Reverse Darwinism, aka hyper-adaptability

[Charlie Hatchett]

"Neandertal Man ended his existence gazing desperatly at the warm shores of Africa, just out of reach across the impassable Strait of Gibralter. With that in sight - he breathed his last."

Charlie, who in the hell wrote that piece of crap? We'll need to perform a lobotomy on that retard with a dull paleo scraper.

Hell if I know.

Beag posted the quote above, though he definitely didn't seem to be agreeing with the statement.

[Digit]

Some time back I had a heated dispute with Marduk on the basis of brain size/intelligence.
John, you suppose that HSN became extinct and HSS did not. If, as seems to be increasingly likely 'Modern' man is a hybrid, both 'Early' HSS and HSN are both extinct or both continue.
The evidence is that 'Classical' HSN became extinct, but 'Classical' HSS, as represented by Cro Magnon, does not appear to be very common in the 'Modern' HSS.
The logical deduction, I agree not necessarily the correct one, is that we are a hybrid and that both our early lineages became extinct, superceded by their hybrid offspring.
IF brain size to body size IS a measure of intelligence then it would seem that we obtained our intelligence from HSN.
These points would explain the various body builds in 'Modern' man, the sudden flowering of art etc and the small genetic variation in 'Modern' man.
As a theory this is likely to be as popular as the early suggestions that HSN was an ancestor to us, but it fits!

[Forum Monk]

The logical deduction, I agree not necessarily the correct one, is that we are a hybrid and that both our early lineages became extinct, superceded by their hybrid offspring.

Deduction, yes but as you say, not necessarily the right one. I think the DNA studies, if they are to be believed, pretty much dispel this idea. Unless of course you go back a little farther through the phylogeny.

[Beagle]

What the DNA studies don't mention Monk, is that the DNA of the so-called African invaders don't match modern man either.

[Digit]

Monk, some of the terminology in DNA studies baffles me (old age).
So tell me this, if we are hybrids, can you tell without a full DNA chain that this species, or that species, did, or did not, contribute to that hybrid?
And could you do it without similar DNA info from both contributing species?

[Forum Monk]

Monk, some of the terminology in DNA studies baffles me (old age).
So tell me this, if we are hybrids, can you tell without a full DNA chain that this species, or that species, did, or did not, contribute to that hybrid?
And could you do it without similar DNA info from both contributing species?

A difficult question to answer in my opinion. As I understand it one could say our DNA and the chimpanzee is about 90% the same. But its the part which if different which makes all the difference. I would say it would be a scholarly deduction (buzz word for an intelligent wild guess) to claim a linkage without nearly complete samples for comparison.

[Digit]

That's about how I reasoned it Monk. That being the case, as HSN and HSS are supposed to have a common antecedent, they may well have been able to produce offspring.
The Mule is generally considered to be a better animal for many tasks than either the Horse or the Ass, (Donkey, Burro, whatever), so called hybrid vigour, but is supposed by many to be sterile. It is not.
Mules have a low breeding success but not a zero one and under the right conditions, in the wild, would soon become the dominant species.
This is what I think has happened to us.
In the absence of DNA evidence we have to fall back on comparative anatomy, and that supports the hybrid theory.

[john]

Co-incidental, but nonetheless fascinating.

Civilization depends on a stable climate
By JOHN KRIST
April 26, 2007

If you were to able to travel back in time 50,000 years, abduct a paleolithic hunter from a river valley in southern France and haul him back to 21st century America, would he stand out in a crowd?
Depends on the crowd. He probably wouldn't blend in very well at the New York Stock Exchange. But dress him in shorts and flip-flops, hand him a backpack and he could probably stroll across any college campus in the country without attracting attention.





Human beings who lived 500 centuries ago were fully modern, virtually indistinguishable from us in fundamental ways. Their brains and bodies were physically the same as ours. They created sophisticated art - murals, paintings, sculptures - and buried their dead in a fashion that suggests they possessed ceremonial or religious traditions. They had developed the technology and navigational skills required to travel across broad expanses of ocean.

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers did not, however, domesticate plants or animals on a large scale. Nor did they live in large, sedentary communities. No one did until about 10,000 years ago when, suddenly and in multiple locations around the globe, agriculture and cities appear in the archaeological record.

The relatively abrupt and simultaneous rise of farming and urban settlement patterns suggest that the capacity to develop such innovations had been part of humankind's intellectual and behavioral bag of tricks for a long time.

That capacity had lain dormant, however, awaiting some sort of catalyst to unleash it.

There's a pretty good theory as to what that catalyst might have been. If valid, it's potentially bad news for the well-groomed, suit-wearing descendants of paleolithic cave painters.

This was one of the secondary but intriguing points made last week during the penultimate in a series of global warming programs at UC Santa Barbara.

Thursday night's lecture and panel discussion featured journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert, who turned her award-winning series of articles on climate change for the New Yorker into a book featured this spring in a campus-wide reading program.

At about the same time that agriculture and urbanization appear in the archaeological record, the Earth entered a period of climate stability not seen at any time in the preceding 400,000 years. That's the span of time for which scientists have the most detailed record of global temperatures and atmospheric conditions, derived from the isotopic signature of frozen water and the chemistry of trapped air bubbles in ice cores pulled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

What those ice cores reveal is a pattern of profound climatic instability during most of modern humanity's time on Earth. Every 100,000 years or so, the climate would begin to cool, probably the result of a recurring pattern in Earth's orbit around the sun. Ice sheets would grow, glaciers would advance and sea level would drop. Eventually, however, the climate would begin to heat up, at first slowly and then rapidly, the warming continuing until terminated by onset of another ice age.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, however, the pattern changed. Temperatures reached approximately the same high point that they had reached before each of the three previous ice ages, but then held fairly steady, with minor fluctuations.

