Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed. .

Climbing a tree.
Keeping an eye out.
Clustering into a group and making loud noises.
Throwing rocks.

These are all defences against predation.

Snails have no teeth, no horns and no talons. They also have no arms. So are defenceless.

But wait didn't someone in this very thread list a bunch of things they did that helped defend them? Who could that of been? Can't be the guy saying no big teeth, no horns, no talons equals defenceless could it?

Well as long as we're stuck arguing against someone who thinks australopiths must've been able to defend themselves against predators ALL the time in order to survive for some reason, its not like we're going to make any headway in this debate.

Indeed, predation activity tends to consist of long hours of doing relatively little feeding wise, followed by a short intense burst of hunting activity. Which holds true for everything from lions down to spiders.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed. .

Climbing a tree.
Keeping an eye out.
Clustering into a group and making loud noises.
Throwing rocks.

These are all defences against predation.

As are hiding, staying downwind, scavenging after the higher predators have fed, observing alarm calls of other animals to read the signs of danger.........

monkeyboy wrote:

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed. .

Climbing a tree.
Keeping an eye out.
Clustering into a group and making loud noises.
Throwing rocks.

These are all defences against predation.

As are hiding, staying downwind, scavenging after the higher predators have fed, observing alarm calls of other animals to read the signs of danger.........

This list goes on.

Then you combine this with factors such as predator to prey ratios and the actual behaviours of predators themselves (as noted by Cali) and there are a whole array of factors in play which explain species survival without any need for weapons at all.

Lions' sharp teeth weren't much of a defence against this lot:

I've often watched birds defending their nest, and their young, against predators. At times, they get a total battering - e.g. avocets can lose a lot of chicks in a particular site to gulls, crows, herons, and so on. All ground nesting birds have this problem, and have developed a number of different defences, e.g. camouflage, distraction displays, nesting in dense cover, alarm calls, which make the young scatter, and so on. Why bring up the issue of weapons? I don't think avocets have developed razor-extensions to their feet just yet.

nunnington wrote:I've often watched birds defending their nest, and their young, against predators. At times, they get a total battering - e.g. avocets can lose a lot of chicks in a particular site to gulls, crows, herons, and so on. All ground nesting birds have this problem, and have developed a number of different defences, e.g. camouflage, distraction displays, nesting in dense cover, alarm calls, which make the young scatter, and so on. Why bring up the issue of weapons? I don't think avocets have developed razor-extensions to their feet just yet.

Avocets hardly raise a nest of chicks. They seem to be a food production line for young gulls.

On Springwatch it was said the in the total life time (17 years) of the couple who stay together for life they may only raise two chicks keeping numbers in balance.

Yep. The birds in our dams, with their nests on the water have a hard time raising a full nest of chicks.

Or is Jay-jay saying that primates in particular develop weapons in order to fight off predators? Many animals obviously don't. Going back to birds, there are some with aggressive tendencies, e.g. ostrich, but many species develop other means of defence of their young. In extremis, they may fly away, and start again.

nunnington wrote:Or is Jay-jay saying that primates in particular develop weapons in order to fight off predators?

In part yes bu,t also because JayJay doesn't see's how they could have survived otherwise.

It is all a big appeal to incredulity argument because JayJay thinks australopiths couldn't have survived without an irreducibly simple explanation of a single thing that enabled survival i.e. weapons. Basically all the actual science of how species survive isn't good enough for JayJay and he handwaves it all away in favour of his own irreducibly stupid explanation.

And at some point that proves atheists are ruining science and stopping people from believing in god. Its not clear how exactly this happens with the religious people who study in the fields.

Sendraks wrote:

nunnington wrote:Or is Jay-jay saying that primates in particular develop weapons in order to fight off predators?

In part yes bu,t also because JayJay doesn't see's how they could have survived otherwise.

It is all a big appeal to incredulity argument because JayJay thinks australopiths couldn't have survived without an irreducibly simple explanation of a single thing that enabled survival i.e. weapons. Basically all the actual science of how species survive isn't good enough for JayJay and he handwaves it all away in favour of his own irreducibly stupid explanation.

It's a bit like saying that because I have seen a whole scrape of avocets lose their young to gulls and crows, therefore, well, therefore what? They haven't developed razor-edged feet yet, so they'd better get a move on, otherwise they might die out. However, avocets have increased their population in the UK, after being wiped out in the 19th century. Maybe God likes them.

You have to remember, Nunnington, that elementary concepts tend to be difficult for creationists to understand, once they're infected with the ideological virus.

Elementary concepts such as "all a species needs to do is produce enough offspring to balance predation attrition".

Elementary concepts such as "which individuals mate with which others determines the genetic destiny of the population".

Elementary concepts such as "if there are several existing ways of avoiding becoming lunch for something else, organisms will quickly apply them".

Elementary concepts such as "if the DATA says your idea is horseshit, it's Game Over".

Cali said:

Elementary concepts such as "which individuals mate with which others determines the genetic destiny of the population".

Indeed. We need only look at the history of the European Royals to see how inappropriate mating messed up their genetics.

And is still doing.

Yes.

Calilasseia wrote: Oh this is going to be fun, if only from a schadenfreude standpoint ... and now I'm back from my job interview, I can round this off after the delays arising therefrom.

Schadenfreude is the feeling you get when a biker is stopped by a cop after roaring past you. It’s not what you should get from sending a sneering overbearing post.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:
we know you keep pointing to Dart's obsolete 1925 paper with respect to this, and as far as the view of Australopithecines as tool users of any sort is concerned, the paper is obsolete, because we now have another 80 years or more of collected DATA faslifying that view. None of which you've bothered taking notice of.

In truth I have discussed many post-1925 sources.

We've all seen your idea of "discussing" those sources, namely quote mining them and making shit up to try and peddle the idea that they agree with your blind assertions, when even an elementary perusal thereof demonstrates that they don't.

