Agriculture and cultural ecology

Guys, I sit here reading your last bits and I can't tell you is making more sense than the others.John the last half of your last post is a bad example: Or rather a good poor example.
Both of you have asserted away without pointing out why you are saying these things.First Spiel says John has contracdicted himself. I can't tell where he did cause Spiel doesn't say so.Then John says Speil has been incoherent but doesn't repeat where or in what way.Then it carries on in this vein.It is extra work to make each post more self contained or refer directly to the relevant previous posts but it makes the argument easier to follow and increases the chances of getting your opponent pinned down.I'm enjoying this one cause I'm not at all sure in my own mind who is where or who is right or wrong. Let's see who can be most convincing.[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 10-09-2003]

Thank you Speel. That presents your views pretty clearly.John? Care to be as clear?I don't remember more than assertions about a big brain being needed for back up and for cooling. Is that what you are claiming?

This is helping. Maybe a summary of a thread every 50 or 60 posts isn't a bad idea.However, let me see if I understand the two positions. Basically the issue is what selective pressure(s) helped start the brain size increase in hour pre-hominid to early hominid ancestors.One side suggest that this was the advantage of tool making and complex omniverous food obtaining methods. The other side says the brain evolved to increase resistance to heat and therefore allowed hunting in hotter weather. I'm a bit confused but it appears that he resistance was obtained by allowing for death due to the heat through redundancy.What is there in the way of evidence to support each side?Not a lot I don't think. It appears that we have evidence that it take very great heating to kill brain cells. The need for redundancy isn't clear to me and the agrument doesn't seem to hang on much else.It has been suggested that the enlarged brain then became co opted for other uses. It is not at all clear to me that it makes sense that a complex *heat producing* structure would evolve to handle a high heat enviroment. Wouldn't large ears have been better?The whole foraging is hard or isn't hard argument seems to be pointless to me. At some point in our evolution the large brain became and advantage from the things it allowed us to do. This may have been fancier weapons and their use, it may have been language, it may have been other socialization. Why can't we keep backing this up to our earliest ancestors? Each increase in size confered some advantage directly from the intellectual capability it gave us.Right now I'm not convinced that the heat resisting redundancy is all that strong an argument.