Aquatic Ape theory?

I disagree when you say "we." H. Floresiensis is a prime example of what you get when you isolate a gene pool. It evolves unique characteristics, like a diminutive stature or physical characteristics adapted to its environment. Those characteristics are specific to that particular cousin in the evolutionary tree, not the default. Besides that, H. Floresiensis isn't even our direct ancestor at all, rather we share a common ancestor with her [them]. There is no known species of primates, alive or extinct, that spend the majority of its life in the water. Of those that do spend more time in watery environments are just as hairy as their cousins. How do you reconcile that?Secondly, if we are directly related to H. Floresiensis, and it is the smoking gun that we are the products of aquatic apes, then why were huge paddle feet, small stature, and not spending a great amount of time in the water, etc, deselected if it was as large of a selective factor as you suggest?As well as humans swim when properly taught, they still have to be taught nonetheless. They are still slow and clumsy in the water, relatively speaking to other aquatic mammals. Why is swimming not innate or intrinsic if it was such a huge selective factor?What compelling evidence actually exists that would even begin to allude to water being the dominant factor in why the Homo genus began to lose its hair? This is all very theoretical and I am not seeing a connection. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

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"Political correctness is tyranny with manners." -- Charlton Heston

Blue Jay says:"Timeframe doesn't matter. You've pointed out three examples of things that are not on our direct line of descent. So, even if those animals are adapting to the water (and, as RAZD has argued, they are not), what does this mean for us? The animals that fit between us and those monkeys in the Tree of Life are not aquatic, so, clearly, their aquaticism is not related to any putative aquaticism in our heritage.They're irrelevent."Granted, the three monkeys I described are not in our direct lineage. I can't say I read anything Raz wrote that counters what these monkeys are doing. The three monkey's behavior are well documented.Given that we are primates, what these monkeys irrefutably demonstrate are:1) Primates can learn, or change, to wade in the water at long distances upright. They can use this erect stance to maneuver overhead food. This can be seen using the net.http://www.arkive.org/...key/nasalis-larvatus/video-06c.html2) Primates can learn to escape from predators by jumping into water, and dive under the water.Allen's Swamp Monkeys - Facts, Information & Habitat3) Primates can learn to open a vast new food source through exploring under the water.Allen's Swamp Monkeys - Facts, Information & HabitatPlease read the material and watch the videos. There is no reason to worry whether these animals have any relationship to us or not. The above literature, and film just prove positively primates can and do utilize water resources. What a monkey can do, an ape can do better. Just the other day I watched a nature program where chimps were enjoying a fun time in a pool formed in a depression after a rain.I am not saying this is PROOF Ardi, or any hominem DID swim, and dive. I am just saying they certainly COULD HAVE.

Hi Bluejay, The savannah theory is that ape ancestors were forced to adapt to the savannah as it became the dominant ecology at one time, and that our hominid ancestors adapted by standing up so they could see over the top of the grass, to see predators and prey.This is falsified by Ardi standing and walking before the ecological change occurred.Enjoy.

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Sorry I made the impression I meant we evolved from the Hobbit. The point I was trying to drive through is, this primitive hominid got where they were on Flores through generations making slow progression from Africa. Cladistics put the Hobbit just above H habilis. I would suspect that is what they started out as H Habilis, who died out more than a million years before, and ended up as miraculous survivors on Flores. There, it sure looks to me evolution favored fast in and under water travel over land travel.

Ah, like that. Yes, ompletely correct. I thought you were saying that Neanderthals lost their hair because they had begun wearing hides, and that in this manner, with them being our ancestors, we lost our hair as well.Now that I look at it this way, yes that makes sense. You were right to bring this up.

I realize Arrogantape hasn't been around for awhile, but there was a new study published recently that is rather pertinent to this discussion that we were having. This article details a new analysis of the put forward for Ardipithecus as a woodland species.This re-analysis shows that the region Ardipithecus inhabited was clearly a savannah, with perhaps 5% to 25% tree cover. They are careful not to say that they support the "Savannah Hypothesis" (in fact, I think they reject the hypothesis themselves), but they do say that this data does nothing to refute it at all.So, an alternative explanation for the earliest human evolutionary stages is not currently required or indicated.Edited by Bluejay, : Subtitle

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

I just had an OPLL operation. That is a major operation on the spine, the neck in my case.As in any peer review of a science paper there will be questions raised. The paper you latched onto is an opinion. Dr. White countered that the monkeys found in the same dig were leaf eating forest monkeys. He agrees that grasslands were in the vicinity, but Ardi was adapted to climbing. Like Dr. White says, Ardi wasn't specialized to climb grass.I guess you can say Dr. White was a bit testy in his reply.Here is a paper that agrees with me concerning h Floresiensis:http://www.ldi5.net/cerbi/24h.htm

