Posted: Sep 29, 2019 5:22 pm
Are you now answering in picture format?
I asked whether you'd done research into the number of sabretooth cat reconstructions to know that your claim was true or not. You've responded by posting some pictures.
This doesn't answer the question. How many reconstructions do those pictures actually represent? How many is 'no shortage' - presumably, a lot... but how many is 'a lot' exactly when it comes to reconstructions of a particular species?
None of this even elementary nuance is even touched on. You've made a point which dangles and does nothing.
Jayjay4547 wrote:Spearthrower wrote:
Obviously, even this little foray contains a glaringly obvious oversight on your part. The sabretooth feline family have a massively oversized piece of dental anatomy that they're named after. And the sheer dimensions of that piece of anatomy also means they are more likely to survive fossilization in tact than the much smaller canines of other animals./But of course, this is you engaging in near perfect simplification again: no interest in reality, only in what bits you can spin.
Your argument seems to be that the reason why there are no credible reconstructions of male Australopithecus with fang like canines is that the canines were so small that they didn’t survive fossilization intact.
That's a particularly odd reading, isn't it?
In reality, my argument is clearly that the sabretooth canines were so massively oversized that this extreme piece of skeletal anatomy forms the colloquial name for the entire genus, and consequently, being so large, they are more likely to survive fossilization than any species which possesses smaller canines.
That obviously doesn't say that other species have small canines. Perhaps you shouldn't try to reformulate my arguments when your reformulation completely misses my point? Or perhaps given the context in this thread, I would be fair to say you are intentionally misrepresenting my argument.
In reality, any force that is strong enough to break a sabretooth canine is strong enough to break any of the cranial skeleton of a sabretooth, whereas that's quite obviously not the case for the majority of animals.
Jayjay4547 wrote: But there are plenty of reconstructions of Australopithecus with small canines.
No, there aren't, and you've never shown any reconstructions of any australopithecine with small canines.
1) Again, please stop with the numptyism - you're talking about afarensis, the species, not Australopithecus, which can only be used as part of a species name. If you want to talk about the entire clade or genus, call them 'Australopithecines', and if you want to talk about A. afarensis, use the name. The problem for you is that the Australopithecines include a number of species with widely different attributes, and as I've told you before, small canines are not a diagnostic characteristics of the australopithecines. I've already pointed this out to you several times, and even went to the trouble dozens of pages ago, of suggesting that you appeal to a particular species of Australopithecine, it offering the best support for your argument, but you insist on using the genera term, yet talking about afarensis.
2) What's 'small'. You keep using words that are basically subjective - you're about to do this more in a moment having read on - but measurement is not a mystery, it's not some arcane element of scientific jargon you'd pollute yourself by using. I have to imagine that you continue to use these subjective terms to give yourself leeway to move the goalposts as you go along. Actually, the relationship between measurements of various parts - you know, the comparative part of the term comparative anatomy, is really what's interesting, and it's what all those numerous qualified professionals keep referring to when they say that male afarensis had large canines. Are they saying 'as big as a sabretooth'? Of course not, and if we were using sabretooth tigers as an example of 'large' then essentially all animals would have 'small' canines: instead, they're comparing them to other hominids, for example with one of the graphs I shared, it shows you a substantial overlap in canine size between afarensis and chimpanzees; this gives you a valid comparison, aside from the fact it also contains absolute measurements.
Jayjay4547 wrote:And you have presented graphs and pics of intact Australoptihecus canines, which you have presented as showing that they did have fangs.
Please stop bullshitting me to my face.
I robustly challenged and, in fact, completely demolished your attempt at inserting this woolly notion of 'fangs'. Spiders have fangs, hominids don't. So no, of course I've never presented anything at all concerning fangs as I reject it as nonsensical crap.
Jayjay4547 wrote:So why are there no reconstructions of male Australopithecus that could give context to your claims?
1) Why are there no reconstructions of male <insert a species, not part of the name for a species, and not quite a genus name here>? Well, firstly, who says there aren't? It's not like I'm the one saying... dude, I've put up reconstructions for you to peruse. For me, the reconstructions are not important whereas you've latched onto this notion that some specific yet unspecified bar is the only form of evidence you will accept. I find that laughable. I've provided ample evidence in many different formats supporting my position, I don't have to jump some hoop you've concocted to avoid acknowledging all that evidence.