Often post-1925 sources don’t support my points e.g. that unarmed hominins are distinctively vulnerable. As a rule, those based on observation do, those constructing the story of human evolution don’t.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:In those 90 years since Dart’s description of the Taung child, accumulating data has been used to build an origin story where the only players were members were our ancestors themselves.

Complete bullshit. Oh wait, the Treves & Palmqvist paper you repeatedly quote mine and misrepresent, contains a detailed exposition of how isotope data has been used to determine the likely diets of predators. Specifically for the purpose of determining which of those predators were likely to include hominid species in their diet. This on its own renders your above assertion null and void, even before we take account of the numerous other papers devoted to the same topic that I've presented here.

Treves and Palmqvist actually offered only a short summary of that isotope data which they seem to have got a little wrong. Everyone knows that the hominins were predated, but no one anymore thinks they had an interestingly distinctive way of doing something physical about that. Although African prey mammals present a bewildering array of distinctive physical responses to predation. Bewildering to their predators that is.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:For example, Treves and Palmqvist’s 2007conclusion that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was a social adaptation that preceded any elaboration of material culture.

Oh wait, we observe the same development of social groups in other primates. What's more, we also observe the emergence of social behaviours within those groups, directed toward minimising predator encounters, or dealing with predators once encountered. None of which involve becoming arms manufacturers and video game warriors.

Indeed, from that paper, we have this:

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:Hominins armed with weapons may have counterattacked more often, but we find no compelling evidence that material culture sheltered hominins from ambush and stalking predators before the advent of controlled fire.

What part of the words "NO EVIDENCE" do you not understand?

I understand that Treves and Palmqvist are blatantly ignoring the obvious evidence from Australopithecus that unarmed hominins have been distinctively unable to avoid punishment, take punishment or dish it out for millions of years before Africa showed them how to control fire.

Calilasseia wrote: Oh, and guess what? Treves & Palmqvist also present in their conclusion, a suggestion that their ideas can be tested experimentally, viz:

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:Modern humans may retain traces of some of the anti-predator adaptations of our ancestors. In particular, predictable behavioral responses and aversion to areas with dense vegetation or areas without suitable refuge (e.g., wide, open areas) should both be deeply embedded in human cognitive and perceptual abilities. These predictions are not trivial given that taxa differ based on selective pressures imposed by ancestral environments (Byers, 1997). Some animals perceive holes as refuges, while others perceive dense vegetation or open areas as avenues for escape (Lima, 1993). Experiments with sleeping sites, vigilance and group formation could test these ideas about ancestral human anti-predator adaptations;

The authors then continue with this:

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:In the following section, we consider some terrestrial mammalian taxa that live in environments with high predation pressure and display social organizations that share one or more of the following characteristics: inconspicuous, minimal internal conflict, or coordinated vigilance. For each we make predictions about the fossil record if one or more lineages of hominins had displayed such a social organization, and we make predictions about modern human behavior assuming we retain ancestral anti-predator adaptations.

Let's take a look at those analyses and predictions in more detail, shall we?

Before that, let’s try to figure what Experiments with sleeping sites, vigilance and group formation could test these ideas about ancestral human anti-predator adaptations; the authors might have in mind because they don’t say and it’s not clear. Under predation threat, do humans head for a “hole” (cave?) trees or open areas? I’ve observed a few times of my own and other people's wheredogs created a threat, humans don’t head anywhere, they pick up a stone, open a knife or wave a stick. When threatened by dogs myself I use a stick and indeed I carry one if expecting to meet one. So the first requirement for the proposed experiments would be to prevent humans from acting the distinctive way we do.

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:Medium-Sized, Inconspicuous Groups

Individuals in groups of 10–15 animals can detect threats early and warn associates efficiently if distractions due to associates are few. For example, the Asian Hanuman langur (Semnopithecus entellus) forms large groups (averaging 29 members in 22 populations: Treves & Chapman, 1996), yet noisy, costly competition over resources seems to be muted by a combination of kinship bonds and even distribution of resources (Borries, 1993; Borries et al., 1994; Koenig, 1998). Male-male fighting is infrequent within groups because one male often monopolizes mates and evicts rivals. However, this calm evaporates when multiple males compete (Boggess, 1980; Borries, 2000). If modern humans retain traces of such a social organization, one should see higher vigilance among males watching for nongroup rivals, and a significant increase in distractions and within-group vigilance when male rivals co-reside in a group. Hominins displaying such a social organization between 6.0–1.8 Ma would show marked sexual dimorphism associated with polygynous mating. Their dentition might also reflect the use of evenly distributed, low-quality foods, such as foliage or grasses.

So, the authors provide a prediction: if (and I emphasise if) ancestral hominids relied upon stealth combined with a group size of 20+ individuals, similar to that observed in Hanuman Langurs, they would exhibit marked sexual dimorphism, a polygynous mating system, and a dentition indicative of utilising abundant but low-nutrition foods.

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:Small Groups with Male Protector

Small, inconspicuous groups with a protective individual occur among terrestrial primates (e.g., gorillas: Doran & McNeilage, 1998). One version would include females attracted to watchful males, where female-female rivalry would be strong because the male’s protective sphere would not be infinitely divisible among many females. If modern humans retain traces of this social organization, one should see higher vigilance among males than females and the greatest increase in within-group vigilance when multiple females are present in a group. Among early hominins, one would expect strong sexual dimorphism with polygynous mating, but dentition would reflect a high-quality diet due to low group size.

And another prediction: if ancestral hominids had a social system similar to that observed in modern gorillas, they would exhibit strong sexual dimorphism, a polygynous mating system, and a dentition indicative of a high-quality diet.

