mistermack

The Schöningen spears prove that that is the case. You don't need to rely on my posts to find that out. The natural progression in the development of the spear would be stick, then all-wooden spear, then hafted, with either stone or bone on the tip. And that progression could easily take hundreds of thousands, or millions of years. But the weapon needs to have some real merit right from the start, or the process wouldn't even begin. It could be that it started out as a defensive weapon, or defensive/offensive between males fighting for dominance, or as a defence against predators. No leopard would enjoy the experience of having a sharp stick rammed down it's throat by a powerful ape. Whatever kind of tip it had. Apes have stronger arms than humans. The stabbing spear would be quite formidable as a defensive weapon.

The surface gravity would not have much effect on creatures in the seas. I don't really get what they mean by equilibrium temperature. You would need to know what sort of atmosphere the planet had to estimate the actual surface temperatures. Without our greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we would have about -20 at the surface on average. ( my guess, I couldn't be bothered to look it up ). With most of the oceans capped by ice, the albedo would be increased, and we'd probably end up living in an ice-covered planet.

Ummmm, you do realise that the picture you posted is labelled SHAFT SECTION ????? So no, it's not sharp enough. It's a section of a shaft. The clue is in the title. There has never been any suggestion that these spears had hafted stone tips. There is a tentative suggestion that some of the hand tools had been used in conjunction with wooden handles. But the jury is out on that point, the evidence isn't that strong. But the spears were all wooden. That's not disputed at all.

Where's YOUR evidence? I gave a link to the Schöningen spears earlier, but here it is again, as you obviously have memory problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_spears Please note that they are throwing spears, and the people who used them to survive obviously didn't have your superior hunting experience. The associated cache of 16,000 animal bones must have come from a lucky hit.

As an explanation for human bipedalism, endurance running is a joke. Chimps have far more endurance on four legs than two, they can only wobble around for about 100 m before getting exhausted on two legs. They generally walk on two legs for displays of male aggression, not for non-existent endurance reasons. Of course, endurance is selected for in nearly all animals, there's nothing unique about humans, but the endurance hunting hypothesis is full of holes as a proposed hunting technique for human ancestors millions of years ago. I've seen documentaries on the San people, and out of whole tribes, there are only one or two who can actually do it, and they wore modern trainers, and employed some very sophisticated tracking skills. None of that would be available to our ancestors, who would have been less well evolved for upright walking or running anyway. Endurance might well come into play once effective weapons were developed. You lie in ambush, and cause an animal a serious wound, and you then have to follow a blood trail to finish off the victim. That's a much more real-life scenario than ancient men running fit animals to a standstill.

My own idea is to sink horizontal plastic sheets to an ideal depth below the surface of the ocean, so that the nutrients that you add can't sink to the bottom. Wave motion might be enough to keep the nutrients circulating, while not being enough to damage the sheeting. You could then pump jets of water at the bottom of the ocean, and pump up the nutrient-rich clouds of silty stuff to the surface, to fertilise the surface layer that you've created. Seed the layer with fish fry and whatever other life can live off the algal bloom that will result.

The whole thread is about speculation. Nobody knows what made our ancestors become habitually bipedal. The fact that I posted earlier, that apes have been becoming gradually more upright over tens of millions of years in in the scientific record, and it's generally linked to size by evolutionists. That is obviously part of the cause, but it's the final jump, from a chimp-like ancestor to an upright ape that's unexplained. The fact that apes like chimps forage on the ground a lot, due to competition from monkeys for the fruit in the trees is also on the record, and not really disputed. But something happened to our ancestors, that didn't happen to chimps or gorillas. It might well have been a life transforming weapon or tool use. If it was, it has to be wood, because if it was stone, we would see the evidence. That's my line of thinking, but as I wrote earlier, the chances of any solid evidence turning up are pretty slim, given that the transition probably happened about 7 million years ago, and wooden artefacts are unlikely to last much more than a few decades in an African forest.

But this is just stating the bleedin obvious. You are not making any credible link to bipedalism in our ancestors. Other animals that evolved on the plains, unlike ours, have shown no sign of becoming bipedal, even though they have had the incentive of looking for predators for millions of years. I can't think of one single example. You might quote the ostrich, except that it's obvious that it became bipedal by developing wings, like other birds. When you balance the benefits against costs, it's a non-starter as an explanation for bipedal walking. Apes like our ancestors live in very large troops, with many pairs of eyes, and that's how they effectively spot predators. At any one time, someone will be scanning for trouble, and they give a very loud warning. I've read studies that have found that Leopards actively avoid Chimpanzee territories, because they get spotted so very quickly, and the alarm is so loud that their chances of successfully hunting anything at all are very low. That's not to say that they don't occasionally get lucky, and snatch a chimp, but it's very rare.

Your point is what?

