Posted: Jul 09, 2019 5:32 am
Fenrir wrote: Um JJ, the claim (yours as it happens) is that there is some relationship between large canines (i.e their absence) and offensive weapon use (or manual dexterity per se).
A claim which remains without evidence.
No, continually pointing out that the one lineage which has developed the fine motor skills that provide excellent manual dexterity also happens to have relatively small canines doesn't help you. That's a pointless distraction. Birds don't have external ears, that does not suggest the absence of external ears predisposes an animal to flight.
Well that’s exactly the inference your countryman Raymond Dart drew from the canines of the Taung child, on the sold grounds that a bipedal primate that size would have been hopelessly vulnerable in the context of the African savanna unless it used kinetic hand weapons. And he has never been contradicted that I know of, except that the scientists telling the origin story seem to have come to agree that weapon use wasn’t very important. I’m trying to argue that the weapon use was more important than “fine motor control”, the high consequentiality of using the best object in the west way stablished a symbiosis-like relationship with objects. At the same time relieving the species from skull constraints that go with males having to defend the troop using their teeth.
Fenrir wrote: You are essentially claiming a hominid picked up a rock and it's canines fell out but this change was externally imposed and somehow had nothing to do with the hominid itself?
Thanks for putting it so well, apart from that misdirection about canines “falling out”. Of course, the ancestor of the Taung child had to have a highly particular form and context, as shown by the very similar savanna chimps who yet haven't locked into the same peculiar adaptation.