2) Given that you tried this already, and I pointed out how pathetic it is for your position to appeal to a lack of evidence that you've seen as evidence for your position, when it's only you who wants this particular type of evidence, and you can't even show any evidence whatsoever for your case... and then when you try to, you once again post a fucking female afarensis, cluelessly, which is exactly what started this entire side-discussion, and which you're still arguing about 40 pages later, yet you still don't know what you're looking at.
And somehow, you still act like your position is credible. /shrug I can't help you: you're doing this to yourself, and I ain't coming to your rescue.
Jayjay4547 wrote:Spearthrower wrote:
Oh JJ, you really are horribly out of your depth, aren't you? You sit here pretending to know what you're talking about, constantly whining about how you want a serious conversation and how no one treats your proclamations with due gravitas... and then you say something as abjectly clueless as this.
No JJ, the roots of teeth are not long and sharp, nor do they have an enamel covering like the crowns.
I love how you toss out these one line declarations after ignoring evidence for dozens of pages: it's like it's taken you this long for your Morton's Demon to come up with a way to spin the information and protect your beliefs. Of course, it has your deep pool of ignorance to draw on, so what it eventually comes up with is completely nonsensical.
Here is the graphic you posted earlier showing hominin teeth:Yohannes Haile-Selassie wrote:
Point of order, here is one photograph of hominin teeth I shared earlier. To say it is 'the' one is to pretend that there is only one, whereas we all know there are many.
Secondly, yes? And?
Jayjay4547 wrote:What seem to me to suggest “long and sharp” are towards the bottom of the images but those are the roots; what seems to have enamel and would be exposed, are the unimpressive top bits.
I have no idea why you believe the roots are long and sharp - again, I can't really answer to your ignorance. What I can do is point to AL 333-35 and say 'there's an example of long, sharp canines in afarensis', and it's quite possibly a young female.
As usual, you don't really know what you're looking at, and as usual, it's like you're too proud to ask me. As if asking me means you've lost the high-ground, or something. I could do as I have in the past and just not inform you, and then watch as you pretend you know what you're talking about while making points that miss the mark, but go on, this time I will give you an easy pass.
The left hand picture is of a juvenile A. anamensis, the middle picture is loosely ascribed to A. anamensis, but as the fossil is represented only by teeth which show an intermediary transition is comparative crown to root length, and given the 3.8 mya dating of the site, it appears to form something of an imtermediary between anamensis and afarensis, the latter of which can be seen on the right.
Now there are a number of interesting points to make here, many of which impact on so much of your argumentation such as the fact that the later (a million and a half years in fact) afarensis specimen has comparatively larger canine crowns than anamensis which contradicts your 'simple' narrative and actually points to a far more interesting scenario concerning the sociobiology of the two species and how much information can be deduced from comparative analysis just of teeth, but to be honest, I can't really be arsed to explain stuff to you just to have you pretend expertise at me.
Instead, I will point out that comparatively, that is to body size, jaw size, other dentition size, and to root size, these afarensis specimens have large canine crowns. (Aside: before waving your hand over this, the only reason that you can say the sabretooth has large canines is as a comparative function: they're large compared to other parts of its body, so if the same length canine teeth were found on an animal 20 times a sabretooth's size and weight, then they'd no longer really be considered 'large'.)
However, that's still not the full story. The full story is even more interesting, and even more problematic for you. This site, known as 'the first family', actually offered a jumble of bones from many individuals - I have actually explained this already in the thread - and back when it was discovered in the 1970's, there were far fewer specimens to compare these to. As such, it took many years for it to become accepted that they were afarensis remains at all, and even longer before it became consensus that they represented many individuals, male, female, and juvenile. Back 20 years or so ago, Plavcan and Kimbel - 2 names you should by now have become familiar with, ran a comparison against the comparative size of canine and femur bones from other sites, many of which could be more reliably sexed, and arrived at the notion that afarensis exhibited far greater sexual dimorphism than in any other hominid, greater even than gorilla. I have already reported exactly this in this thread with citation. However, later analysis showed many discrepancies, particularly with newer fossils coming to light, and this basically caused a disagreement between two camps which lasted basically until about a decade ago.
