Re: News: On Nova, Theories of How the Apes Became Us.

Kermit wrote:
On Nov 5, 1:02 pm, Ye Old One <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
November 3, 2009
Television Review | 'Nova: Becoming Human'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/arts/television/03human.html?_r=1

On ‘Nova,’ Theories of How the Apes Became Us
By NEIL GENZLINGER

Here’s some cheery news: that global warming thing everyone is so
worried about is actually going to make us all a lot smarter.
Unfortunately, it’s also going to leave us with heads the size of
basketballs.

It occurred to me as I watched this that the GW deniers will say "See?
Even if it *were happening, your own science says it's a good thing."
Well, no. It means that it was dangerous to us in the past, and it
would be stupid or insane to ignore a threat that killed many of our
ancestors... But I'll save that for the next GW denier I run into.

For you regulars here: is this taken seriously? If so, why doesn't it
make every species smarter? I'll take a guess - we were already smart
enough that small improvements make a big difference. The difference
between a dull and an especially bright human is considerable. But I'm
not entirely satisfied with that claim...

Those are among the conclusions that might be drawn from Tuesday’s
opening installment of “Becoming Human: Unearthing Our Earliest
Ancestors,” a three-part “Nova” on PBS that starts out sounding like
just another bone drone but grows progressively more compelling.

Part 1 opens by talking about a fossilized skull found in 2000 in
Africa. Known as Selam, it is also sometimes called Lucy’s Child, a
reference to the more famous 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton
found in Ethiopia in 1974.

“Ugh,” you’re immediately thinking, “here we go again with the old
bones. Haven’t there been about a thousand of these human-ancestor
discoveries, and who can keep track of which was earlier than which,
and do I really care anyway?”

But the program turns out not to be as interested in bones as it is in
something bones, or at least skulls, can tell us: brain size. The
focus here is not on connecting humans to earlier hominids, but on
pinpointing why and how we began to think smart human thoughts, while
chimpanzees, say, never got much more advanced than poking a stick
into an ants’ nest.

For a long time, as the program notes, the assumption was that
humanness somehow came naturally as a byproduct of the thing that most
obviously distinguishes us from chimps: the preference for walking
upright on two legs. Daniel E. Lieberman, a Harvard anthropologist,
gives a nicely accessible account of his theory that bipedalism
developed as a means of saving energy, a sort of Prius to the chimp’s
Hummer.

That is persuasive. But didn't the people who released the Ardi paper
and fossils recently speculate our arboreal ancestors were walking
upright in the trees, and chimps and gorillas both developed knuckle
walking independently, afterward?

“It’s poorly designed to withstand the forces of gravity,” he says of
the unfortunate chimp. “It has to expend a lot of muscular effort to
keep itself from collapsing into a little pile of chimpness, or
whatever, with each step.”

But that energy-efficient bipedalism, it turns out, did not
automatically mean smarter; small-brained bipedal apes were around for
rather a long time without making much mental progress. “As a group,
they flourished for about 25 times longer than we’ve been around,” the
narration tells us. “They survived and thrived as brain size
flat-lined for almost four million years.”


Did it start when we began hunting as runners, or did the growth spurt
start first, then running/hunting?

So what made the brain finally decide to grow? Rick Potts, a
Smithsonian paleoanthropologist, says it was because the climate
turned wacky. Africa experienced a period of instability about two
million years ago when things went from wet to dry and back again in a
relatively short time.

“Climate changed all the time,” Dr. Potts says. “And so the idea that
we’ve come up with is that variability itself was the driving force of
human evolution.”


Why not baboons, or chimps, or wildebeest?

I assume because bipedalism was a prerequisite, and none of the species you mentioned ever evolved in the direction of bipedalism. (And this program suggested that bipedalism was initially just a means to conserve energy for movement.)

What could a mutant chimp do with increased intelligence, if it needs its arms for walking and brachiation? Whereas bipedal hominids (Ardi, Australo) could put a mutation of increased intelligence to immediate use developing better tools and tactics with its hands and arms.


--
Steven L.
Email: sdlitvin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: News: On Nova, Theories of How the Apes Became Us.
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