5 ms·

My own hypothesis is walking not only freed our hands, but also freed our mind. The human are the rare if not only species relies heavily on remote projectiles

by est 5y ago

My own hypothesis is walking not only freed our hands, but also freed our mind. The human are the rare if not only species relies heavily on remote projectiles for attack. Most other animals are melee main. (I happy to be proven wrong) Now the fun part. If you are melee main, you just out-run your food and bite them, simple. However, to master remote attacks, you must predict how the prey moves. You have prepare carefully, plan how your projectiles fly, or else you get nothing. This enforces us to mimic other animals, the better we think like the prey the better we catch our food or avoid big monsters. This is how primitive animal worship originates. Those who understands animals best are the most wise person in tribes. This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group. Projectiles gave us an artificial world with a beauty of its own. Parabola is studied extensively throughout history. A species's food source depending on ultilizing projectiles think differently than other animals. Bipedalism hominins are meh, but bipedalism hominins having stones in their hands are extremely dangerous. (Btw, are there any books or papers supporting my idea?)

ant6n 5y ago
Early humans used running for hunting, see persistence hunting. Animals who hunt for food still need strategy. They hunt together, with few animals upwind pushing prey into a trap of waiting animals downwind. Predicting where prey will be while running is also very useful.
- est 5y ago
  Running is important, but running is not prefered if you can quietly and easily kill animals. e.g. You catch fish with a trident, instead of running fish along the river.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    Persistence hunting does not work on fish. And human intelligence predated complex tools like tridents.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BB212 5y ago
The thing about your hunting theory is that lots of other animals use coordinated social attack on prey. They have to do risk/benefit based on how many other of their kind are there and how many other of the other kind. I also don't think charging an animal has a small amount of optionality - they have to decide how That being said I believe the freeing of the hands was probably crucial to brain development. The trade-off of sending so much energy to the brain became worth it once you had the physical means to build tools and such.
harscoat 5y ago
Gravity’s Rainbow
pfdietz 5y ago
I recall seeing an old theory that large brains are needed to get sufficient timing accuracy on throws. If I vaguely recall correctly, it made the argument that the number of neurons needed to get sufficient timing accuracy goes as the sixth power of the throwing distance, for a fixed size target. This is still an active area of research https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-limits-accuracy-of-human-throwing.html https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-limits-a... Throwing is a very valuable hunting skill, since unlike melee it does not place the hunter at direct risk of injury by the prey.
slver 5y ago
You're describing features that many other animals have. Being bipedal, hunting, using projectiles, and so on.
csomar 5y ago
The human body does not, really, support your idea. The human brain is big but not the biggest (either by size or ratio) and the human body (tall hands and tall legs) is made for running, walking, traveling and not thinking. Birds (Eagles) are much better at targeting animals, and they are the projectile. And our sight compares really badly to other hunting animals. My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river) > This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group. Social structure is not unique to humans. Other animals have it and have complex ones too (like birds who mate for life!). Some animals are self-aware and might be even conscious.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  > My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river) Foragers are the vast majority of human history and they're just as capable of weighing long-term risks as you or I. It would also be incorrect to say that all agriculture originated around river valleys. Mexico and New Guinea are both counterexamples.
  - csomar 5y ago
    New Guinea is an island, definitively not a river but the sea is rich in resources; kinda of a different regime. For Mexico, I thought they had lots of water (assuming you mean Tenochtitlan). The city was literally floating in water.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      All agriculture happens in places with water. That's sort of a necessary prerequisite. In Mexico we're really talking about Oaxaca and especially the highlands in early agriculture. In New Guinea, the whole island is a swampy tropical rainforest. Neither of these are compatible with the hydraulic hypothesis though.
mkoubaa 5y ago
Maybe this is why birds are smart relative to their size. They are melee but are also themselves the projectile
pdog 5y ago
Animals tend to run away when you throw something like a rock or a big stick at them. It's possible the primary benefit of utilizing projectiles by early humans, even before they could fashion weapons or throw accurately, was as a defense mechanism that increased their survival rate.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  ... as anyone who ever met a snarling, menacing dog in deserted Balkan mountains can confirm. Even bending down and pretending to pick up something from the ground will often work.
abecedarius 5y ago
William Calvin has written along something like those lines. I don't know whether it's his current view.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Empathy, not apathy. Otherwise, a very interesting hypothesis. I must ruminate (pun intended) on it for quite a moment.
telesilla 5y ago
Orca gang together to generate large waves in unison to wash off waiting penguins and seals from ice floes: https://youtu.be/g1VEwsI4SlY https://youtu.be/g1VEwsI4SlY. Likely they do other premeditated hunting too. A recent discussion of grandmothers show we also share menopause with Orca (and pilot whales, who also hunt in groups and also very closely related to Orca) so it might be these are the only other species that come close to us, culturally.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
There is the tooling hypothesis, i.e. that the ability to build tools also brought the need to communicate how to build the tools. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/tools-and-language/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/tools-and-language/ The structure of steps in a process necessitated structured grammar and thought. US philosopher Daniel Dennett is a proponent of language-as-debugging. Our rational faculty was an emergent property of evaluating statements. Errors provoke laughter as a debugging response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Detection_of_mistaken_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Detection_of... Notable comedian George Carlin demonstrated a real genius for debugging language. His piece about the progression from "shell-shock" to PTSD is a good example. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246642/characters/nm0137506 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246642/characters/nm0137506
- mickdarling 5y ago
  I like the idea proposed by I think Larry Niven the SF author, that speech started as a way to bypass and augment the corpus callosum so the two hemispheres of the brain could get more in sync, and provide a way of organizing, "do this, then do that, then 'be careful here' swing the rock and release." Think about the internal focus you have when doing something carefully and how you talk yourself through it, from carpentry to skiing. Using the same verbalizations, when showing someone else the same thing, evolves to language.
xeromal 5y ago
I like this. It's a fun thought

by est 5y ago

ant6n 5y ago

Early humans used running for hunting, see persistence hunting. Animals who hunt for food still need strategy. They hunt together, with few animals upwind pushing prey into a trap of waiting animals downwind. Predicting where prey will be while running is also very useful.