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:Small, Cooperative Groups

Small groups within which individuals cooperate in anti-predator behavior can survive under heavy predation pressure. The use of coordinated vigilance or sentinel systems is particularly important in such conditions because one or two individuals survey the surroundings while the remainder of the group forages uninterrupted. Upon detection of a predator, the sentinel gives a visual or acoustic signal as an alarm and the group takes defensive action. Modern humans use sentinels, of course. Sentinel systems are also seen today in many cooperatively breeding species (Wickler, 1985; Savage et al., 1996), but also among less cooperative groups that must forage silently (Horrocks & Hunte, 1986). Of particular relevance may be the social mongooses Herpestidae found in African woodland savannas. High levels of cooperation and reciprocity appear critical under heavy predation pressure (Rasa, 1986, 1989); pressure that leads to the retention of juveniles and sub-adults in their natal groups (NB: also a modern human trait). If modern humans show traces of this social organization, the sexes will be equally vigilant, and familiar associates may readily coordinate defensive behavior. Hominins using this system would show little sexual dimorphism and delayed maturation, as in modern humans. Dentition would reflect a high-quality diet due to low group size.

A third prediction: if ancestral hominids operated in small, cooperative groups, they would exhibit little sexual dimorphism, equal vigilance on the part of both male and female individuals, delayed maturation, and a dentition indicative of a high-quality diet.

Treves & Palmqvist, 2007 wrote:Solitary Foragers

This form of inconspicuous social organization is seen in orangutans among the living apes and has been interpreted as a response to food scarcity (Sugardjito et al., 1987), and perhaps to avoidance of threats posed by conspecifics rather than predators (Setiawan et al., 1996; Treves, 1998). Nevertheless, early hominins might have foraged alone and aggregated only at superabundant resources or at sleeping sites. If modern humans retain traces of such a social organization, one should expect no coordination of vigilance within their groups and increases in vigilance with party size, particularly when reproductive females encounter nonfather, adult males. Fossil hominins displaying such a system would presumably show extreme sexual size dimorphism (Rodman & Mitani, 1987) and evidence of high-quality diets.

And that's a fourth prediction. Once again, based upon observation of present day primate species exhibiting the requisite social organisation. In short, we should expect to see appropriate anatomical correlates indicative of social behaviour classes. And, on the basis of this, and the fact that different anti-predator strategies are observed arising within different systems of social organisation in those present-day species, the requisite conclusion is that the social system adopted by our hominid ancestors would also have had an effect upon the prioritising of different anti-predator strategies, on the basis that this is observed in extant primates right across the taxonomic spectrum.

Those excerpts from Treves and Palmqvist, presented in a chapter of a book about primate-predator relations, are all about different social and eating behaviour. One would think that they would at least mention something distinctive about the hominin body plan: the one primate without opposable big toes, the one primate whose canines doesn’t make them dangerous to attack, and the one obligate biped.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Their conclusion is the opposite of the truth

Bullshit. What part of "different anti-predator strategies are correlated with different social behaviour systems right across extant primate taxa" do you not understand? Game fucking over, not only for your fantasies, but for your duplicitous quote mining of this paper.

You are repeating yourself Cali but the game isn’t over, I don’t deal in fantasies nor did I quote mine that paper. Obviously different anti-predation strategies are correlated with different social behaviour. But that doesn’t explain what is physically distinctive about hominins. It doesn’t save the phenomena. Treves and Palmqvist behave like someone modelling the antipredation activity of fossil porcupine via their social behaviour and without mentioning their quills.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:which is that the end Miocene and Pliocene saw a unique adaptation by our ancestors to material culture in the form of hand weapons used defensively to provide access to savanna resources.

Crap.

Once again, all the DATA with respect to Australopithecine tool use, points to that tool use being for food processing, not beating the shit out of big cats.

Africa is a serious place Cali and it has always been necessary for primates to beat the shit out of big cats, or at least leopard-sized ones, or at least to mount a considerable threat. Primates complicate predator’s hunting by being dangerous to attack. It’s common for African mammal prey species to be dangerous to attack, consider the range giraffe, buffalo bushbuck and porcupine.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
It’s not a fantasy that Australopithecus used hand weapons defensively, rather a strong inference.

Bullshit. You keep blindly asserting this bullshit, despite the fact that ALL THE DATA IN EXISTENCE POINTS TO THE REQUISITE TOOL USE BEING FOR FOOD PROCESSING. We observe NO recognisable weapons in the fossil record dating back 3.3 million years, we observe NO instances of big cat fossils with bone damage consistent with weapon attacks (which would be present in quantity if your fantasy was anything other than the product of your rectal passage), and we observe in addition that they didn't occupy the sort of habitats that your fantasy asserts to begin with. Made up shit doesn't equal "inference", as I've already schooled you on. Once again, Game Fucking Over.

The inference can be drawn mainly from the short blunt canines of Australopithecus which makes other higher primates dangerous to attack, their lack of opposable big toes making them less able to escape in a forest canopy, their obligate bipedalism, apparent inability to avoid being run down, their tool making and the facility of their modern descendants for handling hand weapons at speed and accuracy.

That inference is simply too strong to be wished away by writing in capitals and saying “Game Fucking Over”.

As to the lacking evidence which you offer as clinching counter-arguments, Oldowan hand axes would be plausible hand weapons, for example, to smash onto the skull of a predator in a mobbing attack. Indeed it’s implausible that an animal that puts an edge on a pebble and holds that pebble in its palm, and is predated, wouldn’t use it as a defensive weapon.
Failure to yet find bone damage on a predator also isn’t a clinching counter-argument. A prey species doesn’t need to kill its predator, just complicate its hunting and if it does maim the predator, that won’t necessarily leave an identifiable bone injury. Predators on hominins probably hunted other species as well and might often die of starvation rather than directly from injury.

As to the bushy habitat, it was at least shared with hunting dogs, hyena, several sabretooths and leopard. And not shared with forest apes. If you imagine them shinning up trees whenever a pack of dogs was encountered, then that would place them at a disadvantage compared with sympatric baboons who keep the dogs away rather than use a perilous PQ17 style scattering into the bush.

So the counter-arguments you present as clinchers against the inference of hand weapon use aren’t actually clinchers.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:When you read Dart’s article “in full” you would have come across this passage on p197:

Dart (1925)p197 wrote:Bipedal animals, their hands were assuming a higher evolutionary role not only as delicate tactual, examining organs which were adding copiously to the animal’s knowledge of its physical environment, but also as instruments of the growing intelligence in carrying out more elaborate, purposeful, and skilled movements and as organs of offence and defense. The latter is rendered more probable, in view, first, of their failure to develop massive canines and hideous features, and, secondly, of the fact that even living baboons and anthropoid apes can and do use sticks and stones as implements and as weapons of offence (“Descent of Man”p81 et.seq.).

