Oh look, more bollocks.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Good points DH. However, this is about "defensive biting" remember. The whole idea being that if you don't have teeth to defend yourself with, you must be reliant on weapons - regardless of all the other possibilities (climbing, numbers, predator avoidance etc etc). All the other things are just blithely discounted in favour of this idea, despite there being no evidence to back it up.

Not only that, but there's an obsessive focus from jayjay on predator-defence being the driving factor behind tool development, as opposed to it being one of many factors, and quite possibly not the most important one.

As to Sendrak’s point, Australopithecus lacked a big toe set far back from the other toes and so able to grasp branches like a baboon or chimp.

Ahem, it was determined as far back as 1978 that the phenotype of Australopithecus is most closely matched by the present day bonobo, a species that is eminently able to climb trees. The requisite paper covering this is this one :

Pygmy Chimpanzee As A Possible Prototype For The Common Ancestor Of Chimps, Humans And Gorillas by Adrienne L. Zihlman, John E. Cronin, Douglas L. Cramer & Vincent M.Sarich, Nature, 275: 744-746 (26th October 1978) DOI: 10.1038/275744a0

Zihlman et al, 1978 wrote:A CONVINCING theory of human origins must clarify man's relationships with living primates and with the ancestral forms known only through fossils. Phylogenetic relationships have previously been determined mainly by anatomical similarities, but now, biochemical similarities provide independent criteria for evolutionary relationships. Albumin and transferrin immunology, immunodifrusion, DNA annealing and amino acid analysis all indicate that chimpanzees, gorillas and humans share a substantial common ancestry, and that the Asiatic apes (gibbons and orangutans) diverged earlier from this lineage1–3. These findings directly conflict with the more widely held view that all the great apes diverged from a common ancestor long after the ‘Origin’ of the evolutionary line leading to modern humans4. The molecular data consistently suggest a much more recent origin of the man–chimpanzee–gorilla separation than was previously imagined, namely, in the range of 4–6 M yr ago3,5. These data show that, although the two chimpanzee species (Pan paniscus and P. troglodytes) are biochemically distinct, they are more closely related to each other than either is to humans or gorillas6,7. The chimpanzees speciated, then, after the initial three-way split. We therefore, here contend that, among living species, the pygmy chimpanzee (P. paniscus) offers us the best prototype of the prehominid ancestor. Biochemical, morphological, behavioural and palaeontological data support this proposition and argue for a relatively recent and accelerated divergence of the hominid from the pongid line.

Looks like your assertions are unravelling again in the face of DATA.

Moving on ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:There’s no evidence they lived in larger groups than baboons or chimps

All they needed to do was live in sufficiently large groups. Which could have involved numbers comparable to chimps or baboons, or possibly smaller groups of 10 to 20 individuals. Plus, since social living is a common feature of vast swathes of primate taxa, it's reasonable to conclude the Australopithecus inherited this social living habit from its primate ancestors, particularly as later fossil hominids left behind evidence of existing in social groups. It would be a strange development for Australopithecus to abandon social living, only for later descendant taxa therefrom to reacquire this trait. It's far more reasonable to conclude that social living persisted through all the requisite lineages.

Once again, DATA destroys your assertions.

Jayjay4547 wrote:there is no evidence that numbers on their own are effective against predation on primates anyway.

Numbers are a pretty effective strategy for baboons keeping predators at bay in the daytime, as you yourself kept telling us in so many earlier posts, particularly when the individuals in a group coordinate their actions. Another of those postulates for which we have support through DATA. Leopards have a habit of being more cautious when approaching a group of baboons in the daytime, but will readily seize the opportunity to pick off lone baboons that stray too far from the social group. Of course, the situation changes dramatically once night time arrives, and leopards can bring both their superior night vision and superior night time alertness to bear. As once again evidenced by the DATA.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Nor is it clear how Australopithecus might have been better at predator avoidance than other primates.

I seem to recall Treves & Palmqvist provided plenty of mechanisms in their paper, almost all of which you avoided addressing when you quote mined that paper.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Their short blunt canines would make them seem like sitting ducks compared with other higher primates

Not if they have other means of dealing with predators. Such as hiding, or placing themselves out of reach, or being in a vigilant social group that has numerous sets of sensors looking for trouble, and the means to pass on the alarm to others in the group. The mere fact that the Genus persisted for over 1½ million years tells us that they weren't the "sitting ducks" you imagine.

Jayjay4547 wrote:who in addition to their other high competences, ARE dangerous to attack.

Once again, there are plenty of organisms in existence that pose little or no retaliatory threat to predators, but which manage to avoid predation in sufficient numbers to continue the species in question. Indeed, NO organism is an acme of perfection in this regard - any organisms that did achieve this state would explode in numbers to the point of eliminating its food source. All that is required, is for a sufficient number of organisms to be sufficiently competent in this regard, to last long enough to breed. If the rate at which a species produces offspring equals its attrition rate, then it's going to persist even if lots of individuals of that species end up being eaten. This is a complete red herring on your part, one that demonstrates a truly woeful ignorance of basic biology.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Unless one draws the staringly obvious inference that Australopithecus used hand held weapons to make themselves dangerous to attack.