And it is in that brief window of temperature stability that modern civilization was born and has flourished. It is entirely plausible that until then, human populations were forced to move so frequently to follow climate-driven shifts in food and water supplies that they could not develop social and technological systems requiring permanence.

About 150 years ago, modern humans began unintentionally tinkering with the climate system, setting in motion a trend toward warmer temperatures - higher than any in the experience of our species - that threatens to end this period of stability. The consequences may prove merely inconvenient for the richest nations, but for hundreds of millions of people in countries that lack the wealth and institutional capacity to adapt, the changes are likely to prove disastrous as food supplies collapse, fresh water becomes scarce and low-lying lands are inundated by rising seas.

There's a grim symmetry to this theory - that human beings had to wait for a period of climate stability before they could develop the technology to destabilize the climate. And it offers a rather dismal prognosis for the future, which Kolbert expressed this way:

"An organism that depends on stability, but produces instability, can only survive for so long."


(Contact John Krist at jkrist(at)VenturaCountyStar.com. To read previous columns, visit www.johnkrist.com.)

(Contact John Krist of the Ventura County Star in California at krist(at)venturacountystar.com)


john

[Digit]

If civilisation exists as a result of climate stability, about which I have serious doubts, there exists an interesting conundrum John, as we probably owe our existance as a genus to climate change.

[Cognito]

If civilisation exists as a result of climate stability, about which I have serious doubts, there exists an interesting conundrum John, as we probably owe our existance as a genus to climate change.

The answer to this one could be "Check Box E, all of the above." As John inferred, on average there interstatials about every 100,000 years that, although not identical to our current experience, were similar in nature. I have often wondered why "civilisation" (whatever that is/was) did not arise during those prior periods ... nothing similar to ours with the rampant overpopulation, but something.

However, if you want to look for significant human activity in the past, interstatials would be the periods to review first. Look during the "elevated" periods on the following Vostok Ice Core Chart (yes, our insterstatial is very stable, but the Sangamon wasn't too bad either):

[Forum Monk]

Indeed, Cogs, it is a little of all of the above. The rise of civilization required much more than climate.

A very good article in my opinion -
http://www.emayzine.com/lectures/sumeria.htm

Paleoanthropologists estimate that between three and four million years ago, ancestors of the human race appeared on earth, naked in a world of enemies. The skills necessary for survival were mastered over many hundreds of thousands of years.

Agriculture and the ways of life it engendered were the most important achievements. The first farmers scattered kernels of grain on the earth and waited patiently for harvest time. Wild beasts were tamed as work animals or kept for their meat and hides.

Because their fields and flocks could supply most of their wants, a settled life in villages became possible; people were no longer compelled to move on endlessly in search of food, as their food-gathering ancestors had done for countless generations.

It was along the banks of great rivers that villages first grew into towns and cities. In early Egyptian picture writing a town is shown as a cross within a circle - the intersection of two pathways enclosed by a wall. The symbol is an appropriate one, for in the history of the human race the town marks the spot where civilization as we know it began.

Within the towns the business of living took new turns. While the majority still farmed, there were now more craftsmen turning out specialized wares, merchants trading for metals and other needed raw materials, priests

conducting religious ceremonies, and administrators planning and supervising the necessary cooperative effort for the common good.

Specialization allowed leisure time for intellectual and artistic pursuits that enriched the lives of the participants and developed a cultural heritage.

A culture can endure only if the knowledge necessary for its survival is passed on from generation to generation. Early peoples relied on information transmitted by word of mouth. But as cultures became increasingly complex, methods for keeping records were needed and systems of writing were created. To most authorities, the development of writing is a prerequisite to civilization.

The four earliest civilizations - Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese - arose between c. 3100 B.C. and c. 1500 B.C., in each case in the valley of a great river system. In this chapter we shall trace the progress of civilization, including the earliest advances in technology and creation of writing systems, in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In chapter 4 we shall examine the stirrings of civilization in India and in China.

[Minimalist]

So is it fair to conclude that a hyper-adaptable species is the final "goal" of evolution?

Seems to me that sharks and alligators have not evolved much in the last couple of million years. The species seems to reach a point where no further adaptations to survival are needed.

[Digit]

Interesting graph Cog.
Article on the Milankovitch Cycles.

The 21,000-year perihelion cycle and the 41,000-year obliquity cycle do in fact appear to be present in the climatological record. But the dominant climate cycle that is seen has a period of about 100,000 years. Although this coincides with the period of change in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, the theory outlined above does not predict that we should see this period directly - the effect of eccentricity should appear only as a modulation of the 21,000-year perihelion cycle. The mechanism by which the Earth's orbital eccentricity could affect the climate in such a direct and important way is not known, although recent evidence (published in 2000) indicates that atmospheric carbon dioxide may play a leading role in amplifying the orbital effect. However, some researchers still have doubts about the association between the 100,000-year climate cycle and orbital variations. Thus, many questions remain about long-term climate variations and their relationship, if any, to astronomical causes.

[kbs2244]

Add cockroaches to the survivors list.
Even less brain function than an alligator or shark.
They gat as good as they had to be. And then stopped.

[Minimalist]

True. Now, if something happens which stresses the population will they resume evolving to meet the change?