est 5y ago
Running is important, but running is not prefered if you can quietly and easily kill animals. e.g. You catch fish with a trident, instead of running fish along the river.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Persistence hunting does not work on fish. And human intelligence predated complex tools like tridents.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

BB212 5y ago

The thing about your hunting theory is that lots of other animals use coordinated social attack on prey. They have to do risk/benefit based on how many other of their kind are there and how many other of the other kind. I also don't think charging an animal has a small amount of optionality - they have to decide how That being said I believe the freeing of the hands was probably crucial to brain development. The trade-off of sending so much energy to the brain became worth it once you had the physical means to build tools and such.

harscoat 5y ago

Gravity’s Rainbow

pfdietz 5y ago

I recall seeing an old theory that large brains are needed to get sufficient timing accuracy on throws. If I vaguely recall correctly, it made the argument that the number of neurons needed to get sufficient timing accuracy goes as the sixth power of the throwing distance, for a fixed size target. This is still an active area of research https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-limits-accuracy-of-human-throwing.html https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-limits-a... Throwing is a very valuable hunting skill, since unlike melee it does not place the hunter at direct risk of injury by the prey.

slver 5y ago

You're describing features that many other animals have. Being bipedal, hunting, using projectiles, and so on.

csomar 5y ago

The human body does not, really, support your idea. The human brain is big but not the biggest (either by size or ratio) and the human body (tall hands and tall legs) is made for running, walking, traveling and not thinking. Birds (Eagles) are much better at targeting animals, and they are the projectile. And our sight compares really badly to other hunting animals. My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river) > This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group. Social structure is not unique to humans. Other animals have it and have complex ones too (like birds who mate for life!). Some animals are self-aware and might be even conscious.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
> My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river) Foragers are the vast majority of human history and they're just as capable of weighing long-term risks as you or I. It would also be incorrect to say that all agriculture originated around river valleys. Mexico and New Guinea are both counterexamples.
- csomar 5y ago
  New Guinea is an island, definitively not a river but the sea is rich in resources; kinda of a different regime. For Mexico, I thought they had lots of water (assuming you mean Tenochtitlan). The city was literally floating in water.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    All agriculture happens in places with water. That's sort of a necessary prerequisite. In Mexico we're really talking about Oaxaca and especially the highlands in early agriculture. In New Guinea, the whole island is a swampy tropical rainforest. Neither of these are compatible with the hydraulic hypothesis though.

mkoubaa 5y ago

Maybe this is why birds are smart relative to their size. They are melee but are also themselves the projectile

pdog 5y ago

Animals tend to run away when you throw something like a rock or a big stick at them. It's possible the primary benefit of utilizing projectiles by early humans, even before they could fashion weapons or throw accurately, was as a defense mechanism that increased their survival rate.

inglor_cz 5y ago
... as anyone who ever met a snarling, menacing dog in deserted Balkan mountains can confirm. Even bending down and pretending to pick up something from the ground will often work.

abecedarius 5y ago

William Calvin has written along something like those lines. I don't know whether it's his current view.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Empathy, not apathy. Otherwise, a very interesting hypothesis. I must ruminate (pun intended) on it for quite a moment.

telesilla 5y ago

Orca gang together to generate large waves in unison to wash off waiting penguins and seals from ice floes: https://youtu.be/g1VEwsI4SlY https://youtu.be/g1VEwsI4SlY. Likely they do other premeditated hunting too. A recent discussion of grandmothers show we also share menopause with Orca (and pilot whales, who also hunt in groups and also very closely related to Orca) so it might be these are the only other species that come close to us, culturally.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

There is the tooling hypothesis, i.e. that the ability to build tools also brought the need to communicate how to build the tools. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/tools-and-language/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/tools-and-language/ The structure of steps in a process necessitated structured grammar and thought. US philosopher Daniel Dennett is a proponent of language-as-debugging. Our rational faculty was an emergent property of evaluating statements. Errors provoke laughter as a debugging response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Detection_of_mistaken_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Detection_of... Notable comedian George Carlin demonstrated a real genius for debugging language. His piece about the progression from "shell-shock" to PTSD is a good example. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246642/characters/nm0137506 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246642/characters/nm0137506

mickdarling 5y ago
I like the idea proposed by I think Larry Niven the SF author, that speech started as a way to bypass and augment the corpus callosum so the two hemispheres of the brain could get more in sync, and provide a way of organizing, "do this, then do that, then 'be careful here' swing the rock and release." Think about the internal focus you have when doing something carefully and how you talk yourself through it, from carpentry to skiing. Using the same verbalizations, when showing someone else the same thing, evolves to language.

xeromal 5y ago

I like this. It's a fun thought