Except that this assertion isn't "staringly obvious", it's a fantasy on your part, a fantasy totally unsupported by any DATA. NO tools recognisable as weapons have been found accompanying Australopithecus fossils, nor have any tools recognisable as weapons been found dating back 3½ million years. Tools recognisable as weapons only put in an appearance about 100,000 years ago, long after Australopithecus had disappeared from the scene and been replaced by descendants in other Genera. Even though it's taken time to unearth the fossils we have, scientists have been pretty diligent about this, and if Australopithecus had genuinely been the habitual weapon user you assert, those weapons would almost certainly have been found by now, even given the practical constraints scientists operate under in certain parts of Africa when looking for fossils. Likewise, fossils of coeval predators bearing bone marks indicative of weapon-inflicted injury would have turned up as well.

The absence of recognisable weapons of relevant age isn't even the killer piece of data destroying your fantasy. What really kills your fantasy stone dead, is the fact that no recognisable weapons appear in the tool assemblages left by many LATER hominids. If Australopithecus had developed weapons, you'd think that hominid lineages appearing after australpithecus would also have left behind their own assemblages of weapons. The fossil record would be yielding these in sone quantity if they were present. Yet, the oldest tools bearing the genuine hallmarks of weaponry only put in an appearance just 100,000 years or so ago.

Indeed, Australopithecus presents to us via its fossils, DATA telling us that the few tools it did use, were food preparation tools, a feature that it shares with vast swathes of taxa right across the present family tree of extant organisms. Likewise, the modifications to dentition are driven primarily by DIET, because, oh wait, that's the primary purpose of teeth, namely to process food.

Your fantasy is stone dead, JayJay.

Jayjay4547 wrote:As to your point, (which like Sendrak’s is a good example of smudgism: ie. smudging over or denying pattern)-

As opposed to your repeated denial of pattern, particularly when the DATA says your assertions are horseshit? Pot, kettle, black much?

Jayjay4547 wrote:the significance of tool using predator defence isn’t about it being more important so much as about it being particular.

Waffle.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s common for animals to use foreign objects to build nests, to dig up tubers, to carry into nests to feed fungi- etc etc etc. Each of these uses has its particular implications.

And each of these leaves behind recognisable wear patterns upon the tools that point to the usage in question. Wear patterns that can be analysed, to provide us with DATA confirming those usages. Except that NO SUCH DATA exists supporting your fantasy assertions here.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And the use of hand weapons instead of teeth for defence against largish successful mammal predators would have had a number of logical consequences, one of them being lessening of constraints against increasing brain size and slow brain maturation associated with language.

So why have genuinely determinable weapons only been found dating back 100,000 years before present, long after that brain size increase had occurred?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s actually essential to my argument that Australopithecus was embedded in the food chain, like modern baboons. That’s the “niche” they lived in, and the problem for which they had blindly stumbled upon a bizarre solution- partial as it is for all living things- how to eat WITHOUT being eaten.

But 'how to eat without being eaten' is merely a subset of the actual 'question' of life of 'how to survive and adequately reproduce'./You just happen to be blindly obsessed with teeth.

By all means rephrase or extend how I adapted Holford-Sterven’s title “Eating or Being Eaten”. How about “Eat without being eaten for long enough to reproduce” . I was more interested in how oddly inappropriate the original title was and how economically it could be refocused on the actual condition of living things.

Er no, your own admission of puzzlement earlier in the thread refutes this latest assertion.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m not blindly obsessed with teeth.

Yes you are. More correctly, you're obsessed with a caricature of dentition biology in which diet is purportedly fucking irrelevant, and what matters instead is whether or not an organism starts building fucking crossbows. The spectacle of persistent fantasising, coupled with mendacious avoidance of contradictory DATA, and manifest ignorance of even elementary biological principles, that is presented by your posts and its ex recto assertions, is truly pathetic to behold.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m kinda fascinated by how intelligent people can work each other into a state of denying such plain evidence as the shape of teeth.

Except that, oh wait, to those of us who paid attention in biology class, tooth shape is primarily forged by DIET. The evidence for this across vast swathes of vertebrate taxa, all the way from lampreys to humans, is overwhelming. Indeed, I've told you in the past, how neglecting this elementary fact, led some past fish taxonomists to arrive at erroneous conclusions with respect to Cichlid phylogeny, erroneous conclusions that were corrected by Dr Humphrey Greenwood at the Natural History Museum in London, when he warned those taxonomists that neglecting to take into account usage wear upon the teeth of type specimens, had resulted in numerous taxa being incorrectly assigned. Indeed, this was one area where aquarists such as myself came to the rescue, by providing material that allowed the real nature of Cichlid dentition to be elucidated, and contrasted with past taxonomic work, courtesy of the provision of embryonic specimens allowing a complete history of tooth development to be constructed for many species. As a result, workers in the field now know that they have to be aware not only of developmental plasticity in Cichlid lineages, but the emergence of usage wear patterns that cause morphological changes in adult teeth, capable of misleading the unwary. I carpet bombed your assertions back to the fucking primaeval slime way back on page 31, with a massive swathe of scientific papers covering this topic in this post, wto which you responded with duplicitous hand-waving and more ex recto assertions.

