Penelope
weak force testosterone
All mammals are social creatures.
Mammals of the same species interact with each other. Herd together. Aid in the raising of each others' young, to some minor degree.
But when hominids began to experiment with walking upright, 4 to 7 million years ago, something new (in terms of evolution) was afoot.
& & &
Ann Gibbons:
Moving from the trees to the ground meant that hominids became easier prey. Those that were better at cooperating could live in larger social groups and were less likely to become the big cat's next meal ...
Ann Gibbons writes regularly for Science magazine, but the above is from a summary of many of those writings (and of findings published in Science by paleoanthropologists) newly published in the March 2010 issue of Smithsonian:
"Discovering Our Ancestors: Researchers Trace the Human Family Back 7 Million Years."
Paleoanthropologists are uncovering most of these recent early-hominid finds (last 18 years) in a semi-desert region of Ethiopia which, 3 to 7 million years ago, was covered in forests.
(Paleoanthropologists, like modern archeologists, collect far more than just bones and tools, today. Anything that can help replicate ancient environments helps to contextualize our understanding.)
The specific focus of this article is upon a 4,400,000 year old 4-foot female which Tim White's team has called 'Ardi' (short for 'Ardipithecus ramidus'). Her brain is the size of a chimpanzee. But Ardi stands upright, according to anatomist C. Owen Lovejoy (though there are some naysayers regarding this point). And she has a small opposable thumb and also an opposable big-toe (for climbing in trees). Ardi could not run (by contrast to the 3 to 4 million year old 'Lucy') but Ardi did live in two worlds - in trees and on the ground.
Gibbons:
... Ardi and fossils from 35 other members of her species, all found in the Middle Wash, represented a new type of early hominid that wasn't much like a chimpanzee, gorilla or a human. "We have seen the ancestor and it's not a chimpanzee," says White. This came as a surprise to researchers who had proposed that the earliest hominids would look and act a lot like chimpanzees. They are our closest living relatives, sharing 96 percent of our DNA, and they are capable of tool use and complex social behavior. But Ardi's discoverers proposed that chimpanzees have changed so dramatically as they have evolved over the past six million years or so, that today's chimpanzees make poor models for the last common ancestor we shared.
(The chimpanzee did not - conveniently - stop evolving when hominids started to branch off in a different direction 6 or 7 million years ago.)
& & &
But here these paleoanthropological discoveries begin to get really interesting. This turn in evolution pushed mammalian social-instinct to a new level.
Gibbons:
A. ramidus males were not much larger than females and they had evolved small, unsharpened canine teeth. That's similar to modern humans, who are largely cooperative, and in contrast to modern chimpanzees, whose males use their size to dominate females and brandish their dagger-like canines to intimidate other males. As hominids began increasingly to work together, Lovejoy says, they also adopted other previously unseen behaviors - to regularly carry food in their hands, which allowed them to provision mates or their young more effectively. This behavior, in turn, may have allowed males to form tighter bonds with female mates and to invest in the upbringing of their offspring in a way not seen in African apes. All this reinforced the shift to life on the ground ...
Ultimately, in the inter-species competition for scarce resources ("survival of the fittest") the evolving hominids became the "fittest" creatures out there. And they became so, because - within their species groups - these hominid creatures were far and away the most cooperative creatures out there.
& & &
If god existed at all to these creatures, god existed as facilitator of their newest, most godlike quality (in terms of evolution) - their developing (and intensifying) ability ...
To cooperate with each other.
Mammals of the same species interact with each other. Herd together. Aid in the raising of each others' young, to some minor degree.
But when hominids began to experiment with walking upright, 4 to 7 million years ago, something new (in terms of evolution) was afoot.
& & &
Ann Gibbons:
Moving from the trees to the ground meant that hominids became easier prey. Those that were better at cooperating could live in larger social groups and were less likely to become the big cat's next meal ...
Ann Gibbons writes regularly for Science magazine, but the above is from a summary of many of those writings (and of findings published in Science by paleoanthropologists) newly published in the March 2010 issue of Smithsonian:
"Discovering Our Ancestors: Researchers Trace the Human Family Back 7 Million Years."
Paleoanthropologists are uncovering most of these recent early-hominid finds (last 18 years) in a semi-desert region of Ethiopia which, 3 to 7 million years ago, was covered in forests.
(Paleoanthropologists, like modern archeologists, collect far more than just bones and tools, today. Anything that can help replicate ancient environments helps to contextualize our understanding.)
The specific focus of this article is upon a 4,400,000 year old 4-foot female which Tim White's team has called 'Ardi' (short for 'Ardipithecus ramidus'). Her brain is the size of a chimpanzee. But Ardi stands upright, according to anatomist C. Owen Lovejoy (though there are some naysayers regarding this point). And she has a small opposable thumb and also an opposable big-toe (for climbing in trees). Ardi could not run (by contrast to the 3 to 4 million year old 'Lucy') but Ardi did live in two worlds - in trees and on the ground.
Gibbons:
... Ardi and fossils from 35 other members of her species, all found in the Middle Wash, represented a new type of early hominid that wasn't much like a chimpanzee, gorilla or a human. "We have seen the ancestor and it's not a chimpanzee," says White. This came as a surprise to researchers who had proposed that the earliest hominids would look and act a lot like chimpanzees. They are our closest living relatives, sharing 96 percent of our DNA, and they are capable of tool use and complex social behavior. But Ardi's discoverers proposed that chimpanzees have changed so dramatically as they have evolved over the past six million years or so, that today's chimpanzees make poor models for the last common ancestor we shared.
(The chimpanzee did not - conveniently - stop evolving when hominids started to branch off in a different direction 6 or 7 million years ago.)
& & &
But here these paleoanthropological discoveries begin to get really interesting. This turn in evolution pushed mammalian social-instinct to a new level.
Gibbons:
A. ramidus males were not much larger than females and they had evolved small, unsharpened canine teeth. That's similar to modern humans, who are largely cooperative, and in contrast to modern chimpanzees, whose males use their size to dominate females and brandish their dagger-like canines to intimidate other males. As hominids began increasingly to work together, Lovejoy says, they also adopted other previously unseen behaviors - to regularly carry food in their hands, which allowed them to provision mates or their young more effectively. This behavior, in turn, may have allowed males to form tighter bonds with female mates and to invest in the upbringing of their offspring in a way not seen in African apes. All this reinforced the shift to life on the ground ...
Ultimately, in the inter-species competition for scarce resources ("survival of the fittest") the evolving hominids became the "fittest" creatures out there. And they became so, because - within their species groups - these hominid creatures were far and away the most cooperative creatures out there.
& & &
If god existed at all to these creatures, god existed as facilitator of their newest, most godlike quality (in terms of evolution) - their developing (and intensifying) ability ...
To cooperate with each other.