I think last week's New Scientist had an article discussing if stone tools were used by humanoid ancestors over 3 million years ago.

I don't remember discussion of how tool use evolved, but would not throwing stones at an animal be the first step, followed by sharpening them, and evolving delivery systems?

Maybe tool use is far older than we realise?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... NUAy0IUcYU

Might walking upright be caused by throwing?

Thanks for the link, I hadn't come across that way of estimating how much our ancestors were using tools. Chimps do use tools quite regularly, e.g. fishing for termites with grass stems, hammering nuts with selected anvil and hammer stone, or throwing stones with malice aforethought, but evidently not enough to shape their hand bones. Australopithecines must have been using them much more.

That's more perspicacious than the surface might suggest.

Not only is throwing likely the first tool use, but there's a well supported hypothesis that it is actually throwing that caused our brains to evolve.

Chimpanzees can't throw for shit, apart from the occasional lucky shot with some poo at a tourist. There are lots of human beings that can hit a rabbit-sized target a dozen meters away, whilst running. If you work out the neurological mechanisms for this in a simplistic way, taking the speed of signals through nerves, that's impossible. There is just no way to time when to let go of the rock. What appears to happen is that there is massive parallel processing that "votes" on when to let go of the rock, and it averages out to be about right.

The throwing motion appears also to be the motion needed to chip away at stone tools. Sorry, Douglas Adams. The secret isn't to bang the rocks together. You have to throw them.

Incidentally, a related thing is true of hammers in a physical sense, as we all know from physics classes. Banging a nail in is hard work. The hammer lets you throw a piece of metal more easily, as does an atlatl with a spear. It's the inertia of the hammer that does the work.

Coordinated parallel processing is also the reason we can do language.

Incidentally, I'm working on a cognitive linguistics system to do this, and it's working splendidly, though I'm having some problems with the Cartesian product code. (The power set code works fine.) Nobody takes anything seriously without a "professional-sounding" three-letter acronym, or TLA. Mine is FNC, for Fuzzy Nondeterministic Cognition.

I've appropriated this as a theme song. I used to be minor buds with George Clinton, and I don't think he'd mind.

So cricket is the reason for the British Empire?

I don't know, I thought that proposal would definitely cause a reaction!

Mongol horsemen firing arrows backwards at full gallop is incredibly impressive.

What is the most complex example we know of?

Someone like KT Tunstall singing, playing a guitar and dancing?

Clive Durdle wrote:Someone like KT Tunstall singing, playing a guitar and dancing?

That's more like an amazing mental feat.

With all I've read about tool use, and human evolution and development, I don't think that it's accurate to say that tool use caused hands to evolve, or intelligence to increase. There's a lot of "chicken or the egg" things to face in even thinking about it all.

By the way, I think we need to move past marveling about non-human tool use. I think it should just be another way to recognize how all life on this dirtball is related, nothing more or less.

Of course, now that I think of it, there is one thing left about tool use that is uniquely human. We are, so far as I know, the only creatures who will die en mass, if all our tools are taken away.

Hitting a moving target with a rock (or a bullet) while you're also moving is a non-trivial exercise. Dogs have pretty good 3-D processing too. They can chase a high thrown ball and catch it as it falls or on the first bounce, even if the bounce goes off to the side. If you think about it, that requires a fair bit of very quick computation. Maybe because they evolved as hunters, and had to chase down prey?

Humans and dogs have co-evolved, is that true of all dogs? And catching is receiving, throwing at something is very different isn't it?

Pterosaurs diving from the air and catching an underwater fish to me looks an incredibly complex operation. Many modern species do similar - owls, hawks, cormorants....

Moving claws, talons, beaks further away is a logical change.

Our intelligence has enabled us to conquer the world. The secret for the big brains, says biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, is cooking, which made digestion easier and liberated more calories.
December 19, 2007 |By Rachael Moeller Gorman



A couple of million years ago or so, our hominid ancestors began exchanging their lowbrow looks for forehead prominence. The trigger for the large, calorie-hungry brains of ours is cooking, argues Richard W. Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He hit on his theory after decades of study of our closest cousin, the chimpanzee. For the Insights story "Cooking Up Bigger Brains," appearing in the January 2008 Scientific American, Rachael Moeller Gorman talked with Wrangham about chimps, food, fire, human evolution and the evidence for his controversial theory.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... brains-th/

Wrangham's book, Catching Fire, discusses how out teeth and digestive system have changed dramatically because we have externalised many digestion processes by the predigestion processes of cooking and cutting.

Maybe humanities usp is that we have externalised many many processes - instead of us hitting someone diectly or cutting them with teeth and claws, we project sharp teeth on the end of arrows, we project weight by throwing stones, we externalise memory by writing and creating educational institutions, we externalised digestion by cooking...

Wrangham's book, Catching Fire, discusses how out teeth and digestive system have changed dramatically because we have externalised many digestion processes by the predigestion processes of cooking and cutting.

Again, that sounds very much similar to a quote I read, where a physician of long ago who still thought Galen was The Authority on human anatomy, declared that the reason why human hips were narrower than Galen described, was because modern people wore tighter trousers.

I have yet to have heard of the force of will, being declared to control evolution, save by the religious peoples amongst us. We didn't lose the ability to walk and run, because we invented cars and bicycles, after all.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/ ... 322-9.html

Researchers have proposed an answer to the vexing question of how the human brain grew so big. We may owe our superior intelligence to weak jaw muscles, they suggest.

A mutation 2.4 million years ago could have left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles, the team reports in this week's Nature1. Lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull may have been free to grow, the researchers say.

I thought I was attempting a discussion about how different changes might have led to how we are now!

An invention is a prosthesis to enable.

Clive Durdle wrote:Humans and dogs have co-evolved, is that true of all dogs? And catching is receiving, throwing at something is very different isn't it?

I was thinking more in terms of the processing necessary to predict the object's path given it's velocity, altitude, vector, etc. and intercept it. Some dogs are better at it than others, my little brindle is a master. She'd make a great baseball outfielder.

The_Piper wrote:

Clive Durdle wrote:Someone like KT Tunstall singing, playing a guitar and dancing?

That's more like an amazing mental feat.

Not really, playing guitar and singing once you've practiced is mostly autopilot. Improvisation (if you're not just noodling away on a scale but trying to come up with something melodic) is where the brain kicks in.

Scat singing in unison (or harmony) with an improvised solo, now that would be tricky.