Jayjay4547 wrote:I bolded the text where Dart asserted that the short blunt canines of Australopithecus showed that they didn’t bite defensively which he used to support the inference that they used hand weapons..

Except that oops, chimpanzees have canines capable of inflicting serious damage (as you took a creepy amount of glee telling us all in previous posts, with that hideous photograph you posted repeatedly), but are also known to use sticks to drive away predators. Consequently, your own examples you've posted here destroy the correlation you're trying to pretend exists

It has given me no pleasure to show pics of the damage chimps can do with their teeth, but it has been useful to demonstrate how dangerous they are, in a specific way that humans (and by looking at their canines, Australopithecus) aren’t. That has been necessary in the face of buffoonery like your bringing up Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield’s ear.

I’ll eat my hat if chimps ever drive away predators using sticks. Because to drive away a predator requires changing the mind of a predator and to do that requires a skillset which chimps don’t have. What they are marvellously good at includes biting and climbing, both of which are alternatives to using a stick. Boesch recorded chimps using sticks to poke at a trapped leopard. Kortlandt set up a scene were chimps shied at a model leopard. Neither use needed any skill and the Kortland video clearly demonstrates incompetent stick use, contrary to what he claimed. Basically, sticks and stones are incidental to the lives of chimps but it’s a strong inference that they weren’t incidental to hominins. Indeed their whole bauplan makes sense when associated with weapon use, and doesn’t make sense otherwise.

So there is no disturbance to the correlation between short blunt canines and not being expert at biting to make a prey animal dangerous to attack..

Calilasseia wrote: Then we have those antecedent hominids with small canines, which left behind NO evidence of any propensity for tool use or manufacture of ANY sort, let alone weapons. Which you keep avoiding addressing substantively because that DATA is lethal to your fantasy.

It’s not fantasy that Australopithecus used hand weapons to defend itself, but a strong inference that you save yourself from looking at by calling it a fantasy. Far from avoiding anything, I have argued a few times (a) Ardipithecus had canines intermediate between Chimps and Australopithecus (b) Earlier large primates seem not have the “massive canines and hideous features” e.g. of gorilla (c) Leopard, the only proven felid expert in predating in a forest, appeared about 3.5mya (d) Ardipithecus like apes, had opposable big toes, giving them an advantage over Australopithecus in a forest. Overall, the ecology of Ardipithecus is a separate issue from that of Australopithecus. An attractive inference is that the appearance of large tree-expert felid predators into African forests drove some hominoids deeper into the forest as expert brachiators and others onto the ground as expert hand weapon users. But I don’t insist on that and one can’t use the uncertainties in the earlier one to deny a clear inference about the later one.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Scientists have acquired a vast amount of additional DATA since 1925, all of which you ignore when it destroys this fantasy you keep clinging to. Plus, I spent time reading Dart's paper in full, from which I presented earlier in this thread a detailed exposition of his work on the head balancing index, or did you forget that I had done this?

So What that you read Dart’s article in full and picked up his appreciation just from the skull, that Australopithecus had been bipedal. Everyone knows that.

Congratulations on missing the point entirely, as is usual with your apologetics. What part of "recognising that he was correct on some matters, doesn't mean he was correct with respect to his manifest speculations" do you not understand?

Dart was astonishingly presciently correct in the work he did for his 1925 paper to describe Australopithecus: that it was bipedal, ancestral to humankind, small brained, with short blunt canines, a tool user, lived beyond the range of arboreal apes and that more remains would be found in Transvaal dolomitic caves (although his specimen from Taung in Botswana had come from a limy lake). .My argument is that between then and his 1953 “Predatory transition from Ape to man” Dart progressively went wrong, although he ended up with a vision quite similar to the modern one. My explanation for that was that Dart theorised in an ideological gale, that demanded an origin narrative where the only actors were our own ancestors, ie one of self-creation.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:That work isn't superseded by modern data, which is one of the reasons Dart's paper remains a landmark in the field with respect to the actual anatomical analysis, and the conclusions about the identity of the fossils derived therefrom,

Well that’s true.

But his speculations ARE superseded by modern data. Again, Game. Fucking. Over.

Bullshit.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:and has nothing to do with his wildly anthropomorphic speculations at the end, which were acceptable at the time because of a paucity of DATA pointing elsewhere.

What “wildly anthropomorphic speculations” are you talking about?

That entire paragraph, in which he speculated about Australopithecines brandishing weapons, constitutes practically an archetype for anthropomorphic speculation. No one else failed to understand this upon reading my post.

Ah, you mean Dart claiming that since Australopithecus was an obligate biped, it probably did things with its hands, both delicate and forceful. It’s ridiculous to condemn that as “an archetype of anthropomorphic speculation”. Australopithecus indeed had an anthro-morph and its genus is studied in the discipline of palaeoanthropology.

Dart did go wrong in that paragraph but rather in the passage “Bipedal animals, their hands were assuming a higher evolutionary role not only as delicate tactual, examining organs which were adding copiously to the animal’s knowledge of its physical environment.”. There we have the self-creation narrative in which the actor is the active intelligence of the ancestor.. It would be more accurate to say the objects were teaching the animals, because of the adaptive value in handling those objects with speed and accuracy. The object being the teacher in the same sense that mud teaches a swallow how to choose the best material with the best consistency and apply it in the best way. It would be even better to say that it was the logic imposed by the context that taught both the swallow and the hominin. And for Australopithecus the creativity in the logical context of using hand weapons for defense was latent, it preadapted them for human speech which requires a brain three times larger and infants whose brains take as much more time to knit into effective control of movement.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Just before his acknowledgements and after noting Darwin’s prescient claim that humankind had evolved in Africa, Dart wrote this:

Dart Feb 27th 1925 p197 wrote:
..In Southern Africa, where climatic conditions appear to have fluctuated little since Cretacious times, and were ample dolomitic formations have provided innumerable refuges during life, and burial places after death, for out troglodytic forefathers, we may confidently anticipate many complementary discoveries concerning this period in out evolution.