Now, if actual research scientists were capable of making mistakes of this sort in the past, mistakes which have now been corrected by relevant diligent research, what makes you think that your data-free fantasies should take precedence over the work of those same, far more knowledgeable research scientists? Especially when those far more knowledgeable scientists spend long hours, indeed in some cases long decades, striving to ensure that they're handling the DATA properly? Only this is all you have to offer here: "my assertions count for more than actual DATA".

Jayjay4547 wrote:It took me a long time to find a particular sentence that would provoke “rationalists” into blatant irrational behaviour:

In case you never read the memo, JayJay, the real irrational behaviour on display here, consists of your continued peddling of repeatedly destroyed fantasy assertions as purportedly constituing fact. They don't. All the DATA says that they don't. The DATA destroys your assertions wholesale.

Jayjay4547 wrote:"The short blunt canines of Australopithecus shows that they had abandoned defensive biting, that makes other higher primates dangerous to attack.”

Your continued robotic parroting of this fantasy is the really irrational action taking place in this thread, JayJay. Being bored shitless with you continuing to parrot this repeatedly destroyed drivel non stop for over three fucking years isn't "irrational" in the slightest. Neither is presenting the DATA that keeps destroying this retarded fantasy you keep peddling.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: And anyway, when it comes to hominim tool development, your 'how to eat' points to all kinds of tool uses which can be developed gradually, with immediate and obvious payoffs for the developer all along the way, rather than your pathetic image of humans carrying weapons around constantly and habitually training with them simply for the with the goal of preparing themselves for future occasional potential predator-defence combat.

Not humans, Australopithecus. A biped with a brain no bigger than that of a modern chimpanzee, that not only couldn’t speak, but doubtless foraged as silently as baboons do.

Except, wait for it, NO DATA EXISTS SUPPORTING THIS ASSERTION.

ALL of the data extant with respect to genuinely determinable weaponry, is of recent vintage, 100,000 years old or less. NO older weapons have ever been found, and given the amount of palaeontological excavation that has taken place over the past century, one would think that any weapons of earlier vintage that did genuinely exist, would have been unearthed by now, subject to requisite usage wear analysis, and determined via said analysis genuinely to be weapons.

You have nothing here of this standard to present. All you have to offer, is tiresome and frankly puerile robotic parroting of repeatedly destroyed assertions. You're a one-trick pony with an act that was pathetic to watch even at the start, and which simply became boring to the point of irritation with its stubborn continued pursuit.

Jayjay4547 wrote:There are few tool uses with such immediate and obvious payoffs as changing the mind of a predator that had decided to attack you or your relative.

Oh, so all those instances of food gathering and preparation tool usage right across the biosphere are an irrelevance in the world of your fantasy apologetic fabrications?

Except that to those of us who paid attention in biology class, they're somewhat more important.

Jayjay4547 wrote:As to your gradual development, the chimp use of tools should be seen as a suggestive failure, not some precursor to what didn’t in fact happen with them.

I'm pretty sure that the chimps don't regard it as "failure" when their tool usage secures them a tasty meal.

Jayjay4547 wrote:When it is humans who carry weapons, that is not a pathetic image; it’s a significant warning to keep out of their way. We see habitual training in weapon use by modern humans as befits modern weapons: ie youths with video games and paint guns.

Oh wait, once again, the DATA tells us that weapon usage was a recent arrival on the hominid stage, courtesy of those genuinely determinable weapons that were dated to no older than 100,000 years before present. This DATA alone kicks your assertions in the balls with size 12 Doc Martens bearing titanium toe caps.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Well the modern “enemy” is human rather than a habituated predator.

Well, that's a topic deserving of its own encyclopaedia, let alone its own forum thread. Which on its own tells those of us who understand how to conduct discourse properly, not to launch into glib assertions on the subject. Not that this will stop you doing so in future I don't doubt.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Because of the attention-drawing noise associated with a stick fight I suspect that juvenile Australopithecus played/competed with each other near their sleeping refuges, which would have been already familiar to their predators.

Er, excuse me, but wouldn't drawing attention to one's sleeping refuges be the LAST thing a competent species does? Even fucking baboons know better than this.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Atheist ideology has led to scientists not noticing the creative path followed by our own ancestors even when it has been staring them in the face for 90 years. Because it doesn’t conform to a narrative of self-creation.

Which is still nonsense when discussing the idea of whether australopiths used weapons for self defence or not. The atheist ideology has zero bearing on this discussion and neither, for that matter, does the notion as to whether there was some external intervention by a deity or what not.

