h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Pedro7
I do not know scientifically speaking.

I think there will be chains that end and some that continue. I can imagine the possibility of some continuing to evolve into the humans of today.
I would not be surprised if more missing links will be found to eventually answer more of these scientific questions.

The fire building is a very interesting point to me.

The article I posted interested me as far as the smaller mamamls.
Elephants so small the small people could eat them.
I may have missed talk of the smallest size limits of common mammals who are now much larger but were much larger at one time. I read the posts about maximum sizes. I will re -read the above posts to see if I missed something


The name the people gave to the elders meant "eats anything" and the current inhabitants kept stating they had a greed about it!
Their stories handed down say their ancestors met them and feared them because of their greed. The story also says they took a male a female away with them. They do not know their fate but were never seen again. They never found evidence or spoke of cannabalism. Lotsof room to wonder IMO. Perhaps their greed extended to wanting to be larger, and attemped mating with the larger beings(people).

They are suggesting the animals and humans changed in size according to their environment. This could have happened after a massive earth castrophe. With the earth so varied it makes sense that several species were needed to survive the earths events. Lots of food for thought and scientific proof with many holes in the knowledge.

*********
Nature will provide for your needs.
It will not provide for your greed.

Wish I knew who said that as it may have been as important back then as it is now to not be greedy with resources.

Hi abbi
It seems to be fairly common for mammals (and particularly elephants) to evolve into dwarf species when they are stranded on small islands. There is just not enough food for a viable population of large creatures, so I suppose only the small ones survive.

One of the best things for me about H. Floresienses was that it showed again how people are subject to evolutionary pressures in the way that other animals are. In hindsight, it's to be expected that a hominid would shrink if stranded on an island as well.

Ah yes the small islands thing
That is good to remember, it's where so many new (old) things are found.

I wonder how many small islands there might have been through the ages of earth with the splitting of continents and so forth. I wish we had spent as much money looking under the sea as we have in space. There has to be more answers and past civilizations down there Same with mountain tops, Satelite imagery will be finding more places never seen as on the S. America mountain tops.

I hope you all resume the conversation,I will be lurking.

Potholer-
"Even though much is made of brain size when assesing intelligence, I'm not sure how good a guide it really is."

It's getting to be a confusing area some scientist might have to re-consider. It stands to reason if we only use 10 percent of our brains that a much smaller brain does not neccesarily indicate a lesser intelligence. It could be a more efficient use of brain.

Ok - Now back to lurking, I think.

>>"It stands to reason if we only use 10 percent of our brains that a much smaller brain does not neccesarily indicate a lesser intelligence."

That's a very big 'if'.

I think the 10% figure is some kind of scientific urban myth. With so many areas of the brain known to be specialised for particular tasks, it's hard to see where all the 'spare' areas could be. If the numerous specialist areas are all [roughly] uniformly wildly oversized for the tasks they appear to be carrying out, that would seem to indicate some fundamental reason that may not be fully understood, but which very likely exists.

With the brain being such an energetically expensive organ, it's difficult to see why we would have a huge excess of tissue - even allowing some degree of redundancy for long-lived creatures like us wouldn't seemingly explain a huge excess capacity.

Well the only using 10% of our brain thing is .

Oops, sorry, that one's obviously been dealt with rather more successfully already .

I must have missed it.
Even if it is 60 percent the same dounts could apply.
I do not think we know most of what there is to know about the brain. We are making great strides in the last decade.

Everything we do not know is a big IFisn't it?

Was that percentage of brain used covered on this thread or another?
I'd like to read about it please. If anybody can point to it, I would appreciate it.

Oh its pretty much a case of all the brain is used at some point, just not all at the same time because different bits are specialised to do different things.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm

"Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show...over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another".

<>

I'd always understood that they are considered sub-sets of human, especially Homo Neanderthalensis...

Sub-sets of human maybe, but not generally thought to be members of our species. That's kinda the question; does human necessarily mean homo sapiens?

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Superfamily: Hominoidea
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Genus: Homo
Species: Homo sapiens

Looks like it to me, and the other Homos (Jones, stop sniggering back there!) are human as well.

ooops, I meant to type *All In The Family* as well...go ahead, call me a Meathead.

ok.








You're a meathead.

Well to put it another way, you probably could have successfully mated outside your species with a Homo Erectus or even Peking..sis. But you can't with a Baboon (especially a boxing one).

As to my head, I admit it is meaty.

By definition you can't mate outside your species. Else they would not BE outside your species. And I'm not sure genetic 'distance' correlates too well with being two different species. For instance, coyotes and wolves are apparently further apart genetically than humans and chimps, yet can interbreed and produce viable offspring.

*Cann, Stoneking and Wilson's (1987) study of mitochondrial DNA found a lack of diversity in the Asian population that would have been expected had these migrants hybridised with the Homo erectus already in the area.*

http://www.ecotao.com/holism/hu_sap.htm

Haven't read the full link yet, but wouldn't interbreeding with erectus *increase* the diversity of the Asian population?

Here's the quote with the next sentence:
<< Cann, Stoneking and Wilson's (1987) study of mitochondrial DNA found a lack of diversity in the Asian population that would have been expected had these migrants hybridised with the Homo erectus already in the area. The greatest divergence in DNA of non-African populations occured 90,000 to 180,000 years ago
//suggesting that Homo erectus (Java Man, Peking Man) did not contribute to our gene pool (as proposed by the multi-regional hypothesis to human origins)//. >> my emphasis.

I'm not sure what to make of this, to be honest. It seems to contradict itself in the following sentence.

You are absolutely right. I went looking for the theory that other Homo species were absorbed rather than wiped out by Sapiens. Instead I found one that pointed out the possibility that the opposite may have happened.

*"It is amazing to know that we had physical contact with another species of human. We either battled with them, or lived with them or even mated with them. Regardless, we touched them, and that is pretty dramatic to think about," says David Reed, first author of the study.*

http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2004-10-05-4

*Multiregional Hypothesis:
Homo sapiens evolved in each of the regions where its fossils are now found from ancestral Homo erectus that migrated out of Africa about 1.5 million years ago.
Advocates of this hypothesis consider H. erectus to be an early version of H. sapiens, and not a different species. Constant interbreeding between neighboring populations of this "archaic" Homo sapiens may have prevented reproductive isolation, resulting in our present-day races of Homo sapiens, rather than multiple species of Homo.*

http://www.bio.miami.edu/dana/106/106F04_19.html

So basically it is a theory, but then so is your theory...one.

Again my apologies for the quote and link.

This is fascinating, CL Zoomer, and what a marvellous idea, as David Reed said, that "we touched them"...