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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| However, you should simply switch over from "anatomically modern humans" to "Cro-Magnon" in order to stay on board. |
I think you've shot yourself in the anatomically modern foot. If Cro-Magnon is a subset/descendent of AMH then he is not cold-adapted. All that stuff about blubber is irrelevant. Blubber is no good on land. You need hair or feathers to keep warm. Our fingers would have dropped off if they were dexterous enough to fashion any kind of tool. We can give ourselves fur, but learning to do so implies that we could (a context of technique/tool/resource development) and that we didn't need to (otherwise we would have died trying).
I put it, before, something like this:
i) tool development is exponential: one technique opens up the possibility of developing others;
ii) tools/techniques are concentrated where the challenges are greatest (i.e. you can't survive the harshest conditions without the fullest set of helping hands);
iii) when you've got the means to master the worst place, then you've got the means to master any place.
Taken together, these mean the world-beating toolkit will appear in the far north, all sudden like, and spread like wildfire, even though it forms a continuum with the evolution of technical ingenuity by ordinary means -- and from climes to which humans are anatomically adapted.
Humans don't have to have left the water in the Arctic in order to explain the lack of direct descendents from Non-Arctic Aquatic Man. We think of ourselves as having left the water, but, if anything, we occupy the foreshore more thoroughly than anything else. We catch the fish, we dig up the clams. If there were any distant cousins doing the same when we turned up, you can be sure they were dispensed with, one way or another.
(What does human genetics look like if we folded back on our own family tree?)
I think I'm arguing that Cro-Magnon-ness already had to be operating in order for humans to make it into the Arctic, but the lighting of the blue touch-paper might still have played out in the way that Mick will soon describe.
Out-of-Africa and Out-of-Canada, anyone?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| The only way he would have stayed on the ice, was if he had no option...and the sea was no longer accessible to him. |
On the contrary, since it's a matter of life and death, no one would have been able to make the ice their home without having another home they could retreat to during the error parts of the trial-and-error cycle.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| How does iodine keep you warm? |
Iodine is necessary for thyroid function, which affects metabolism... though that doesn't mean it's especially important to humans [Axolotls 'grow up' if you give them the iodine they lack in the wild.] or that more iodine is better.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| This means that our cousins like the Neanderthals and the Hobbits would also have had to come out of the water, but separately. |
This certainly does not follow. The differences between us and the hominids (Neanderthal is clearly a continuation of the various hominids in a way that we are not) is quite sufficient to propose that they were never aquatic. Remember, the Aquatic Ape Theory does not make us truly aquatic mammals -- our relationship to the hominids would be equivalent to otters' relationship to stoats. |
It does follow, in that bipedalism is a central character in the story Elaine Morgan tells.
(Did someone mention adaptations to shoulder joints that would enable throwing? Are they sure they're not adaptations for swimming?)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Most of the stone tools found at the site were made of local raw material and consist of cobbles with a few flakes removed to make simple but functional working edges. There were two bifacially flaked points. |
A mixture of rudimentary tools and more sophisticated ones, eh? So what happens when a diverse toolkit (ranging from the rudimentary to the sophisticated as the job demands) overlays a cruder one? Can you tell one man's rude tools from the rude end of another man's spectrum? Hmmm...
| In other words, just as I don't think that living on an earthquake zone was a fundamental part of the Minoans development (and their development or very presence impossible otherwise) nor do I tie the Modern Man in North America (if there was one) to the ice. |
But you have to in order for all their remains to be lost until the last retreat of the glaciers. If it's coincidence that they happened to be within range of the ice at the right time, then nothing is explained.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| You're right -- but I can't get a handle on the glaciation dates. The Aurignacian period is about 40 000 - 28 000BP ... right? |
| Assuming then like the author that the traffic was all one-way, why would people from ice-free Siberia want to cross over into ice-bound Alaska? |
I can only say the dates I am working from (again it was all orthodoxy at the time). All are agreed that the "end of the last Ice Age" occurred c 12000 BP (occasionally that's 12,000 BC). But anyway it's when the glaciers disappeared from a) the British Isles and b) Canada.