Presumably what you call “wildly anthropomorphic” is Dart’s notion of our ancestors being “troglodytic” and using caves as refuges.

Is your reading comprehension so atrocious, that you can't work out that I was referring to his final paragraph, despite me explicitly referencing it after you posted it, or is this merely feigned ignorance on your part for duplicitous apologetic ends?

As for the part on his assertion about purported climactic stability since the Cretaceous, I covered that at length in separate paragraphs. Try paying attention to what I actually fucking write.

First you condemn something in a paragraph as “wildly anthropomorphic” without saying what you are talking about, then you tell me to “pay attention”.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:My attempts to entice you into visualising how human ancestor could have reacted to a predator crawling into their cave refuge at night, sent other posters racing to fetch images of the Flintstones.

Actually, I was among them. Apparently this is something else you failed to pay attention to.

Your rushing to the Flintstones demonstrates a characteristic weakness of atheists to prefer sneering to considering issues. Never mind whether it was a cave or a roosting tree or a camp in the open, how could a human ancestor have reacted to a predation event at night? That’s the issue you avoid.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:But the notion that our ancestors needed sleeping refuges has remained important (see Treves and Palmqvist again), Dart’s prediction about finding human ancestors in dolomitic caves proved correct (spookily, seeing that the Taung child hadn’t come from a cave).

Er, do I have to repeat that list of hominid fossils of the requisite era found in open locations again? Here it is a second time, since you obviously never bothered reading it the first time:[followed by a list of 8 fossils from open locations in East Africa, including the Laetoli footprints]

Dart didn’t predict finding fossil locations in East Africa, but that can’t be laid against his prescience. He predicted finding them in dolomitic caves in the Transvaal where he worked and that’s where Broom started finding them a decade later.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:And of course, the latest find of Homo naledi supposedly taken for burial deep in a dolomitic cave also shows Dart’s prescience.

And it's creationist quantifier abuse time again. Learn once and for all, that one find of a fossil in a cave, doesn't mean that the entire species was cave dwelling. See above. Plus, until the Homo naledi finds are properly dated, which has yet to take place, it's impossible to determine where they fit in the fossil jigsaw.

Multiple Homo naledi individuals have been found in the Sunrise dolomitic cave, with the site not yet fully excavated. Dating the Transvaal fossils has always been a problem but Homo naledi was small brained so for purposes of figuring their skill set from their body plan they were like Australopithecus. For whatever reason those hominins ended up uneaten in the deepest barely accessible recesses of a cave, they were unusually familiar with caving, for a primate.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:So if that was the paragraph you called “wildly anthropomorphic” then you missed its being one of the most prescient passages ever written about human origins by a scientist.

Bollocks. Oh wait, how many hominid fossils have been found in open locations again? Hundreds, if not thousands. Many of them have been found between layers of volcanic pumice tuffs, sandwiching the sedimentary layers containing the fossils, and these rocks are almost never found in caves.

Yes I dare say tuffs aren’t commonly deposited in caves. If there had been volcanic activity in Pliocene Southern Africa then very likely fossil hominins would have been found in the open there as well.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:Indeed, several of the statements at the end of the paper are now known to be mistaken, such as this one:

Calilasseia wrote:

Unfortunately, we now have DATA pointing to significant climate change in the Eocene, which involved elevated global temperatures associated with high concentrations of greenhouse gases.[followed by accounts of parrots in Eocene London and Denmark and a giant snake in South America, and CO2 levels]

Dart was only right about the big picture: that South African climate didn’t experience the complete turnover of species that the Northern hemisphere ice sheets imposed on Europe after the Cretaceous.

Global climate change didn't only affect Europe. The Gondwanathere multituberculate mammals, which had representatives in Africa (including Madagascar) became extinct in the Oligocene. An entire biome, the Laurasian subtropical forests, along with many of its species, disappeared in the transition from late Miocene to early Pliocene, an isolated survivor of the flora being Dracaena cinnabari on the island of Socotra. That disappearance is broadly synchronous with the growth of Antarctic ice.

Throughout the pre-Pleistocene Cenozoic, there were no less than four major climate events - the two Eocene thermal maxima, the Oligocene cooling due to the closing of the Tethys Seaway and the opening of the Drake Passage, and the Middle Miocene Disruption. As the data gathered grows, more may be alighted upon.

Then, of course, species turnover for reasons other than climate was still happening in Africa, as any examination of the fauna from the Eocene to the Pleistocene readily reveals. For example, the extinction of large numbers of grazing mammals that did not possess high-crowned teeth, that affected taxa worldwide due to the expansion of silica-rich C4 grasses.

But none of this detracts from the fact that Dart was wrong about the stability of the climate over the past 65 million years, as was his cited source.

Yes Dart was wrong about there having been little climatic change in Southern Africa since the Cretacious, but like I said he was only right about the big picture, that Australopithecus had faced similar dangerous competitive ground environment to that Darwin knew in South Africa, not a forest environment where apes lived.
Although Dart was astonishingly accurate in his reconstruction of Australopithecus, when he used that to build an origin story, he used the tropes of self-creation and plasticity. Thus in his story it was the strenuousness of the competitive savannah environment not the particularity of the hominins reaction to it, or the logical qualities of hand weapons, that drove progressive “enhanced cerebral powers”. We know now that the Australopithecus Africanus bauplan he found hadn’t changed much in a couple of million years since A. afarensis. It was a bauplan that worked very well, it was optimised.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The last glaciation in South Africa was the Karoo Ice Age from 360–260 million years ago (excluding the Drakensberg, see Wikipedia). Of the 11 predator Miocene-Pliocene species identified by Treves and Palmqvist, four are still found on the savanna and the only major modern savanna predator not represented there is the lion.

