4 ms·

Taken by itself the evolution of the human thumb may not be convincing, but along with other evidence, such as the changes around the human shoulder joint at ar

Taken by itself the evolution of the human thumb may not be convincing, but along with other evidence, such as the changes around the human shoulder joint at around the same time period provides strong evidence that the ability to throw was a major factor in human evolution: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23061016#:~:text=Early%20humans%20evolved%20to%20throw,allowed%20this%20ability%20to%20develop.&text=Researchers%20tell%20the%20journal%20Nature,and%20migrate%20around%20the%20globe https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23061016#:~:tex....

dalbasal 6y ago
Is this all really throwing specific? Don't punching, hammering or other biomechanic also benefit from this? I'm not arguing the anatomy, just the "rock throwing" part. I mean, throwing a rock might come in handy from time to time.. but it seems insufficient to be a driving force.. to me. Spears maybe.. We even have evidence of neanderthal spear making... but that's 1.5m years later. You can make a living with a spear. Feeding a family by hunting birds with rocks seems near impossible. Seems like much less of a game changer than clubs, spears, digging sticks, etc. I can imagine a population dependent enough on these to create evolutionary pressures. This is not an educated opinion... just a layman's speculation. Meanwhile, I also suspect that hunting plays a bigger role than currently fashionable. Chimps are basically bound to live where figs grow. They need a variety of fig trees, because different varieties fruit at different times. No figs, no chimps. Their diet defines their range. Most modern foraging cultures rely heavily on food plants that require processing: cooking, soaking, pounding, grinding.... We're not very good at digesting plants. Even chimps aren't great at it. Assuming earlier ancestors were chimp-like, I think they had to have widened their diets beyond fruit... That means either meat or harder to digest vegetables. Paranthropus (a divergent family of human-like species) do seem adapted to a wider vegetable diet. Their skull was crested, like a gorilla, to facilitate gnawing on uncooked roots, leaves & such. Homo & Australopithecines don't have such features. It just doesn't seem as likely that we evolved the ability to eat a wider vegetable range than chimps, and then regressed to a narrower range again. The invention of fire is often referred to as "an external digestive system." You don't really need this for meat. Fresh meat is digestible. Even chimps can eat fresh meat, and we're more carnivorous than chimps. I think cooking, and other processing methods reintroduced us to vegetarian diets. It's actually really surprising that we don't know what these early species ate. For most animals, diet defines lifestyle. A species that hunts or scavenges for most of its diet is subject to totally different pressures than a fig eater.

dalbasal 6y ago

Is this all really throwing specific? Don't punching, hammering or other biomechanic also benefit from this? I'm not arguing the anatomy, just the "rock throwing" part. I mean, throwing a rock might come in handy from time to time.. but it seems insufficient to be a driving force.. to me. Spears maybe.. We even have evidence of neanderthal spear making... but that's 1.5m years later. You can make a living with a spear. Feeding a family by hunting birds with rocks seems near impossible. Seems like much less of a game changer than clubs, spears, digging sticks, etc. I can imagine a population dependent enough on these to create evolutionary pressures. This is not an educated opinion... just a layman's speculation. Meanwhile, I also suspect that hunting plays a bigger role than currently fashionable. Chimps are basically bound to live where figs grow. They need a variety of fig trees, because different varieties fruit at different times. No figs, no chimps. Their diet defines their range. Most modern foraging cultures rely heavily on food plants that require processing: cooking, soaking, pounding, grinding.... We're not very good at digesting plants. Even chimps aren't great at it. Assuming earlier ancestors were chimp-like, I think they had to have widened their diets beyond fruit... That means either meat or harder to digest vegetables. Paranthropus (a divergent family of human-like species) do seem adapted to a wider vegetable diet. Their skull was crested, like a gorilla, to facilitate gnawing on uncooked roots, leaves & such. Homo & Australopithecines don't have such features. It just doesn't seem as likely that we evolved the ability to eat a wider vegetable range than chimps, and then regressed to a narrower range again. The invention of fire is often referred to as "an external digestive system." You don't really need this for meat. Fresh meat is digestible. Even chimps can eat fresh meat, and we're more carnivorous than chimps. I think cooking, and other processing methods reintroduced us to vegetarian diets. It's actually really surprising that we don't know what these early species ate. For most animals, diet defines lifestyle. A species that hunts or scavenges for most of its diet is subject to totally different pressures than a fig eater.