It is also agreed (or used to be) that the Canadian glacial ice reached its limits (ie the present Canadian borders with Alaska and the US) in 35 000 BP. This is why orthodoxy says that
a) Mod Man turns up in 35,000 in Alaska (apparently he liked going towards the glaciation in an Ice Age) but
b) could only get through to the rest of North America when the ice disappeared in 12,000 BP.
It is generally agreed (even by me) that nobody (man, herbivores etc) can traverse a thousand miles of ice several thousand feet thick, which is what stood between Alaska and the USA in the time period 35,000 to 12,000.
You must always draw a distinction between 'the ice' in the sense that Eskimos and polar bears mean it (which is good) and 'the ice' in the sense that Earth Scientists mean it, which is glacial ice (vair, vair bad).
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| But why did CMs have to change their lifestyle? |
"Have to" is the nub of the problem, I think. (In all of evolution, perhaps.) Everything is resistant to change: we just do what we know. There's just a little bit of dabbling around the edges, where someone explores and experiments, the result of which is slightly greater diversity: all of what there was before, plus a little bit more. Given enough time, the little bits more add up, exponentially, until we now have people living in every corner of the globe, by a myriad of ways and means. Someone can now live in Antarctica, not because they have to, but because they can.
Don't forget that dinner doesn't evolve into pudding: modern Eskimos are not necessarily direct descendents of polar Cro-Magnon.
And for good measure, I'll throw these in: it's problem-solving that creates problems; and natural resources are invented.
| if camels, bison, reindeer and assorted fauna are wandering across the land bridge... |
I'm never satisfied with this account, coz I don't think they ever actually account for it. I dunno how the cues work, but if a migratory herd goes north to fresh pastures, doesn't it stop at fresh pastures? If there is more pasture to the north-east, how do they know and why do they care? And how do they swing from north-south to east-west? I'd rather see more than the assumption that it works out.
(I haven't heard anything I can trust about global weather and Ice Age refugia, by the way.)
What if all the new species were brought by humans?
| The lifestyle is based on following the herds not huddling in a village. |
Which lifestyle?
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Grant
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DPCrisp wrote | Are you saying food might have been so depleted that people took to wearing skins to compensate for their weight loss? |
No, just that if a creature had a large amount of blubber and a high intelligence, he would wear something. What would he wear? What about that penguin the family has just eaten.
Why would he wear something? Because even the most protected animal in the Arctic sometimes feels bloody cold.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Chad wrote: | | The only way he would have stayed on the ice, was if he had no option...and the sea was no longer accessible to him. |
Or if the sea no longer provided the bounty of calories he had grown accustomed to.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Sorry, I was worrying about 'how to survive in the Arctic when you have nothing to wear' and how essential herds were for all your needs but I'm putting the sled before the dog I think.
| What if all the new species were brought by humans? |
To Canada from....? Or vice versa? Driving them across from Siberia in successive waves?
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Dan asked:
(Did someone mention adaptations to shoulder joints that would enable throwing? Are they sure they're not adaptations for swimming?) |
I'm glad to see somebody takes notice of what I write...even if it's only subliminally!
This is from the Neanderthal thread, when I wrote:
| How would Homo Sapiens have acquired this extra articulation of the shoulder? - - Simple...it's an adaptation to an aquatic environment that enabled him to swim better. | |
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| Why not stop waiting for them, Claire and accept the evidence! The trouble with Crazies is that they think they have to overthrow the evidence in order to overthrow the prevailing paradigm. It's much better just to assume the prevailing paradigm is crazy but the evidence is true. |
But the prevailing paradigm and evidence are related i.e. the evidence from some 'trail blazing' archaeologists has (finally) overthrown the prevailing paradigm and this will affect the evidence that gets discovered because it will become possible for 'bog standard' archaeologists to report their early finds without risking their credibility.
Meanwhile I'll read Elaine Morgan because I seem to be the only person round here who hasn't....
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Claire wrote: | | Meanwhile I'll read Elaine Morgan because I seem to be the only person round here who hasn't.... |
shame shame
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Dan wrote:
Look at this kid's hands, feet and cranium. |
Yes...I also had concerns for his (other) extremities
How common is it for a polar marine mammal to have his 'dangly bits' so perilously exposed to the elements?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Chad wrote: | | How common is it for a polar marine mammal to have his 'dangly bits' so perilously exposed to the elements? |
The Shrinkage factor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm3F9piwnTU
"Like a frightened turtle!"
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