Neither have anything to do with this subject and the only reason anyone would keep referring to this nonsensical concept of an "atheist ideology" is solely to do with their inability to evidence or argue their position effectively.

Basically the use of "atheist ideology" in this thread amounts to little more than "I have neither evidence nor compelling argument."

Oh, he's back to his "atheist ideology" bullshit is he? I wondered when this product of diseased creationist imagining would put in a re-appearance.

Apart from the fact that he's been schooled repeatedly on the elementary fact that not treating made up shit as fact isn't a fucking "ideology", neither is taking account of the vast mountains of DATA that he ignores when peddling his tiresome fantasies. Such as the DATA that the primary determinant of dental morphology is diet, and that any changes thereto not associated with diet are accompanied by perfectly adequate explanations supported by evidence. His whole "atheist ideology" fabrication is nothing more than another predictable blatant and specious creationist attempt to hand-wave away the DATA supporting those genuine alternative explanations, by misrepresenting the acceptance of that DATA as purportedly being the product of some presupposition-driven malice, when it's nothing of the sort. Said exercise in blatant misrepresentation being pulled out of his rectal passage, of course, whilst hoping no one will notice the manner in which he ignores vast swathes of DATA destroying his manifestly ideological presuppositions.

Then of course, there's that other strawman caricature he keeps erecting, that those of us who paid attention in biology classes somehow didn't notice the appearance of novelty in the biosphere. Far from denying the existence of "creative processes", as he duplicitously asserts, we recognise that EVOLUTION IS A GIGANTIC CREATIVE PROCESS, one that accounts spectacularly well for the appearance of novelty in the biosphere, and one moreover that demonstrates on a grand scale that testable natural processes are sufficiently "creative" to perform the task without any intervention by merely asserted fantastic entities. None of us who have read scientific papers on such topics as de novo gene origination, speciation, etc., could possibly think otherwise when appraising this DATA in an honest manner. WE are the ones arguing here that real, testable creative processes exist, instead of trying to peddle the ignorant notion that some form of magic is needed to account for the biosphere. WE are the ones providing the DATA pointing to real creative processes in the biosphere, and it's long overdue for this lie he keeps peddling, that we're purportedly failing to recognise genuine creative processes at work in the biosphere, to be nailed once and for all.

In short, the beautifully elegant and easily comprehended creative process that is evolution, can be summed up as follows:

[1] Generate a new feature;

[2] If it doesn't work, discard it;

[3] If it does work, keep it and build upon it in future generations.

It's that fucking simple. It's a notion that an astute primary school child can understand, not least because we apply the very same process to so many of our own activities. Indeed, every major human endeavour has been built upon this foundation, namely trying something, discarding the failures, and building upon the successes. Every "design" activity that humans have ever pursued has followed this path, from the shaping of Palaeolithic stone tools to the construction of manned spacecraft. Indeed, the frequently observed creationist habit, emanating from the American corporate capitalist branch of creationism, of trying to present mature technologies that have benefited from long prior periods of trial and error, as purportedly supporting their fatuous assertions about a "design" process that has never been observed taking place anywhere, apart from being another piece of discoursive mendacity, fails because of the vast quantity of DATA telling us how "design" is actually done in the real world. Trial and error is so integral not only to our own activities, but to the biosphere as a whole, that the only reason people continue to treat dribblingly encephalitic mythological assertions as fact, is because they've been criminally subject to the mushroom method of ideological control by creationist propagandists - keep them in the dark and shovel shit on them.

We don't need magic, we don't need imaginary magic men, and we don't need bullshit arising from a combination of ignorance about this fact, and duplicity on the part of those profiting from that ignorance.

In answer to this:

Jayjay4547 wrote:We can observe our condition of being embedded in an ongoing process but science can’t tell us why.

Poppycock. Science has told us why we're in the circumstances we are, namely because certain laws of physics exist that permit those circumstances. Those laws of physics give rise to the chemistry that underpins life, and that chemistry in turn permits the emergence of new and interesting permutations of organic molecules. Those new and interesting permutations of organic molecules in turn permit the emergence of autonomous organisms, and the emergence of new features within those organisms. Whichever of those new features happens to work, becomes the foundation for more of the same.

Once again, we don't need merely asserted imaginary magic entities to understand this, or at least, those of us who paid attention in science classes don't.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Religion as the view up the hierarchy to a supposed pole

Despite the fact that said "pole" is merely asserted to exist ... but that's all religion ever does, is assert that reality purportedly conforms to its fantasies, without bothering with the tedious business of asking reality if this is actually the case.

Jayjay4547 wrote:can present visions of the “end” of the process in both senses of purpose and of termination.

Again, all merely asserted. The fun part being that NO evidence for a "purpose" decreed from on high exists. It's a fantasy that people cling to when they're insuficiently mature to face the real world as it actually is. Atoms don't have a "purpose", they simply interact with each other, and some of those interactions result in us.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I see these presentations as like painting the ceiling of a cave we live in

Correction, it's more like pretending that the cave painting constitutes the reality outside the cave, without bothering to venture outside and check if this is the case.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and that there is something transcendent in that effort.

