From: John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)
Date: Fri Jan 24 1997 - 09:22:42 MST
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On Thu, 23 Jan 1997 Keith Henson <keith@filoli.com> Wrote:
>I will certainly argue that a lot of animals humans hunted
>were much larger than the strike zone!
If the animals were much larger than that, then we can make 2 conclusions
about these hunters who were armed with nothing but rocks and tiny brains:
1) They had a huge amount of courage.
2) They did not leave a huge number of descendants
>I very much doubt a hunting group got that many opportunities
>to hit something in a day, certainly not as many throws as a
>baseball pitcher will make.
Even with great natural ability baseball pitchers need to practice to be good
at their job, they practice constantly until their arm wares out. If these
hunters saved their arm and did not practice, how could they hope to hit
anything?
>So much context has been lost that I am not sure how this
>ran, but I think my point was that bipetalism was a
>prerequisite for throwing. My point was how the big expansion
>grew out of the earlier adaptions to projectile hunting which
>a chimp sized brain could support.
Once bipedalism and a hand almost as good as ours was developed, the point
Lucy was at, I don't find it all that mysterious that the brain grew very
rapidly. Yes, it will help you with throwing, but with that good hand
intelligence will help you do a lot of other things too. What I don't
understand is why bipedalism developed and why Lucy evolved a first rate hand
when she still had a third rate brain.
On Thu, 23 Jan 1997 freeman@netcom.com (Jay Reynolds Freeman) Wrote:
>even a prey species that would be very likely to lose in a
>fight to the death with a predator, may be able to deter
>that predator by virtue of the small chance of a different
>outcome. After all, the predators aren't out for fights to
>the death as such, all they want is lunch.
I agree with that, I just have my doubts that a pre-human throwing a rock
would even be a good bluff, and as a offensive hunting weapon I think it
would be hopeless.
On Thu, 23 Jan 1997 Michael Lorrey <retroman@tpk.net> Wrote:
>The big difference between baseball and rockball, is that
>your prehuman only had to throw ONE strike a day to live til
>tomorrow (maybe a few more to be fat and happy), rather than
>a whole nine innnings a day (its the repetition while
>strained that causes the most wear and tear on pitcher's
>arms).
If the pre-humans did not practice , how could they be any good at it?
>I just read today's paper that announced the discovery of a
>cache of tools found in Ethiopia near Olduvai that were
>between 2.5-2.6 million years old. [...] How old was Lucy?
3.9 million years old.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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