The idea of humans becoming upright to see further on open savanna is a non-starter, to the point of silliness, to me. If you are a small ape, new to the savanna, it may make sense to stand up now and then and look around, but if you walk around upright, you are just making yourself prominent. Lots of prey animals will stand and look around, but they all drop back down to move around. Or you can use a termite mound or a heap of rocks or a tree to scan for danger. Becoming upright for that reason just doesn't cut it. Some of the latest evidence points to the transition to bipedal walking happening in thick dry forest. There is a hominin species, Orrorin Tugensis, that is nearly twice as ancient as Lucy, (Australopithecus Afarensis) , and is more human-like in many ways. There is strong evidence of bipedal walking, but also good evidence of tree climbing. Which points to an animal that lived in a wooded environment, climbed trees for food and protection, but still had a strong selection pressure for becoming bipedal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrorin Using the stick weapon could be an explanation. It would aid males in becoming dominant over their less dextrous rivals, and also help defend the clan against raids by the neighbours. You could have an evolutionary arms race scenario, like the antlers of stags, or the big canines in male Gorillas and Chimps. Skill using weapons would one day replace big canine teeth in fights between our ancestors.

I have no idea what you mean by that post. The media in Britain used to be extremely deferential to the powers that be. They would simply not print anything detrimental to the image of the royal family, for example, until it was widespread public knowledge. The affair of Edward V111 and Wallis Simpson was kept under wraps for ages in the UK for example, while it was common knowledge in the US. Nowadays, there's very little that the press let go, in any field of knowledge, so you get documentaries highly critical of aspects of religion, which would never have been aired in the past. All of the priestly abuse of children for example, would have been hushed up a few years ago, with the collusion of the press barons and journalists alike. Now it's open season. Like I said, it's a gradual change of attitude that's occurred over the last hundred years.

I can't fault your reasoning.

I think there are a hell of a lot of factors at work there. A lot of it is a change in the attitude of the average person, who are now far less inclined to take orders from "above", than their parents. There's a lot more questioning in politics for example, and peoples' allegiances are more mobile than those of their parents. I think a lot of the reason for that is the media, starting with newpapers, then came radio, and now tv and online stuff. Nowadays, people question everything, taking their cue from the media. A hundred years ago, they tended to simply accept authority. Obviously, it varies from family to family, but I think it explains the overall change fairly well. Religions that indoctrinate the kids more intensively generally keep them onside more. Like Mormons and Islam. But even they are not immune to the general change of public attitude to a more questioning one.

The root cause of the rise of atheism, is the drop in intensity of indoctrination of children. Religious belief is about 95% indoctrination, and only 5% choice. ( in my opinion ) People who are less committed, who harbour doubts of their own, are less strident in pushing religion on their children. My parents were Catholics born in Ireland, and the indoctrination was extremely intense when they were kids. I had a catholic upbringing, but it must have been less intense than what my parents got, because I was an atheist before I was ten. ( although I kept it to myself for a while ). I guess a more scientific education helped with me too. Darwin, and Newton and Einstein, and the big bang explanation, all help to confirm what I suspected all along.

Most of the deep ocean is technically desert, and the reason is lack of nutrients. Over time, stuff sinks to the bottom when it dies, and you end up with water so clear that it can't support the basic photosynthesis process. The productive seas are usually shallow, around obstacles like continental shelves and underwater mountains, where the deep currents are forced upwards, bringing up nutrients from down below. You get spectacular productivity in those areas, but they are only a tiny percentage of the ocean surface. I've argued for ages that pumping up sediment from the ocean floor with special ships would pay for itself in fish stocks, and would remove huge amounts of dissolved CO2 from the oceans, as well as relieving extinction pressure on the rarer fish species.

On the question of evidence, there actually IS evidence, but it's indirect. The oldest stone tools are the Oldowan "choppers", going back about two and a half million years. Electron microscopes have found tiny fossilised wooden splinters in the sharp edges of these. If they were chopping wood 2.5 million years ago, sharpening a stick is by far the most likely candidate explanation. I think it's good evidence of spear making from that period, but it could go back double or treble that amount of time. Technology moved pretty slowly back then. You can sharpen a stick just by dragging it around, and that would have surely been the first method.

The sharpened stick is by far the most effective weapon available to hominids at the time of the transition to a bipedal stance. But the chances of one surviving in recognisable form in Africa must be very nearly nil. Spear evidence goes back a lot more than 280,000 years, but nowhere near millions of years. I think these are the current oldest : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_spears There's far more chance of a wooden artefact being preserved in the cool North than a humid African forest. Probably the best chance of evidence of spear use by early hominids would be fossil tracks, like the Laetoli footprints. You might get the impression of a spear being dragged along, or used now and then for balance. But if you are not looking for it, you're not going to find it.