Bollocks. The idea that making shit up is "transcendent", is another one of those palsied fantasies supernaturalists routinely engage in. Making shit up is good fun, which is why human beings do it. But treating made up shit as fact isn't fun, because it leads to all manner of horrors. We have a large body of evidence pointing to this.

We all enjoy good fiction, but there comes a time when one has to learn the difference between fiction and fact. This is something supernaturalists tend to have a hard time with.

In short, they prefer made up shit to fact.

Oh look, more bollocks.

Time to have some fun with this ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Not only that, but there's an obsessive focus from jayjay on predator-defence being the driving factor behind tool development, as opposed to it being one of many factors, and quite possibly not the most important one.

As to your point, (which like Sendrak’s is a good example of smudgism: ie. smudging over or denying pattern)- the significance of tool using predator defence isn’t about it being more important so much as about it being particular. It’s common for animals to use foreign objects to build nests, to dig up tubers, to carry into nests to feed fungi- etc etc etc. Each of these uses has its particular implications. And the use of hand weapons instead of teeth for defence against largish successful mammal predators would have had a number of logical consequences, one of them being lessening of constraints against increasing brain size and slow brain maturation associated with language.

But you were proposing a defensive-weapon-dominated development hypothesis.

The word ”hypothesis” implies originality and going beyond current information

Actually, the word hypothesis, when used properly, implies a diligent attempt to provide an explanation for DATA. Your made up shit doesn't qualify as a hypothesis, because it ignores vast swathes of DATA that render your made up shit null and void. Such as, for example, the fact that hominids ANTECEDENT to Australopithecus, such as Sahelanthropus, ALSO had small canines, yet exhibit NO evidence of tool use. This organism dates back to 6 million years before present, and NO recognisable tools dating that far back have ever been found. So, the existence of a previous hominid with small canines, that never used tools over a 3 million year period, destroys your made up shit wholesale.

Jayjay4547 wrote:But my point is(a) that the lack of fangs in Australopithecus should have immediately created the inference that they instead used hand held weapons that made them dangerous to attack.

Bollocks. First of all, there are plenty of organisms that don't possess big canines, and which don't use tools. Second, Sahelanthropus had small canines, but never once during its 3 million year history left behind evidence of tool use. Oh dear, there goes your fantasy once again, destroyed by DATA.

Jayjay4547 wrote:What actually happened instead, (amongst those who accepted Australopithecus as significant in human evolution) was that they (Dart and Broom in South Africa) immediately leaped over the obvious made up shit inference

Fixed it for you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:to hypothesise about Australopithecus using weapons to hunt.

Except that the DATA tells us, once again, that NO recognisable hunting weapons associated with ANY hominids have been found that are more than 100,000 years old. This piece of DATA destroys your sad little fantasy about weapon-wielding Australopithecines. As does the DATA telling us that earlier hominids with small canines, such as Sahelanthropus, never used tools of any sort for 3 million years. Your fantasy is dead in the water, holed below the waterline by the above DATA.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So they immediately built a story line about our ancestors imposing their will on the world as opposed to reacting to the will of outside species.

Bullshit. This is YOUR fantasy assertion, not that of the requisite scientists, and one you have been repeatedly exposed as duplicitously misattributing to those scientists. Your entire apologetics here is nothing but fabrications and lies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:At the same time Northern hemisphere scientists remote from the data and the wild context that produced that data, just airbrushed the genus out of significance.

More bullshit and lies. Oh wait, one of those Northern Hemisphere scientists was the very same Robert Broom, whom you've tried to claim above somehow failed to understand what was really going on, because he didn't treat your made up shit as fact. The people who actually objected to Australopithecus being an ancestral hominid back in the 1920s and 1930s, when the available DATA was far less complete than today, were anthropologists. Furthermore, those objections were raised in an era when the collection of hominid fosils was far less extensive than in the present, and lo and behold, it was the emergence of those later fossils that helped settle the matter. Once again, the thinking involved was driven by DATA, not your fantasy fabrications about "atheist ideology" or the rest of the bullshit you're soiling the thread with here.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your intent is pretty much the same.

Lies. Oh wait, no one here has claimed that Australopithecus isn't a valid hominid ancestor, whether a direct ancestor or a sister taxon thereto. All we've rejected is your data-free fantasies and ex recto assertions.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Secondly that word “dominated” implies a mere stacking of relative importance, as if defence was simply “more important” than food gathering. But these factors are intimately intertwined.

Ahem, YOU are the one asserting here that weapon use dominated the development of these organisms, so don't be surprised if we point this out. It's been your masturbatory obsession for at least three years of your posting career, not including your tenure over at RDF.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A ground living species needed access to areas where it could forage, in the face of predators for whom those same areas were their larder.

