_Robert_

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 ere…

[Read more]

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 ‘[Read more]

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…[Read more]

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.

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.

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 cop…[Read more]

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.

Explained well and well explained as usual by Reg.

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.  …[Read more]

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

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…[Read more]

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…

Measles are being spotted more often……

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…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20702883/

Two students ultimately outperformed the chimp on the brief-display condition. The authors conclude there’s no evidence for a fundamentally superior spatial memory system in chimps; intensive training plus strategy can explain Ayumu-level performance.

Chimptastic.

Yes, studies have shown that chimpanzees can beat adult humans in specific cognitive tests, particularly those measuring working memory and rapid visual assessment. This finding challenges the assumption that humans are superior in all cognitive functions.
Key Study Details
The most famous research, led by Professor Tetsuro…[Read more]

@jakelafort – yes, Jane Goodall totally opened up the field of primatology, changing a great ape from a “what” to a “who”.