Consequently, whenever I've been citing papers of information in this thread, I have actually been referring specifically to literature from within the last 10 years because newer finds have clarified much of the mystery of the past. What we know now, and I have shown already in this thread, is that afarensis canine sexual dimorphism was approximately the same as in modern chimpanzees (even though the afarensis lineage diverged potentially 13 million years ago), and significantly greater than in modern humans. Problematically for you, this is also true comparative to earlier australopithecines, and in fact, apes going back for several million years: as I mentioned many times already, the entire catarrhine clade exhibited reduction in canine size over many millions of years back into the Miocene, and there's an interesting point in history where the monkeys and apes essentially switched evolutionary niche if their dentition is anything to go by. What's ironic, and I've given you fair warning many times, and even explained exactly this to you before: Australopithecus afarensis is the worst australopithecine you could have selected for your argument, because it actually has comparatively the largest canine size of the hominina, and exhibits an increase in canine size over time with the more recent specimens exhibiting the largest comparative canines. As I told you before, you should have picked a. africanus, although you'd still need to contend with the problem of sediba's canines, and yet more detailed problems for you - even the definition of the earlier A. anamensis still has doubters who think it's actually just an early A. australopithecus, which would then indicate a very pronounced increase in canine size in the early Australopithecines over a fairly short period.
Jayjay4547 wrote:
Well spotted Spearthrower, my mistake. Though notice in the raw link to that image exposed above, it was identified as AL-444-2, which is of a male, I believe. That seems to be wrong and I should have spotted it.
What do you mean 'well spotted'? It's bloody obvious, JJ. It's not 'well spotted' - it's confounding for me to conceive of how you didn't spot it, but perhaps it goes a long way in explaining why you find comparisons so confusing.
It's also absurdly ironic that this is literally how it all started, with you posting a picture supposedly of a male afarensis, then me saying 'dude, that's female'.
It also necessarily impacts on your declarations about how you can just trot off round the internet and round up all the information: no experts needed.
This is exactly what happened before as well: you posted something naively believing it was 1 thing, yet it was bloody obviously quite another. How do you keep on engaging in this level of self-deceit where you clearly don't know what you're looking at, yet you still keep arguing about it? It's exactly like my analogy of ignorant-of-engineering me insisting that a photograph of the 3 Gorges Dam is a picture of a bridge, and when you explain why it's not so, me posting another image of yet another dam and then declaring that proof.
Perhaps other people are bored of the minutiae here, perhaps other people won't notice this, but you can't seriously expect me to pretend like these events haven't occurred. It's not that you don't know enough, it's that you really don't know anything at all and what you SHOULD be doing is asking me to explain things to you so that you LEARN, just as if I wanted to discuss engineering I should listen to somebody who knows what they're talking about..
Jayjay4547 wrote:Here is a reconstruction of that male fossil, showing that it didn’t have fang-like canines.
As I said before: point to the canines.
Your sentence is cute, but the actual sentence should read: here is a reconstruction of a make fossil which doesn't actually possess any associated canines.
Jayjay4547 wrote:Compare with those of male gorilla or chimps, which I have posted often.
Why would I need to?
Jayjay4547 wrote:
You'd think that by now you'd have learned to stop posting pictures of replica you find on internet shopping sites!
Jayjay4547 wrote:To see the wood for the trees,...
Um ego and hubris?
How can someone who literally can't tell a male from a female, an adult from a juvenile, or one species from another 'see the wood for the trees'?
Answer is: they really can't, and no one would ever take such a person seriously.
Jayjay4547 wrote:Australopithecus male skulls were more like the female ones, than is the case in modern gorilla and chimps.
Skulls? We weren't talking about skulls.
We were talking about canine teeth. As I have already evidenced in this thread, A. afarensis canine length is approximately the same as in chimpanzees.
Jayjay4547 wrote:As I have often demonstrated through pics.
Pics which you cite but don't understand the content of, pics which you keep mis-identifying, pics which don't even contain the information you are supposedly appealing to. You don't know what species you're looking at, you don't know what canine teeth look like, you don't know anything relevant, ergo what you have demonstrated is that your hubris vastly outweighs your competence.