You do realise that there are organisms other than mammals worth considering, in any properly complete ecological inventory? And that even if one restricts attention to mammal taxa, there's a whole lot more to consider than the Felidae (the fun part being of course that the first recognisable Felid, Proailurus, originated in Asia)? Or did you not bother with my dissertation on bacteria, which are actually the most numerous organisms on the planet, and without which, there wouldn't be any multicellular organisms at all?

I didn’t bother with your dissertation on bacteria, because I suppose that what was distinctive about human origins doesn’t depend on much that was distinctive about their relation with bacteria.

It might well be significant that felids originated in Asia, in particular, their retractable claws. The appearance in Africa of highly tree-adept felids could possibly have created a tipping point for hominoids where some developed massive canines and better mobility in trees (apes) while others developed a ground-based hand-weapon defensive skill (hominins).

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: Likewise, Dart's statement toward the end of his paper, that Pliocene Africa was characterised by the same stretches of open countryside, is also shaky in the light of modern DATA, a paper of relevance being this one:

Early Hominid Evolution And Ecological Change Through The African Plio-Pleistocene by Kaye E. Reed, Journal of Human Evolution, 32: 289-322 (1997) [Full paper downloadable from here]

Dart’s actual words were “Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution.”

My bolding.

From the abstract of that paper alone:

Research presented here compares east and south African Plio-Pleistocene mammalian fossil assemblages with 31 extant mammalian communities from eight different habitat types.

In more detail, according to the graph in that paper labelled Figure 7, the following Plio-Pleistocene fossil assemblages are indicative of the following habitats:

[1] Sterkfontein 4 pen woodland;
[2] Swartkrans 1: open woodland;
[3] Swartrkans 2: open woodland;
[4] Swartkrans 3: open woodland adjacent to grassland;
[5] Kromdraai A: open woodland;
[6] Kromdraai B: open woodland;
[7] Sterkfontein 5: open woodland adjacent to grassland.

In more detail, I also provided this from the paper in my previous post:

Southern African hominid localities

Limeworks Cave, Makapan Valley. The Limeworks Cave is located in the northeastern part of the Transvaal in South Africa. The older deposits (Members 3 and 4) are suggested to be in the range of 3·2–2·7 Ma and are capped by a Pleistocene aged deposit (Partridge, 1979; MacFadden, 1980; Delson, 1984; Vrba, 1995).

Member 3. This deposit contains an extremely large number of mammalian specimens (greater than 30,000), of which 24 are Australopithecus africanus. The deposit was accumulated in the cave by fossil hyaenid and porcupine species (Maguire, 1985; Reed, 1996). There are relatively high percentages of frugivorous species (14·95%) and some arboreal animals (5·45%). Thus the habitat is positioned with bushland and medium density woodlands. Fresh grass grazers (3·44%) and aquatic mammals (1·84%) indicate the presence of a river and some edaphic grasslands (Figures 7 and 8). Previous reconstructions have ranged from woodland (Vrba, 1980) to forest (Cadman & Rayner, 1989) to open savanna with nearby bushland (Dart, 1952; Wells & Cooke, 1956). However, the mammalian community suggests that this region was a habitat mosaic that contained riparian woodland, bushland, and edaphic grassland. Member 4. A. africanus is represented by only three specimens out of a total of 257 mammalian specimens. Cercopithecine monkeys make up 80% of the collection; and the likely accumulators were birds of prey and leopards (Reed, 1996).

Member 4 deposits contain even greater percentages of arboreal (7%) and frugivorous (20%) species than Member 3, which suggests a more wooded habitat. However, this is probably a function of sample size and predation bias rather than a change of habitat. Because this member may have been accumulated by birds of prey, there may be an exclusion of many bovid species. This would skew the results to the more wooded habitat than the ecovariables suggest. Thus, because Member 3 and Member 4 are roughly contemporaneous in time, both assemblages probably represent a woodland–bushland habitat.

Member 5. There have been no hominids or other primates recovered from this member. Member 5 is a Pleistocene deposit with very few species (13), and is included here for comparative purposes. The accumulating agent is not known, although as it is a cave deposit it is likely that either carnivores or hominids made the collection. There are aquatic animals (15·4%) and fresh grass grazers (15·4%) which indicate edaphic grasslands and a water source, but there are no frugivorous or arboreal mammals, indicating that the region might have been more open and xeric in the Pleistocene.

Sterkfontein, Sterkfontein Valley. The Sterkfontein cave has been continuously excavated for the last 27 years. Over 850 hominid remains have been recovered (L. Berger, pers. comm.). Extensive analyses of faunal remains of this locality were done by Brain (1981) and Vrba (1976) and the analysis here is based on these original studies.

Member 4. A. africanus has been recovered from this member, which has been faunally dated to between 2·4 and 2·6 m.y.a. (Delson, 1984), and the deposit may be the result of carnivore activity (Brain, 1981). The mammalian community consists of few arboreal animals (3·33%), but a high percentage of frugivorous mammals (16·67%). There is also a fairly high percentage of terrestrial/arboreal animals (23·33%). There are no aquatic animals from this locality, and only 3·33% fresh grass grazers (Figures 7 and 8).

The fauna suggests a habitat reconstruction for Member 4 of an open woodland, with bushland and thicket areas. Other habitat reconstructions of this member at Sterkfontein have indicated a medium density woodland (Vrba, 1975), a moderately open savanna (Vrba, 1985), an open woodland to a forest (McKee, 1991), and an open savanna (Benefit & McCrossin, 1990). Thus, the mammalian community reconstruction is close to Vrba’s 1975 interpretation. However, while there are few arboreal animals, the high percentage of frugivorous mammals falls within the range of bushland and medium density woodland, and this locality is likely similar to the more closed Makapansgat Member 3 deposit.

