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Excerpt from the article, "The researchers noted that female adult chimps made and used spears more often than adult males. The males relied more on their size
by qiqing 12y ago
Excerpt from the article, "The researchers noted that female adult chimps made and used spears more often than adult males. The males relied more on their size and strength for hunting. Female chimps are almost always hindered by infants that ride on their backs or bellies, so spear hunting is far more effective for them than attempting to chase down prey."
- duaneb 12y agoInteresting. I wonder if female child ~~bearing~~ holding contributed to our move to bipedalism.
- JulianMorrison 12y agoThere is speculation that the baby sling did. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/prehistoric-baby-sling-made-our-brains-bigger-2071291.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/prehistoric-...
- qiqing 12y agoTIL how long baby slings have been around. "Before the invention of the baby sling, dated by Dr Taylor to at least 2.2 million years ago, when human ancestor head size suddenly began to increase, physically mature infants were more likely to survive, because caring for slower-developing immature ones was difficult, uneconomic and often dangerous. Mothers holding their infants were more vulnerable to attack from predators or other humans than those using baby slings. They were also less able to perform other more economically productive tasks. Most importantly, the invention of the baby sling artificially lengthened human gestation, said Dr Taylor."
- malandrew 12y agoThat all makes sense as a theory, but is this fact based on hard evidence or merely academic speculation? 2.2 million years is an awful long time ago, and I didn't think we had that much evidence about humans habits and culture dating back that long ago. Exactly what happened roughly 2.2 million years a to explain this evolutionary change?
- EGreg 12y agoThat's the thing. Most of the evolutionary theories about how something happened 2 or 200 million years ago are just on the level of speculation. That's one of my gripes about evolution ... the field attracts a lot of pseudoscience (such as evolutionary psychology) in the form of "explanations" for various phenomena we observe today, or how a transition happened. The truth is no one actually knows, or can test most of the theories that seem like they MIGHT be true but could also be fanciful speculations by researchers. That something was found is a fact. How it got there is largely speculation, but I'm surprised how often these theories are taken seriously, not just by the public but by other scientists. Real tests include statistical significance, like exploring the fossil record across continents, simultaneously corroborating the theories of continental drift and common descent. Allopatric speciation can be discovered this way. You need a bunch of data points or functions of them, that should be independent but are highly correlated. That is what supports a theory, in the Fischer sense. Here is an example: horse fossils are found physically above t-rex fossils 99.9% of the time, and in the remaining cases, the rocks show evidence of upheaval in that area. Or, radiometric dating vs the superposition principle. If 99% of the data samples agree, that is extremely significant. That is how you prove theories.
- vanderZwan 12y agoI think the bigger mistake is to claim the invention of the baby sling caused our lengthened human gestation: it gives no selection pressure in favour of lengthening our gestation period, it merely removes a selection pressure against it.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ak39 12y agoIs the field of EP completely pseudoscience?
- pekk 12y agoEP is obviously not completely pseudoscience, but it has a few global problems. It's often forced to test hypotheses about things that happened long ago, which is hard and can lead to weakly supported conclusions. It also adopts the conceptual framework of cognitive psychology, which can be a bit of a grab bag in terms of falsifiability because it is so heavily reliant on "indirect observation." Finally, it frequently deals in topics which are flashpoints for controversy, which invites unusually stringent examination and rejection from people with some personal or political or religious agenda.
- crimsonalucard 12y agoThis is similar to how human civilization formed. Areas of plentiful food have no need for farming or saving up food as wealth thus, it is only in places where food/resources are less plentiful did technological civilization develop.
- tomp 12y agoAlso, I've heard the theory (I don't know if it's true) that while Chinese invented porcelain and used it for containers (cups, plates, etc), Europeans never did, and ended up inventing glass instead (and windows, microscopes, telescopes, ...).
- blawson 12y agoThey talk about this on the British panel show Qi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg&ab_channel=solipsism1000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg&ab_channel=solip...
- thret 12y agoHuh, I just read this theory yesterday in Nation by Terry Pratchett. I'm going back and reading the few books of his I missed.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThe Road Not Taken... http://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK http://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK
- pjmlp 12y agoTelescopes were brought into Europe by Arabs living in what was then Iberia, Sicily and a few other places. As well as many farming new technologies like irrigation for example.
- testrun 12y agoNot quite - http://www.space.com/21950-who-invented-the-telescope.html http://www.space.com/21950-who-invented-the-telescope.html.