Posted: Jul 10, 2014 8:28 am
I can’t recall you making a mistake of fact, but where do you get that there were ever African bears? According to the Wiki entry there were only remote ancestors the size of raccoons.
laklak wrote:Ever been bit by a horse? Formidable weapons, horse teeth. Horses, like chimps, dogs, cats, muskrats, alligators et. al. use whatever they've got in a scrap. For horses it's hooves and teeth. However, neither horse hooves nor horse teeth evolved as weapons. Neither did chimp fangs. Diet, man, that's the ticket.
Well have you ever been bitten by a chimp? If you were rescued in time, you might still need a face transplant though being bitten by a much smaller animal than a horse. That’s so sensible for a biting prey species; to aim to maim. Sure, also zebra try to bite lions once they have been tackled and their teeth might not be adapted for that, but can you be sure that their hooves aren’t adapted to kick? As their ancestors got bigger so their hooves adapted to form single masses, well suited for kicking a pursuer. Like the australopith a zebra might look innocent of weaponry, but one still instinctively stays clear of the fat behinds of “tame” zebra.
The ticket to where? A primate needs a ticket to the savannah, full of resources but inhabited by other mammals who are adapted to be difficult and confusing prey.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:Jayjay, you should read the Simarillion, it treats Ainur as the creator together with the Valar and Maiar and mortal beings as the actors.
I never could get into the Simarillion but maybe you could say the same of Greek mythology where the gods and men are on an intellectual equality. Although I understand it was a capital crime to be an atheist in ancient Greece, that notion of equality might have excited Westerners in their long drift away from the Hebrew vision of the world. In the Bible God is the actor, the Israelites merely have the freedom to obey or not, to learn or not to learn , to evolve or not. So God sets the framework for growth, mankind grows within that framework. It’s an interesting vision for today, where that framework might appear as the global ecological system.
I made up a sequence of this waterbuck seeing off a lion, which is its habitual and successful predator- in a particular context where the lion couldn’t turn the buck’s flank. If she jumped into the water at one side that would be distant from the buck and would give the buck time to turn to face her again. Some calculation like that must have been in her head. Unfortunately the story line doesn't continue beyond the lion going off after her near escape. I imagine the buck backed into the water again, to restore the stalemate.
That to help demonstrate the importance turning the flank of prey, that would be difficult to do on a biped hominin.
Edit: add above point, plus chimps smaller than horses.