Sunday School

[jakelafortParticipant]

Cool vids.

Those chimps look extraordinarily quick. If university students can be trained or can practice to outperform the chimps that is not a fair test, is it? Wouldn’t it have to be same age adjusted for life span? And what is that guy doing isolating a baby chimp from its mother? I think it has been known for far longer than his experimentation that it is harmful.

Not only do accents give away country of origin but the way letters are pronounced also does. Wascally wabbit.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

Our Multipolar world evidently has been playing out among chimps for quite some time.

Before the EU supported the PA, Baron Von Butcher, Creto, Dr. Strangmind, and Dutchess were side-by-side in joint intrigues with Ali Assa Seen, Wicked Wang Fu, and Dragon Woman, in battle with chimps on the side of APE-Enlightenment:

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling
• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Grammar and Addendum

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Measles are being spotted more often……

[jakelafortParticipant]

Thanks Enco,

Just yesterday i burst out in Lance Link. I aint kiddin ya man. I do that. Just shit comes out with no known or apparent trigger/nexus. I was taken with Lance Link as a wee lad. Had a client named Lance and i referred to him as Lance Link, secret chimp. Never to his face of course…

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

This theory suggests that during human evolution, we may have lost some ancestral short-term or working memory skills to make room in the brain for other, more complex functions, such as advanced language abilities, symbolic representation, and hierarchical thinking.

Surely we grew bigger and more complex brains throughout our evolution, leaving the chimpanzee brain behind a long time ago.

I can well believe that chimps are better in some cognitive aspects than humans, since they live in a different environment and so they have different requirements if they are to thrive.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Simon i think you are guilty of the same mindset as the scientists who first heard about Jane’s discovery.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Surely we grew bigger and more complex brains throughout our evolution, leaving the chimpanzee brain behind a long time ago.

Chimps are not frozen in evolutionary time, stuck at a checkpoint on the way to being human. Modern chimps have been evolving for the exact same 6–8 million years since our lineages split from a shared common ancestor.  They are not some sort of “old” humans or “failed humans”. They are modern chimpanzees and specialists in their own ecological niche and with their own evolutionary pressures. Humans didn’t “progress”, we diverged.

Bigger brains evolve only if the environment selects for them. Large brains are metabolically expensive and extremely slow to mature. A chimpanzee’s environment does not reward the long childhood our lineage stumbled into. We are great at abstract thought and longer term planning while a chimp will have a very detailed spatial memory and fast reaction times.

Evolution is about fitness, not complexity. So, a chimps brain is better (more fit) for survival in it’s environment than a big resource hungry human brain is. Again, we did not leave them behind in some evolutionary arms race. They just optimized differently. Bonobos and Chimps have modern brains, just like their cousins do. Now, where did I leave my back scratching stick?

[jakelafortParticipant]

Explained well and well explained as usual by Reg.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

Simon i think you are guilty of the same mindset as the scientists who first heard about Jane’s discovery.

Not at all, I’ve read a lot of Michael Tomasello and Frans de Waal about what chimps and bonobos can and can’t do, and how they behave.  It was Jane Goodall who paved the way for them.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

They are not some sort of “old” humans or “failed humans”. They are modern chimpanzees and specialists in their own ecological niche and with their own evolutionary pressures. Humans didn’t “progress”, we diverged.

That’s true.  But what changed was our environment, when theirs didn’t.

So, where we learned to cope with a new environment (the savannah) by developing a set of new skills (cooperative breeding, sharing, cooperative everything), we learned to cope with just about any environment.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

We know that there was a “last common ancestor” (LCA) of chimps/bonobos and humans around 6 million years ago.  I believe the human line got started around 4.5 million years ago.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Notice how dates are pushed back for the earliest fill in the blank? Big Bang. Human migration out of Africa. First humans in the Muricas. Fossils of hominids.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Apparently the first human species to make it out of Africa was Homo erectus, ~2 million years ago, and they were the first species to do cooperative breeding, meaning that a woman could have more than one child at once, because she got help in looking after them.  This meant that human children had longer in which to mature.

The human line must have started 4-6 million years ago.

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Our lineage split from the other apes circa 5–7 million years ago. That’s when the hominin line begins. Homo erectus appears much later, around 1.9 million years ago and evolved in Africa and yes, they were the first major successful wave to leave Africa. I think they first spread in Eurasia.

But cooperative breeding, known as ‘alloparenting’, where individuals other than the biological mother help raise offspring did not start with them. Hominins before erectus already had extended childhoods, reduced canines, increased sociality, and group-based foraging, all of which support cooperative care. Homo erectus is a major player, but they’re an early chapter in Homo, not the beginning of “humans.”

We homo sapiens only appeared 300 to 200 thousand years ago in Africa. I think the oldest fossils are from Morocco (not verified by me). but there is no serious debate on that date range anymore. The trouble is that evolution in hominins isn’t linear as multiple closely related populations overlap, interbreed, and diverged from each other.

Our immediate predecessor is probably Homo heidelbergensis, aka Homo rhodesiensis. These African populations gave rise to modern humans.

Source..my own copy of this publication.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

But cooperative breeding, known as ‘alloparenting’, where individuals other than the biological mother help raise offspring did not start with them. Hominins before erectus already had extended childhoods, reduced canines, increased sociality, and group-based foraging, all of which support cooperative care. Homo erectus is a major player, but they’re an early chapter in Homo, not the beginning of “humans.”

You’re right, the evolution of cooperative breeding must have been a slow process, beginning with the human line and reaching full swing with Homo erectus.  Great ape mothers won’t let anyone else touch their infants, until they’re weaned, basically because those others might steal them and kill them.  So there must have been ~4 million years of sociality and sharing in place before mothers could fully let go of their infants to unrelated others.

A remarkable thing about humans is that we have grandmothers, and this is only observed in a few species with cooperative breeding, like killer whales.  In most species, females die when they stop being fertile.  I think the logic must go like this: a grandmother (the closest person to a mother with kids) would likely have been the first kind of other person than the mother to be allowed to look after children.  So, her grandchildren received better care, so they grew up to live longer, allowing them to live longer as grandmothers, bestowing better care on their grandchildren, in a self-reinforcing evolutionary cycle.

Of course, this would produce grandfathers as well.

I’m sure I’ve seen some articles from that Scientific American.

[Author]

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