Many of those predators being on the lookout for larger meals to start with. But of course you ignored the DATA about the relevant taxa contained in the Treves & Palmqvist paper, when this didn't fit your fantasy assertions.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So I’d rather rephrase your last sentence as: A reasonable observer would infer that defensive hand weapon use was the key that unlocked coevolution between our ancestors and tools.

No, a genuinely reasonable observer would take account of the DATA, telling him that NO weapons dating back more than 100,000 years have ever been found. Which on its own destroys your fantasy assertions. Likewise, another piece of DATA that destroys your fantasy assertions, is the fact that Sahelanthropus never once left behind evidence of any tool use during its 3 million year history, yet it too had small canines. Then of course there's all the DATA telling us that the only tools used by Australopithecus were food preparation tools, and which have been determined to be thus by diligent analysis of tool use wear patterns, and the comparison thereof with empirically tested replicas of their tools in the laboratory. All this DATA subjects your fantasy assertions to a no-lube rogering with a razor wire dildo.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: That's why you had to fantasise about distant ancestors imbuing their tools. with symbolic importance hand drilling with weapons in order to be competent enough to use them for predator defence.

“Drilling” is something soldiers do on a parade ground, you carelessly misrepresent my argument.

As opposed to your deliberate misrepresentations of ours?

Hypocrisy time, folks!

Jayjay4547 wrote:When little monkey play it’s all about grabbing and biting, rolling around and grabbing and biting. Too cute. But it has a training purpose. When bullocks play it’s all about their horns, clashing and pushing. That also has a training purpose. Whether cattle attach symbolic importance to their horns might not be provable but when a cow flourishes her horns at a dog both the dog and the cow know what information is being sent; call it effective semiology.

Except that once again, the DATA tells us that your fantasy about weapon-wielding Australopithecines is precisely that - a fucking fantasy.

Here's that embarrasing and inconvenient DATA once again, that fucks your fantasy assertions back to the primaeval slime:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Your sad, pathetic fantasy is dead in the water. Though it was brain dead to start with.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Consider this thought experiment. Imagine a chimp patrol, a group of males move around the perimeter and if they catch a member of another troop they will inflict injuries cited as punctures, and slashes- inflicted using their sharp canines working with their powerful arms- that’s the primate way. If they meet a skulking leopard they will act aggressively as we saw from Boesch’s accounts. – The same chimp species also use grass stalks to fish up termites and sharpened sticks to dig up tubers. OK now visualise the patrolling chimps carrying hand weapons with them. How comfortable is that image for you? It’s profoundly jarring.

Oh wait, but no one doubts the DATA telling us how chimps behave, especially as we can see it on video. But chimps are NOT Australopithecines. Furthermore, there is evidence that chimps acquired larger canines as a later derived trait, courtesy of their different social organisation.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Now visualise Australopithecus going on a similar patrol. With those short blunt canines. Or wouldn’t they have gone on patrol? If they met a leopard skulking around, what would they do, bearing in mind their short blunt canines?

How about "fuck off and hide"?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Their canines establish beyond a doubt that they carried hand weapons

No they fucking don't. This tiresome fantasy of yours is destroyed by REAL WORLD DATA. Here, once again, is that REAL WORLD DATA that destroys your sad little masturbation fantasy:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

This DATA destroys your tedious little obsession.

Jayjay4547 wrote:fundamentally unlike a modern chimp.

Except that, opps, chimps acquired the requisite features AFTER the split from the hominid lineage. Because lo and behold, the common ancestor of all of these organisms was a primate with small canines, from which Sahelanthropus inherited its dentition.

Game. Fucking. Over.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And just as the horns of antelope and the canines of baboons are factors in their relationships with their predators so were the hand weapons of Australopithecus.

Bollocks. Australopithecines did NOT use fucking hand weapons. Here, once again, is the DATA telling us this:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

This DATA once again destroys your tedious little obsession.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The weapons had symbolic significance for all concerned.

Bollocks. Weapon wielding Australopithecines are a figment of your imagination. The above DATA keeps telling us this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: There would be no obvious need for such things in a scenario where tools were being habitually carried and used for other purposes (hunting, food preparation, non-predator competition, etc).

No such need for training how to use a hand weapon?

Except that, oh wait, NO EVIDENCE FOR WEAPONS BEING USED BY AUSTRALOPITHECINES EXISTS. All the DATA tells us that WEAPONS DEPLOYED BY HOMINIDS ARE NO OLDER THAN 100,000 YEARS. You keep ignoring this DATA, JayJay, despite me delivering it to you repeatedly with a side salad of the discoursive baseball bat. It's an indication of the corrupting influence of creationist ideology, that you keep ignoring this DATA, when even a fucking five year old would sit up and take notice of it, and would have done so long ago.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Maybe not if australopithecus was somehow excluded from the food chain or only predated by accident.

Ah, strawman cariacture, another creationist favourite.

Jayjay4547 wrote:But that’s not a reasonable reconstruction of their ecology.