Hi, Arrogantape. I hope everything went okay. You still seem your chipper, witty self, so I'll assume it went well.----- I didn't really "latch onto" it: I just wanted to throw it out there.And, it's an opinion paper with a statistical analysis in it.----- By definition, savannahs have trees in them. Therefore, they also have tree-dwelling animals in them.----- ...and for walking, too. Ardipithecus is an intermediate form, after all.And, savannahs are intermediates between forests and grasslands: they are therefore great places to harbor the evolution of grassland apes from forest apes.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Thank you, Bluejay. Actually, I am wearing a rather spacey neck brace. Fused bones have to mend, and that will take another 4 weeks to two more months. I am not dragging my right leg around anymore.The leaf eating monkeys and apes seem to all live in forests, or am I missing someone? Baboons are the real treed savannah monkey. They are well adapted to run fast for the tree, and scamper up. We have all seen that awful pictorial in National Geographic of a baboon that was caught by a leopard.The reconstruction art depicting Ardi sure doesn't look like a plains warrior. She looks like she going to offer her hand in greeting; artistic license I suppose.I really like our discussions. My back is starting to ache, so, bye for now.

Thanks, Bluejay. ... and followed by

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... Cerling acknowledges Ardi could have lived in a wooded river corridor, but it was a river that flowed through savanna.

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"It wasn't a pure grassland, and it wasn't forest either," says Brown, dean of the University of Utah College of Mines and Earth Sciences and distinguished professor of geology and geophysics....

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... and instead indicate tropical grasses made up 43 percent to 77 percent of the ecosystem.

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... For all sites, the median amount of tropical grass by biomass produced was 40 percent to 60 percent -- hardly a forest, he says.

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That, to me, doesn't sound like it is "clearly savannah" but rather a mixed environment. Seems to me an argument over whether the glass is half empty or half full.The kind of ecological opportunity that I would expect an already bi-pedal ape to take advantage of, compared to quadra-pedal cousins. True, what they are saying is that the Savannah theory can't be ruled out by the evidence.What it does mean though - in my opinion - is that the original Savannah hypothesis still needs to be revised to fit this evidence.The original theory was that ape ancestors moved onto the Savannah, and then became bipedal.Here we have an emerging Savannah ecology with an opportunity to expand into open areas, while still having places of refuge in groups of trees ... and the ancestors are already bi-pedal.Thus bi-pedal locomotion still precedes the full savannah ecology. The human ancestors moved into the Savannah because they were already adapted for bi-pedal locomotion.This is consistent with other information I've seen from other sources as well.http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2008/03/080320183657.htm
Chimp-sized hominid walked upright on two leg | EurekAlert!Both these articles refer to a 6 million year old thigh bone that is evidence of a bi-pedal gait, andhttp://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc97/10_18_97/fob1.htmis about a 9 to 7 million year old apelike animal that may have spent much of its time standing upright.Thus it is not surprising to me to find an already bi-pedal ape inhabiting an emerging Savannah habitat, pre-adapted to take advantage of the new opportunities.Enjoy.

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Hi, RAZD. Well, a "mixed environment" is what a savannah is. So, my saying that it was clearly a savannah was my saying it was clearly a "mixed environment." (It was also supposed to be my presenting somebody else's conclusion, but it didn't come off that way).I think the savannah model fits this geographic evidence perfectly. There were tree-climbing, forest apes in the forests; bipedal, grassland apes in the grasslands; and now, bipedal/tree-climbing apes in the savannahs.This makes it a nice intermediary. I always thought this was the basic idea of the Savannah Hypothesis.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi Bluejay, Like I said, it seems to be an argument over whether the glass is half full or half empty. Again the issue is when bipedalism evolved. The (original) Savannah Theory states that bipedalism evolved as an adaptation to the Savannah.This means you should find Savannah ecology before you find bipedalism.The original theory has been modified to fit more modern evidence of earlier and earlier bipedalism:http://sssf.byethost31.com/evolution/501856.htm

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Basically, the theory states that between 5 and 8 million years ago, at the end of the Miocene epoch, a drying period enveloped equatorial Africa. As a result of this drying, the Miocene forest began to shrink, forcing the apes to begin to make the transition to a terrestrial way of life. ... The original theory, in the strictest sense, confined itself to the open grassland-savannah as an available niche for the transition to the bipedal hominids.

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Adaptation of bipedalism due to the changing ecology.

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... Today, however, most scientist conclude that this transition took place in a woodland-savannah where the developing hominids could move about on the grassland and still escape to the forest when threatened by predators. ...

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Note the distinction in types\grades\levels of savannah - more like a spectrum than discrete differences. Half full or half empty.The essential problem is that we already see bipedalism in the earliest savannah ecologies (and earlier?), suggesting that the hominid ancestors were already pre-adapted for bipedalism, and that this allowed them to take advantage of the emerging ecology better than their non-bipedal cousins (simple natural selection in action).This means you should find bipedalism before you find Savannah ecology.The evidence is not conclusive yet, but it hints in this direction.Enjoy.

