainfall was light so Africa suffered from famine. They traveled along the southern coast of Asia, finding conditions not much better--although DNA shows that a few of them colonized the tip of India while the rest kept walking. They didn't stop until they reached Australia which, due to the vagaries of weather patterns, was a paradise teeming with food. It was 10,000 years later that another adventurous party left Africa--members of the same tribe, the San or "Bushmen." By now the ice age was lifting so they were able to make new homes in southwestern Asia. These people were the ancestors of all modern humans outside of Africa and Australia, as borne out by DNA analysis. So if we find differences between the native Australians and the rest of the non-African population, this is the reason.
I said, "primarily in skin color," not "exclusively." Of course there are other differences. The Italians look considerably different from the Norwegians. The Arabs look considerably different from the Germans. The Japanese look considerably different from the Vietnamese. The Incas look considerably different from the Mayans. But skin color is the one attribute that we can see from a distance, before we notice the shape of the eyes, nose, forehead, even hair and eye color. Therefore, this is the one attribute that we correlate most strongly with ethnicity. It's "a white person," not "a white people." "People" is always plural: you must have at least two. As I noted, if you put two Asian people together, the odds are that they will be quite different looking. A Thai vs. an Ainu. A Mongol vs. a Khmer. A Korean vs. a Filipino. Even people from two different provinces in China might look quite different. And as I also noted, white people also differ considerably. You won't mistake an Irishman for a Sicilian! In some places, there has been so much population movement that almost all of the people of the world have passed through and left their DNA. America, China, Iran, England, Israel, Brazil: There is no "typical-looking" person in those countries. We all look different. Our President's father is African and his mother was of English ancestry. He doesn't look like anybody. A lot of white people think he's black, a lot of black people think he's white. But he's just a human.
I knew all that and agree it is very probably fact. That the ancestors of the Austrian aborigine left Africa about 10,000 years earlier than the second wave going to the SE did is why I think there is a good chance that they did not perceived via the RTS and would love for them to be tested by test I described. I also noted they left during the depth of an ice age when the ocean separation between SE Asia and NW Australian land mass was much less than currently due to sea level being ~100m lower. For example what is now several hundred separated islands, called Indonesia was probably one essentially unified land mass. Likewise some of the now submerged sea peaks between SE Asia & NW Australian were island way points where fresh water and food could be had for the ancestor of the aborigines migrating to Australia.