Member 1. P. robustus and Homo sp. are represented by this member. Although there are no arboreal species found in this Swartkrans deposit, there are 13·89% fruit and leaf eaters, as well as 5·56% aquatic animals (Figures 7 and 8). There is a small proportion of fresh grass grazers (2·78%). This gives the picture of an open habitat, with a river present as evidenced by aquatic animals. This river or stream probably supported a woodland or forest as suggested by the percentage of frugivorous mammals that fall in the range of medium density woodland and bushland. In addition, there would have been patches of edaphic grasslands to support the fresh grass grazers. Previous reconstructions of this member include a moderately open savanna (Vrba, 1975); a mesic, closed woodland (Benefit & McCrossin, 1990); and a savanna woodland with riparian woodland and reed beds (Watson, 1993). The reconstructed habitat here agrees with that of Watson (1993).

Member 2. P. robustus and Homo sp. are recovered from this member. Despite the assertion that these deposits are roughly the same age (Brain, 1993), there appears to be a decline in fruit and leaf eaters from Member 1 (13·89%) to Member 2 (8·82%). There are no fresh grass grazers from this member, although there are still aquatic carnivores (5·88%). There is a very large percentage of meat–bone eaters (8·82%). There is also an increase to 32·35% grazing animals and 100% total terrestriality. Thus, this indicates a drier habitat than the previous member, perhaps a wooded grassland with wetlands. Vrba (1975) reconstructed the habitat of Member 2 as a moderately open savanna which agrees with the interpretation here.

Member 3. Only P. robustus has been found in these deposits (Watson, 1993). There is a further drop in fruit and leaf eaters in this member to 6·25%. However, there is also a decrease in grazing animals to 25%, which is accompanied by an increase in fresh grass grazing animals (4·17%). There are similar proportions of aquatic animals (6·25%) and fossorial animals (8·33%) to those in Member 2. Thus, the habitat of this member is reconstructed as an open grassland with a river or stream nearby supporting edaphic grasslands.

So, we have:

Makapan Valley, Transvaal: mixture of riparian woodland, bushland and edaphic grasslands adjacent to a river;
Sterkfontein: open woodland, with bushland and thicket areas;
Swartkrans: open grassland with edaphic grasslands adjacent to a river for the older strata, riparian woodland and reed beds in an adjacent river for the younger strata.

Again, the DATA says Dart's assertion was wrong.

I bolded Dart’s “occasionally wooded belts” and your long paste does nothing to contradict that. In 1925 Dart inferred correctly that Transvaal Australopithecus had lived in a competitive relation with dangerous predators and not in forests where apes were found. What has emerged since then is a long term drying of the Southern African climate superimposed on higher frequency astronomically driven climate changes (100k and 41ky years) and step-like dramatic changes. See deMenocal(2003) None of that made the struggle for existence less intense than Dart supposed.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:In that passage Dart also foregrounded “mammalian competition” thus implying antagonistic relations between species

Well ecology has come a long way since the primitive notion of combat relations, in case you hadn't noticed. And since his assertions on climate and habitat have been demonstrated to be wrong, we can take that other assertion of his with a large bucket of salt too.

Dart’s assertions were a lot better than those of his metropolitan contemporaries, with their Piltdown Man and their Piltdown Cricket Bat. It took a Joburg Jew to sort them out about the Man forty years later but the cricket bat should have put their thinking cogs in motion.
Don’t come to me for ‘primitive notions of combat relations’, just look at ratskep posters, like Agrippina’s notion of various snakes and mongooses somehow getting it together to harm humans.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
I’d say, Raymond Dart was certainly driven by the Muse of Science, during the few months between being given the Taung Child skull, and publishing his findings in Nature. His performance was all the more remarkable in comparison with the blind obfuscation of contemporary metropolitan gatekeeper scientists.

Bullshit. The only "blind obfuscation" on display here is in your posts. A part of this being your yet again tiresomely repeated insinuation that modern scientists are purportedly "upholding a doctrine" creationist style, instead of paying attention to the huge swathes of DATA that have become available since 1925, and which is lethal to your fantasies.

So much wrong in that paragraph. It’s no fantasy that modern scientists have developed a human origin story of self-creation, but an arguable proposition. You won’t find that in the work of Reed above. It’s when the story is explicitly constructed – by Darwin, Dart or Lovejoy or more extremely, by Ratskep posters, that the ideological bias towards plastic self-creation emerges.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I believe that in later years Dart lost that connection, although his hunting hypothesis is increasingly embedded in modern origin stories that emphasise meat eating as necessary for a large brain. See for example this blurb:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/rele ... 1999a.html

Calilasseia wrote: "Modern" as in 17 years old? Plus, that article doesn't specify how meat was added to the diet of hominids. It doesn't cite either hunting or scavenging, the latter being the mode supported by the most recent DATA

Jayjay4547 wrote:Dart didn’t appreciate that the use of hand weapons “for offence and defence” weren’t just two sides of the same coin. He was also bedeviled into making highly coloured statements and even sneering at the public as when he wrote that “of course” white people hadn’t evolved, only black people.

From the International Journal of African Historical Studies, 42(2): 257-282, courtesy of the article The Enigma of Raymond Dart,we learn this:

Dart's career and work presents the intriguing circumstance of a scientist and writer who challenged science with a daring proposal which was considered false and was later fully accepted as scientifcally valid, and used his reputation to forward numerous arguments which could not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

The author of the above article, Robin Derricourt, is also responsible for Raymond Dart and the Danger of Mentors, in Antiquity, 84(3): 230-235 (journal link here):

Archaeology, like all scientific and scholarly disciplines, requires the transmission of knowledge and ideas. This commonly involves the influence of mentors and role models: figures who can at times take on the role of gurus. But adherence to mentors has its dangers. That is shown in the career of Raymond Dart, whose professional work was deeply flawed by the adherence he paid to his mentor Grafton Elliot Smith. His status has been maintained by his dedicated disciple, the great physical anthropologist Phillip Tobias, but critical assessment of the corpus of Dart’s work (Dubow 1996; Derricourt 2009) contrasts with his selective reputation.