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Wow, another primitive bipedal on an island, in the Mediterranean sea, no less. Savannah, or no, this critter, or it's grand pappy, as well as great grand spawn, swam to islands. This is another confounding item hard to explain without admitting our upright stature enables swimming and diving just as well as carrying groceries.This is a quote from a description of a cave site at 72 thousand years ago, just 3 thousand years after the VE1-8 super volcano wiped out nearly everyone. This epochal event is interesting to me. It is where they found remnants of tiny seashell strung jewelry, and ochre."The people who used Blombos were not permanent residents. The artifactsmostly stone spear points and scrapers, seashells, and butchered animal bonesreveal that small groups stayed at the cave for weeks at a time to hunt and gather food. They’d collect abalone, mussels, and other shellfish from the tidal flats, trap rodents, and hunt antelope and fur seals. After they moved on to a new spot, sand would blow into the cave, covering the belongings the group left behind. What we are looking at is almost a snapshot of life 70,000 or 100,000 years ago, says Henshilwood. We are trying to reconstruct human behavior in the past from a really limited set of information that we have available to us today.

Hi arrogantape,I'm afraid you're a little mixed up. The Blombos cave is at the south tip of africahttp://www.svf.uib.no/sfu/blombos/

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Blombos Cave (BBC), situated near Still Bay in the southern Cape, South Africa (34025’S, 21013’E), is some 100 m from the coast and 35 m above sea level.

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Creationists should note the dating section, and the number of different methods used that all result in similar dates.New Finds at Blombos Cave

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IN a cramped cave that looks out across the swell of the Indian Ocean, South African archaeologists are unearthing evidence of Middle Stone Age people well ahead of their time. The prehistoric occupants were painting their bodies red for rituals and carving abstract symbols. They were fishing and using bone awls, perhaps for leather working.
Further excavations highlighted the Blombos people's sophistication - implements of ground and polished animal bone. At 80,000 to 100,000 years old, these are among the oldest bone tools in Africa, and much older than shaped tools discovered elsewhere. Although our ancestors worked stone 2.5 million years ago, they learnt relatively late that bone could be fashioned into something useful. But, as with stone technology, it looks as though the idea started in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Fishing is another activity humans invented late in prehistory, and Blombos has the earliest evidence for that, too. ...

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Further afield, it looks as though Homo sapiens was smart enough to travel by sea from Indonesia to Australia about 60,000 years ago. The fossil remains, and genetic analyses of living people, point to an origin for our species somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa about 150,000 years ago, and the first dispersals of Homo sapiens out of Africa perhaps 50,000 years later. ...

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Blombos Cave and the Creativity of Early Modern Humans

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Then, evidence of an earlier flourishing of the creative mind began to appear, in southern Africa south of the Zambezi River, dated to the Middle Stone Age, 70,000 years ago and more. Similar artifact collection typesknown as assemblages in archaeological parlancealled Howiesons Poort and Stillbay have been found at sites such as the Klasies River Caves, Boomplaas, and Die Kelders Cave I in South Africa.

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These sites included sophisticated bone tools, backed blades, a careful selection of raw material for stone tools and the use of a punch technique; but most of these were controversial in one respect or another. That was until Blombos Cave.

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Since 1991, South African researchers led by Christopher Henshilwood have been working at the Blombos Cave site. Artifacts found there include sophisticated bone and stone tools, fish bones, and an abundance of used ochre. Ochre has no known economic function; it is almost universally accepted as a source of color for ceremonial, decorative purposes. The Blombos Cave layers containing used ochre are dated 70,000 to 80,000 years before the present. Most recently (April of 2004), a cluster of deliberately perforated and red-stained shell beads dating to the Middle Stone Age has been found, and is being interpreted as personal ornaments or jewelry for the occupants of Blombos.

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The best and most likely interpretation of these finds, and numerous others throughout Africa, is that the growth of the human symbolic thought was a slow process that continued throughout the Middle Stone Age in Africa. How that flourishing of creative thought left Africa is still under discussion, but one way may have been through the Southern Dispersal Route.

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If this is the earliest evidence of hominid fishing and shell gathering, then it is significantly late in the scheme of hominid evolution ... evidence that hominids had evolved into early Homo sapiens before this behavior was developed, rather than being a defining behavior that affected early hominids becoming human.Southern Dispersal Route: How Humans First Left Africa

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The Southern Dispersal Route refers to a theory concerning an early migration of modern human beings from southern Africa to the east along the coastlines of Africa, Arabia and India to Australia and Melanesia between about 70,000 and 45,000 years ago. ...

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The theory goes that modern H. sapiens with a generalized subsistence strategy based on hunting and gathering coastal resources (shellfish, fish, sea lions and rodents, as well as bovids and antelope), traveled along the coasts eastward. ...

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Interesting reading.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : /qs

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I was writing about two entirely different things. Reading back, I was surprised I had done so. Since, I have been told the effects of heavy anesthesia can linger for months. It seems true.The upright femur found in Italy is a site once an offshore island. The species (Oreopithecus) of that individual who left evidence of upright mobility certainly swam from a mainland to the island. The important lesson of this is our upright stance allows us to walk upright and to swim rather well over long distances. No one can deny this.My second thought train went off track to the 70,000 year old Blobose site, a cave overlooking the shore. We can look at 75,000 as the barrier where only a tribe or two survived the horrible conditions that lasted as much as two years.There is no doubt that in five thousand years, humans had made inland excursions. It was a long gestation of 25,000 years, though, before humans striking out of Africa along the southern Indian and Asian shores to Australia. Now, that surprises me.