When discussing our ancestors' use or need for weapons, it's tempting to go along with the old "Savannah Hypothesis", because that involves much more contact with the significant predators, than jungle or forest living apes would be used to. The latest evidence is leading more and more towards a transition to upright walking in a heavily forested environment. You don't get many of the major predators in the forest, because the prey are mostly highly agile tree climbers, so the food is very difficult to catch. Chimpanzees suffer very little predation, which is just as well, given their slow rate of reproduction, and it's a fair guess that our ancestors were similar. But, by far the biggest danger to a Chimpanzee, is another Chimpanzee. And that's today, when they are rare. Six million years ago, our ancestors would probably have been much more numerous than modern Chimpanzees, so territorial competition would have been far more intense. The clan next door would have been a constant threat to life, and in my opinion, it would have been that pressure that resulted in the development of weapon and tool technology. By the time they moved out onto Savannah, they would have been pretty proficient at making and using weapons. They wouldn't really have stood a chance without them.

You are missing the fundamental point of the way evolution works, just as they did. Comparing modern humans to chimpanzees is totally irrelevant. Modern humans have had six million years of adapting to the upright stance. Evolution cannot foresee that situation, as I already explained to you. The only way that our four-footed ancestors would become more upright was if there was an evolutionary benefit at the time. Are you claiming that modern chimps could walk more efficiently, if they became a tiny bit more upright? It's a ludicrous suggestion.

This betrays a real lack of understanding of the evolutionary process. Evolution cannot foresee a future advantage. The advantage has to be there, in the present, at all stages. It's a process of tiny incremental changes. Our chimp-like ancestors were clumsy and inefficient on two feet. On four feet they were fast and nimble and more efficient. The more upright they became, the less efficient would have been their locomotion. They became upright in spite of a loss of efficiency. Have you ever seen a chimp walk upright? They tire of it very quickly, because they are simply not built for it. There is no chance whatsoever that efficiency of locomotion had anything to do with the onset of bipedalism. The necessary incremental advantage wasn't there, until millions of years later. Likewise, seeing predators is a silly idea. If you can see them, they can see you, and they are faster and more efficient movers than a little newly-bipedal human ancestor. Also, the idea stems from the savanna hypothesis, which is pretty much defunct, with the newest evidence indicating a change to bipedalism happening in much more heavily wooded environments, where distance vision doesn't count, and tree-climbing ability does. The real factors behind bipedalism are firstly that the history of Apes is generally of an increase in body size and a more upright build. So bipedalism wasn't a sudden event. The two are probably linked. Bigger animals can't run along branches as nimbly as small monkeys and squirrel types. It's probable that as apes got bigger, they would do better standing on one branch, and holding onto higher branches for safety and balance. So a more upright stance is one logical direction for bigger tree dwellers to follow. Another likely factor is the rise of monkeys, at the expense of apes, which is well documented in the fossil record. Monkeys are smaller, quicker and can handle less-ripe fruit than apes, so over millions of years, apes have been losing out to them, because they can beat the apes to the fruit. One way for apes to respond to this situation is to exploit food on the ground, and under it, by eating fungi, and digging out roots etc. So it's quite possible that we should be thanking monkeys for our modern bipedalism.

What I get from your aggressive moderation is a biased intention to stifle my posting on the subject. I could paralyse the thread if I demanded citations for every claim made. I'm not that passionate about it. If you want to kill the debate, you just had your way. Over and out.

Your summary isn't warranted by the article which by the way has all the hallmarks of a study set up to arrive at a certain conclusion, but even so, they say this : This is all hypothetical, and it will take years of experimentation to determine how much of an effect the phytotransferrin-carbonate connection will have on ocean productivity,” cautions McQuaid. “Interestingly, the rapid injection of CO2 in the atmosphere has been tied to several of the earth’s mass extinction events, and these extinctions manifest themselves with particular intensity in the marine environment. Even that statement is deliberately misleading. They want you to conclude that CO2 was the cause of the extinctions, not a result of the cause, which can be volcanic or large impact or both. This is what bugs me about climate scientists/activists. They never miss a chance to give a false impression. Because they KNOW that they won't get ridiculed for it by their peers.

Of course it does. Climate science is ready and waiting. It can even get you a Nobel Prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore

Quite right. Have a Nobel Prize. Have you ever noticed though, that you don't keep getting hotter and hotter under your blanket? (Hint: temp magically levels off !!)

The name doesn't ring a bell. In any case, I've never been anybody's acolyte, so the answer is no. As far as climate change goes, I think that the alarmist faction has a funny fixed idea of a world of "scientists" and "deniers". I personally am perfectly happy to acknowledge that of course CO2 has a well known greenhouse action. What I deny is all of the bullshit that goes with it, that computer models can accurately forecast climate over decades, that CO2 has caused one degree of warming, ( a big fat lie that's constantly repeated) and that warming will only ever have disastrous consequences, if it does happen. So yes, CO2 does catch some escaping heat energy. But NO, it doesn't trap it, as is constantly claimed. It re-emits it. What happens after that isn't accurately known. If it was, climate could be accurately forecast. It's mind-bogglingly arrogant to say that we can't identify an upcoming 18 year halt to warming, but we can confidently forecast the climate for the end of the century. I can't believe how people buy into that crap.