In the first part of 1925, Dart — then a youthful professor of anatomy in Johannesburg — published in quick succession two papers in the pre-eminent British science journal Nature.One (on the discovery of Australopithecus with the announcement and interpretation of the Taung fossil cranium) would become a landmark document in the history of palaeoanthropology and prehistory (Dart 1925a). The other is a classic example of the approaches which would later be seen as belonging in the lunatic fringe of archaeology. Dart would continue publishing on both themes throughout his long and productive life (from his birth in Australia in 1893 to death in Johannesburg in 1988).

So a proper critical analysis of Dart, tells us that he had some brilliantly right ideas (Australopithecus as a human ancecstor) and some hilariously wrong ones. Life has a habit of being complicated like this.

You haven’t actually showed which of Dart’s ideas were “hilariously wrong”. I’m the one who has tried to show where Dart developed an origin narrative biased towards human ancestors acting on the world as hunters, rather than reacting to it as the hunted.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I illustrated the branch Dart later chose away from external agency in this graph, to which your response was to deface it:

We've seen your tiresome amateur Paint graphic once already, which was fatuous when you first posted it.

Tiresome, amateur, fatuous. Another way of defacing a point being made. I accompanied the graphic with a discussion of how it illustrates the contingency and the tendency towards self-creation in the human origin story.

Calilasseia wrote:
It [Reed’s reconstruction of Australopithecus environments] deals a death blow to your assertions about Australopithecines purportedly being exposed and vulnerable on the savannahs. Which they wouldn't have been if they weren't there in the first place.

They were on the ground enough for it to have been adaptive to not have opposable big toes, whereby apes (and Ardipithecus) grab branches.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:at least one of which, the leopard, it would have been suicide to try to escape from by climbing a tree, judging by the video clips we have seen of how expert climbers leopard are.

But apparently it's not "suicide" for baboons to do the same? Hmm, why does your reply bear the aura of shit made up on the hoof, without bothering to consider the elementary matter of consistency with previous made up shit?

Like I have said many times, male baboons have long sharp canines and all baboons have opposable big toes, which together complicate a leopard’s task in hunting them.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Would you try to escape from a leopard by climbing a tree?

I'd probably try to avoid such encounters at source. As I suspect our ancestors would.

You can bet baboons also try to avoid encounters with leopard at night and are at least as good at that as our ancestors.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Nope, undoubtedly those ancestors fought leopard on the ground using hand weapons.

Bullshit. We're back to the first six points of that list of mine again ...

[1] NO DATA exists pointing to Australopithecines having developed weapons - ALL THE DATA on tool use and manufacture by Australopithecines points to them making and using tools for food preparation;

To which I have answered, an Oldowan hand axe is a plausible striker weapon in a mobbing action, stones could be plausibly assembled at a roosting site and thrown, and plausible stopper weapons unlike stones would be relatively unlikely to be preserved as fossils. Your bolded “food preparation” refers to cut marks from defleshing meat which is done habitually implies either hunting with weapons or a capacity to drive primary predators off their kills using hand weapons.

Calilasseia wrote: [2] Antecedent hominids with the same dentition, and which never once exhibited any propensity to manufacture or use tools of any sort, let alone weapons, persisted for three million years, and did so in an environment containing predators, some of which were even more powerful and dangerous than the predators extant today;

To which I have answered, those Ardipithecus ancestors had opposable big toes and lived before the appearance of highly tree-adept leopard.

Calilasseia wrote: [3] The specious assertion you erected, to the effect that the ecology of those antecedent hominids is purportedly "not known" to a sufficient extent to be applicable to your fantasy, is refuted wholesale by the contents of the scientific papers on those organisms presented here;

I withdraw that not enough is known about Ardipithecus but assert that you can’t use a reconstruction of some other species to deny a particular inference about Australopithecus.

Calilasseia wrote: [4] There is NO DATA suggesting that the predators of the Pliocene systematically attacked Australopithecines, in preference to any of a wide range of other prey animals, and isotope data from the fossils tells scientists that these predators primarily fed on those other animals];

That is a crock. Isotope data tells scientists Lee-Thorpe and Francis Thackeray(2010) that individual leopard and one sabretooth ate prey such as baboons and hominins when other predators ate C4 grass eaters.

Calilasseia wrote: [5] In addition, observed predators today rarely, if ever, prey upon organisms that scavenge their left overs, not least because by the time those scavengers turn up, the predators have already eaten, and DATA exists in quantity pointing to Australopithecines being amongst those scavengers;

That’s an even worse crock, since if our ancestors habitually took meat from primary predators or from other scavengers like hyena, they would had to be highly adept at driving them off.

Calilasseia wrote: [6] As you have already been schooled upon repeatedly, a multiplicity of strategies exist for organisms to avoid predation, which are used by those organisms with sufficient success to allow their populations to be maintained, and the idea that Australopithecines never once used any of those alternative strategies is biologically untenable.

Of course our ancestors used strategies such as vigilence, hiding, staying away from dangerous areas and signalling warnings. But you have offered no explanation why they should have been better at any of those than other primates, who are all also distinctively dangerous to attack thanks to the long sharp canines of their males.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:And they often lost, fuelling the creative engine built from intimate antagonistic relations, rather like Dart pictured back in 1925.

Except your fantasy never happened. Oh, and Dart was responsible for a number of ideas that have since been characterised as "belonging in the lunatic fringe of archaeology".

You haven’t identified those ideas, or discussed the bias in Dart’s origin story, copied and elaborated by later science, as I have.

Do really think anyone is going to read your lousy wallpaper.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
Tiresome, amateur, fatuous. Another way of defacing a point being made. I accompanied the graphic with a discussion of how it illustrates the contingency and the tendency towards self-creation in the human origin story.

originstorygraph.jpg

They're criticisms of the graph and justified ones at the. The graph doesn't make a point, it is just a pretty picture you've created on the basis of no evidence what-so-ever, just to illustrate your opinion. It is tiresome, because your references to it are tiresome. It is amateur, because it was created by an amateur. And it is fatuous, because it is silly and pointless.

The picture simply illustrates the fantasy you want it to illustrate. There is no reason why any rational person should take it seriously.