Except that a proper reconstruction of Australopithecine ecology, taking account of vast quantities of DATA that you repeatedly and duplicitiously ignored, was presented in the Treves & Palmqvist paper that you quote mined and misrepresented to death. The mere fact that you had to post lies and fabrications about that paper, on its own destroys what subatomic particles of credibility your tedious made up shit ever had.

Jayjay4547 wrote:More likely most ended up in the tummies of predators without surviving beyond their prime, as with baboons today. (Maybe some died from other causes and were stuffed into the recesses of the cave to avoid attracting predators.)

And the mere fact that you recognise this elementary DATA, again destroys your fantasies. Because lo and behold, male baboons have big fucking canines, but can still end up as lunch for a leopard, if said leopard takes advantage of circumstances skewing the contest in the leopard's favour. You know, such as being more alert than sleeping baboons at night, and having superior night vision?

Jayjay4547 wrote:If you visualise australopithecus as embedded in the food chain and therefore stressed to gain most access to food while minimising their forfeit to their predators then there would actually be an obvious need for practice to optimise skill and to optimise the effectiveness of the weapons.

Except that NO DATA EXISTS TELLING US THAT AUSTRALOPITHECINES USED WEAPONS.

Here's that DATA destroying your pathetic fantasy once again, which I'm going to keep embarrassing you with as long as you keep peddling this shit:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: Your problem, of course, is that other tool-use activities have immediate payoffs, and have the potential for much learning to happen in relatively safe scenarios.

Bet their predators gave them plenty of on the job training and not in safe scenarios. That’s the point. Animals that were not proved to be adept at defense left the gene pool, to be prematurely metabolised in the belly of predators.

See that DATA above, JayJay, that says your weapon-wielding Australopithecines are a figment of your imagination? Suck on it.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: Even considering canines as weapons to be eventually made obsolete by tools, such weapons clearly have uses which are aggressive as well as defensive, and uses against others of the same species as well as others of different species.

A curious feature of the strange established origin narrative is that you focus on one class of tool, that can indeed be used for both aggression and defense.

Oh wait, this might have something to do with the fact that ALL THE FUCKING DATA TELLS US THAT THESE WERE THE TOOLS THAT AUSTRALOPITHECINES ACTUALLY USED. Which is why what you caricature duplicitously as the "strange established origin narrative" became the accepted scientific consensus, because ALL THE FUCKING DATA SUPPORTS IT.

Jayjay4547 wrote:But there is a class of tool that is useless for direct aggression or hunting and which one can call a stopper, complimentary to a striker. Its function is to halt an attack, take the initiative from the attacker, confuse it and make it vulnerable to a strike. The stopper is associated with the left hand. The striker you focus on is associated with the right hand and in terms of ideology, with acting on the exterior world, imposing one’s own will on it.

Drivel.

Oh wait, once again, all the DATA tells us that AUSTRALOPITHECINES DID NOT USE FUCKING HAND WEAPONS. Here's that fucking DATA once again:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Game. Fucking. Over.

Jayjay4547 wrote: That’s all of a piece with the story of self creation

Bollocks. Oh wait, this "story of self-creation" bullshit you keep peddling, is nothing more than a duplicitous attempt to misrepresent the proper acceptance of DATA, telling us that social interactions between members of a given species affect the genetic destiny of the requisite population. We can see this at work in every nightclub on the fucking planet, where lots and lots of testosterone-fuelled young males engage in all manner of hilarious behaviours, in an attempt to persuade the females to drop their knickers. Horny males wanting to get laid, and picky females, have been a known and important mechanism for shaping the destiny of populations for some time. And if you never observed any of this in action, then you really need to get out more.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: In the baboon/car example you quoted, the humans were not predators being defended against.

They were driving away another non-predator species, and/or keeping them distant from a desired object.
The closest analogy with our ancestors using tools instead of teeth for a similar scenario would be them driving competing scavengers off an abandoned kill, or trying to monopolise some other food source.

That’s true but utterly irrelevant.

Oh wait, you keep hand-waving away as purportedly "irrelevant" all manner of DATA that bombs your fantasies with fucking nuclear ordnance. Here's that DATA you keep ignoring once again:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Game. Fucking. Over.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The video demonstrated that long sharp canines make other higher primates dangerous to attack, for whatever reason another party has to attack them.

No, what makes them dangerous to attack is coordinated offensive action. One male baboon on its own is up shit creek without a paddle. One male baboon accompanied by three others, and two dozen females, coordinating their response, is in a far stronger position.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m not blindly obsessed with teeth. I’m kinda fascinated by how intelligent people can work each other into a state of denying such plain evidence as the shape of teeth. It took me a long time to find a particular sentence that would provoke “rationalists” into blatant irrational behaviour: The short blunt canines of Australopithecus shows that they had abandoned defensive biting, that makes other higher primates dangerous to attack.”

Evidently you are blindly obsessed with teeth as predator-defence weapons, since even if considering them purely as weapons they have various other uses, as do weapons today.

The fact that female primates have shorter blunter canines than males means that long sharp canines interfere with feeding needs.

But if it means the males get laid, JayJay, those large canines are going to stick around.

