^^Weird...

Quoted from Cheesewiz:

plasmid

???????????????

Have you ever seen a giraffe lie down, they basically fall over, its hilarious.

OK, having now watched the program:

How did our ancestors learn to cook if they didn't already have big brains?

Before they could discover cooking of food, they had to discover fire, which means they also had to have mastered tools to reproducibly make sparks, and strategies to gather/cut tinder and brush.

Does the brain need to be that big to harness a natural occurrence, also meat doesn't need to be hunted, it could be scavenged which would only require very simple tools, (many apes, Corvidae and other animals use simple tools) as would gathering fuel for a fire, it is very easy to keep a fire going once started.

Fire would probably initially have been used as warmth and protection.

In order to do these two things, they needed to be out of the trees already, walking about.

I don't think those two are related, we originally came out of the trees and walked on 2 legs and foraged, in a similar way to modern apes.

Food did not directly lead to evolution. It can't. The genes for big brains were already in the population, and increased calories and protein from meat allowed that advantage to be exploited.

But development can be retarded or halted by diet and habitat even if the necessary genes are present.

The general summary form the program included using moulds of ancient teeth in a chewing machine to test their effectiveness with various foods, and came to the conclusion that our more modern ancestors ate meat from about 1.2m y.a.

Also the various experiments that were carried out showed that digesting cooked food requires 24% less energy (measured using snakes) than raw food due to starch grains being broken down due to the cooking process, and also eating cooked food provided more energy (figure quoted in the program was about 50% but wasn't quantified within the program) demonstrated by giving mice cooked food and raw food and measuring how far they ran.
Result mouse on cooked food ran further and put on weight.

Also they tired 8 people on a diet of raw fruit and veg only, a daily intake was 5kg and it turned out that there isn't enough time in the day to actually eat that much fruit and veg and sleep, crap, etc. with a modern digestive system.

I'm sure I've forgotten bits and half wish I'd taken some notes.

The general summary form the program included using moulds of ancient teeth in a chewing machine to test their effectiveness with various foods, and came to the conclusion that our more modern ancestors ate meat from about 1.2m y.a.

doesn't this alone ruin the basis of their theory, since modern looking humans (in terms of limb proportion etc) arose about 2 million years ago and developed into homo erectus by about 1.8 million years ago?

iirc there's no evidence for controlled use of fire until pretty deep into homo erectus' era (less than one million years ago), although i guess that's something that wouldn't necessarily leave a lot of clues for anyway.

cooking food would probably just be yet another of the many developments that humans underwent/figured out at some point during the last four million years rather than anything essential and drastic as the article supposes. as soon as homo erectus comes around there's a pretty gradual increase in brain size all the way up to the present. if there were an essential development that was required for human-like brain sizes, shouldn't there be a sudden increase in fossil record (preferably following a stall in brain growth)?

doesn't this alone ruin the basis of their theory, since modern looking humans (in terms of limb proportion etc) arose about 2 million years ago and developed into homo erectus by about 1.8 million years ago?

Like I said I've forgotten things, I might have the wrong time frame.

Have just double checked and the teeth used in the Bitemaster 2 are Australopithecus (not good at meat) and they don't say what the others are but date them to 1.7m y.a.

The main dig site (schwatkrautz (sp?) (might be Schwartz Krautz)) featured in the program showed evidence of both butchery and burnt bones from 1 or 1.2m y.a. can't remember which although no evidence of butchered burnt bones yet.

[This message has been edited by Maffia (edited 03-03-2010 @ 02:57 PM).]

Could our early ancestors have found a way to make fire with their brain sizes? They couldn't have used the flint and steel method at this point in time could they?

Certainly not the steel part....

^lol somehow that didn't occur to me

they didn't "make" fire. they "got" fire. probably from a lightning storm or something similar, and took it into their caves, where it didn't go out.

And from there you backwards engineer how to make fire.

I wholly support banning people for being very disruptive to the community (aka, annoying)
It should probably be done more often
x

+1
















On second thought, 2. Only because I would be one of the first to go

yay elpea and shrink!

My apologies for missing the action. Was away for most of the afternoon/eve and only looked at the thread I had open.

Even better news!

Survivor Fo Banned

Now if we can just get Survivor Fo Sho and Hairball off the forums we can finally move toward world domination.

Interesting observation: Chemists are more likely to have daughters than sons. Something be mutating our Y chromosome.

having a son is a far higher risk from a genetic standpoint so generally individuals with lower levels of fitness tend to have more daughters.

ergo, chemists suck at life.

(also my keyboard seems so fragile after tinkering with a piano for half an hour.)

Interesting observation: Chemists are more likely to have daughters than sons. Something be mutating our Y chromosome.

Yeah, but when you dispose of the unneeded girls after getting enough to arrange for a few family alliances through marriage, the statistics are bound to even out.

ergo, chemists suck at life.

no u

In all earnest, I suppose it's because general fitness means, "fewer lethal or gravely disabling disease alleles".

And having more daughters means, "more embryonic lethal crap going on in the genome" so only daughters survive to term, and reproduce.

It's technically possible for an XXY baby to survive inheriting an otherwise lethal sex-linked allele, but they are infertile, so there you go.

it's much more than that. a male's reproductive success is much more variable than a female's. An unfit male is fairly likely have no offspring while a fit male has nearly unlimited potential (ghengis khan anyone). Females have much more consistent offspring outputs, as the majority of them will leave at least a few offspring, but their potential isn't all that high.

Which is why females that are malnourished or sickly are more likely to produce daughters than sons (because a malnourished mother is unlikely to produce healthy offspring, and a weak son is less likely to produce grandchildren than a weak daughter). I think sons are more likely to be aborted if the mother undergoes some sort of trauma while pregnant as well.

I think being an unattractive chemistry nerd might have the same effect, but as far as I know there have been no scientific studies to support this hypothesis.

[This message has been edited by Meteora (edited 03-04-2010 @ 04:18 PM).]

I would have thought that would prevent children of both kinds.

This kind of Chemist hate can only be fostered by a chemist stealing metes gal.

Ergo, Chemists win.

It's not chemist hate, it's science! You can't argue with science!

I'm not the one who brought up the sex ratio of chemist offspring. I'm just explaining what it means!