On Monday 13 September 2021 at 20:07:58 UTC+1, I Envy JTEM wrote:
What's the most conspicuous and
salient feature or behaviour or
characteristic of the hominin
taxon?
No penis bone!
Or, um, or were you looking for something else?
"Intelligence" is the biggie, if you ask me, though it's super
difficult to gauge across the expanse of time.
"Intelligence" (in a broad sense) is the
reason that we've got to a population of
8 billion, and are destroying the planet.
(By 'intelligence' I mean the whole gamut
of abilities and social systems that
facilitated adaptability, culture,
communication and language.)
though it's super
difficult to gauge across the expanse of time.
"Intelligence" hardly had anything to do
with the reason the first population of
proto-hominins separated from their
chimp cousins. That would have been
something accidental -- like a major
river changing course, or a rise in sea-
level. But if the newly separated
population was to survive in its new
situation it had to be able to call upon
its own resources in new ways. It had
to change its behaviours to allow for the
exploitation of its native "intelligence".
It had to find new food sources and new
ways of doing things and then exchange
ideas within the whole community.
Actually, I recall arguing 80 gazillion years ago that the first and
most obvious is upright walking.
'Upright walking' and all the other
morphological and behavioural changes
must have been impelled by the newly-
developed and exercised "intelligence".
All the standard theories (and most of
the non-standard ones, such as seen in
this forum) unthinkingly assume the
contrary. According to them, the taxon
adopted all manner of strange (and
often unique) morphologies and then,
purely coincidentally, noticed that it
had acquired a super-intelligence.
That's manifestly illogical. It requires
an extreme level of coincidence.
So when you see a theory of human
evolution claiming that early hominins
evolved an ability at super-running or
became bipedal from wading, or from
climbing cliffs, or from swimming in
lakes or the sea, you know that you
are reading nonsense.
Any theory that focuses primarily on
morphology can only be wrong.
"Bigger brains" is what has always dotted the line between Homo
and everything else. It's something that can be measured from
fossils, and that makes it empirical. I'm not as convinced by it,
as humans today show a large enough range in brain size. Just
extrapolating that backwards in time should leave us reason to
doubt, all the more so when you consider that maybe there was
a few million years LESS of filtering... more diversity, perhaps?
The 'brain size' issue has got to be a
distraction. H.naledi's brain is not much
more than that of a chimp. If that's all
a relatively recent hominin needed,
then the rest is probably just a form of
insulation, and readily lost by a species
that slept in caves.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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