What part of "a feature only sticks around for multiple generations if it ends up being inherited" do you not understand?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Weapons don’t commonly have other uses, rather simple tools can also be used as weapons. The other day a woman in Kenya killed a leopard using a spade. But when there is a leopard around one would wish one’s spade were a rifle. There is strong adaptive stress towards efficacy of weapons.

So, oh wait, other tools with one use, can eventually be deployed for another use, if they happen to be flexible enough?

Yet you reject the idea, supported by all the DATA, of food preparation tools putting in an appearance first, and weapons much later?

Are you beginning to see why many here point and laugh at your posts?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: No-one is saying that tools would be useless for predator defence.
What people are saying is that predator defence alone is a seemingly poor driving force for early tool-use development.
A species which habitually used tools for other purposes would seem by far the best-placed to also use them for predator defence.
In such a situation it would seem simplistic to claim that the reason for the shrinkage of canines was the predator-defence use of tools if the other uses of tools would also have implications for dentition.

There really isn’t a way around the inference that the short blunt canines of Australopithecus shows that they had abandoned defensive biting.

Except that once again, ALL THE FUCKING DATA SAYS THAT YOUR ASSERTION IS A FUCKING FANTASY. Oh wait, here's that DATA again:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Game. Fucking. Over.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Either their canines show that they were helpless

So how do you think Sahelanthropus survived for 3 million fucking years? Despite [1] having small canines, and [2] never developing tool use?

Jayjay4547 wrote:where other African higher primates, as alternative prey, are anything but helpless- or they had some other means of making themselves dangerous to attack.

Or, as is more likely, they found ways of making sure they weren't attacked in the first place. Such as hiding, keeping watch for suspicious movements, and avoiding places where big fuck-off predators were known to put in a regular appearance. You know, the sort of behaviours that work right across the entire fucking Eumetazoa?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Perhaps they carried around lawyer’s letters? At any rate that level of ridiculousness lies behind your intent to lift our ancestors out of their actual embeddedness in nature.

Oh look, it's more lies and bullshit.

The one GENUINELY trying to elevate Australopithecines to a "special" status, whilst flying in the face of all the DATA destroying this assertion, is YOU, with your fantasy about Australopithecines operating as a sort of Palaeolithic Call Of Duty Spec-Ops team. We're simply paying attention to all the DATA you keep ignoring that destroys your fantasy.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The statement “The short blunt canines of Australopithecus shows that they had abandoned defensive biting, that makes other primates dangerous to attack” is the kind of statement that Adam Gopnik called a killer fact; a simple obdurate point in the path of the express train of established thinking about science.

Bollocks. it's made up shit, and all the DATA says it's made up shit.

Oh, and of course, a fucking art critic knows more about science than actual research scientists ... not.

Jayjay4547 wrote:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/spooked-books-adam-gopnik?mbid=nl_151127_Daily&CNDID=31392773&spMailingID=8291652&spUserID=NzcxODAyNjY2NDES1&spJobID=802497421&spReportId=ODAyNDk3NDIxS0

Ah, the usual postmodernist drivel we've come to expect from people who prefer made up shit to facts.

Jayjay4547 wrote:You could also call it an inconvenient truth.

No, it's made up shit. The DATA says it's made up shit. Here once again is the DATA that says it's made up shit:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Game. Fucking. Over.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It points to unexpected structure in human evolution, whereby our ancestors were sleep-walkers moulded by the likes of sticks, stones and hyena; that is, by the outside world, with creative consequences including language and coevolution with tools.

Poppycock. Once again, the DATA says something totally different from your tiresome ex recto fantasies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:None of that is inimical to science or to atheism

Oh you think peddling made up shit as fact isn't inimical to science? You'll find the Catholic Church learned the hard way how that bit them on the arse.

Jayjay4547 wrote:but it isn’t exactly the flaccid self-congratulatory story of self-creation invented in the name of science by atheists and their fellow-travellers.

Lies and bullshit. Oh wait, the only one here making up stories about "self-creation" is YOU, with your entire "Australopithecines were special because they formed Palaeolithic Spec-Ops teams" wankery. On the other hand, we're paying attention to the DATA that points to your wankery being precisely that. Wankery that you're peddling because you're desperate to find some crevice into which to insert an imaginary magic man. It isn't working, JayJay, because everyone with functioning neurons can see the tissue of lies you've erected to try and prop up this fantasy, and the mere fact that you've had to peddle lies about us repeatedly, on its own destroys what subatomic particles of credibility your made up shit ever possessed to start with.

On the other hand, we have DATA supporting the ideas we accept. Here's that DATA that destroys your fantasies once again:

1: NO hominid weapons older than 100,000 years have ever been found;

2: ALL tools reliably associated with Australopithecus have been FOOD PREPARATION TOOLS;

3: Sahelanthropus, which existed for 3 million years before Australopithecus, exhibited NO propensity for tool use for 3 million years, despite having small canines.

Game. Fucking. Over.