Posted: Jun 18, 2014 11:18 am
Jayjay4547 wrote:theropod wrote:So I was trying to say that it’s just as obvious that Australopithecus avoided predation by fighting using hand-held foreign objects.
Yeah but I can show you the bones of dinosaurs that lived at the same time as T. rex that have bite marks. That's empirical evidence. Do you have any at all that your assertion about Australopithecus?
Was there ever any doubt that T. Rex ate meat, even before those bite marks were found? Did palaeontologists stand around scratching their heads? Gosh maybe this was an aquatic reptile. No could it have been a wood borer? Let’s hypothesise that it ate meat, Let’s call that the T.Rex Hunting hypothesis till we get “evidence”.
Um, what? My point is that there is empirical evidence to back up the head scratching by paleontologists. This is missing from your premise. Own it.
theropod wrote:Part of the evidence is in the shape of the teeth. Tyrannosaurus had teeth for biting flesh. The australopiths didn’t.
Are you saying they lived on a vegetarian diet, as that is one huge assertion.
Australopiths had teeth that were good for biting dead things. T.Rex’s teeth were good for biting things that it intended would soon be dead.
Says you. Besides, you still seem to want to make T. rex into a pure pradator.
theropod wrote:And they didn’t have any other obvious means to avoid predation.
Oh, like a social structure, and numbers.
If social structure and numbers were good for avoiding predation then termites would have nothing to worry about. But they have social structure, numbers and soldiers. Put your hand in a termite nest and one of those can give you a bite to remember. So injected poison can be an antipredation method but for an African mammal, if it can’t sprint or climb a tree better than a leopard or hide in obscurity, then it comes down to applying either blunt or sharp trauma to the predator. Not that different from your Nebraska dinosaurs.
My Nebraska dinosaurs? Have you ever actually read a word I've written here? Seriously, have you?
I doubt termites have much to worry about. They've been around one hell of a lot longer than humans have, and their defense systems must work or there wouldn't be such things as termites. Thanks for making my point for me.
More assertions you can't, or won't, support with anything but more assertion. Are you sure you want to limit these early hominids to a defense with sticks by a select few members of the troop? Have you never considered the possibility that they all stood their ground and may have even acted aggressively in unison when confronted by a leopard? A unified front is a daunting thing.
Where social structure and numbers come in is the troop needs to organise so the minimum number of members apply the maximum trauma with minimum effort.
So 4 members of the troop confronting a leopard with sticks is better at inflicting trauma than an entire troop? How does that work?
theropod wrote:Would it be unreasonable to call that ideological dinning pathological? Take Piltdown Man I was citing above. Those great scientists in the oil painting were terrible palaeontologists. I watched a clip on BBC the other day, about the Piltdown “cricket bat”. An expert opined, this might have been a plant to tell the actual hoaxer “we are onto you”. But the fact is, these men weren’t onto it: they went on to trash actual paleontological evidence offered by a colonial.
And exactly what the hell as this to do with anything? Remind me, was it a fundamentalists working from doctrine that discovered the hoax, or was it a scientists working from the evidence?
What the 40-years that the Piltdown forgery went undetected shows is that paleoanthropologists like everyone else, are blinded by what they want to see. And what they want to see is culturally determined. That was well put in a review by Brian Switek of Donna Hart and Robert W Sussman's “Man the Hunted” :
Bullshit revisionism! How many paleontologist actually had a chance to examine the specimen? Were color pictures available on the net so others could compare the tooth to known early hominid teeth? It still wasn't some creotard that figured out it was a hoax. That was a trained professional. Own it.
“If there is any science that is influenced by our cultural background, expectations, and desires it is anthropology, and we must take care to make sure that what we want to be true doesn’t obscure our vision.”
http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2009/06/14/book-review-man-the-hunted/
Yes it was a scientist who uncovered the Piltdown forgery; a 38 year old son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Johannesburg, at that time reader at Oxford. Not fundamentalists. On the other hand it is a creationist who is pointing out a pathological blindness in modern science’s view of human ancestors.
Nope, it's a creationists that has no understanding of the methodology of science making all sorts of empty assertions with not one shred of empirical evidence in support thereof. Even when actual scientists tell you where, and how, you're fucking up you insist you know you're right. When faced with empirical evidence you ignore that too in favor of your made up stories you cannot support with anything but more empty assertions.
RS