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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Counting mtDNA mutations is like counting the ticks of a clock... and if we assume the clock has always ticked at the same, known rate, we can put a time estimate on any particular interval. But what if it has been speeding up or slowing down... can it vary from place to place... is it wildly erratic...?
What was your question?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| The work was done [on Out-of-Africa] primarily with European and Near Eastern Neanderthal specimens, and began by noticing that more recent European Neanderthals looked less like modern Europeans than older ones did. If Neanderthals and been ancestral to their successors, they should have resembled them more and more over time, not less and less. |
Interesting. So there is some evidence that Neanderthal became more and more cold adapted? (But when morphological differences are all they have to go on, why aren't they sub-divided into different species?)
| However, as with other DNA, mutations do occur. They seem (A) to be individually random, but (B) to occur over a large population at a relatively constant rate. Like other genetic mutations. |
So how does it or can it go wrong when extrapolating back to very small populations?
As the genealogy of lines of "mutated forms" has been slowly worked out, it has accounted for all humans (in the sample). It follows that no other woman from her generation has any living descendants through an exclusively female line of descent (at least among individuals studied so far).
Caution: This does not make Mitochondrial Eve the first woman, or the first human, or the first member of a new species. |
That doesn't stop them placing the origin of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa at about 200,000 years ago.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| When a large species suddenly disappears and is immediately replaced by another species which is identical except a bit smaller, this can only mean one thing. |
Mankind is responsible, every time. Huntin', spearin', fishin'. |
What does the huntin', spearin' 'n' fishin' do? What's the connection between the disappearing and the appearing species?
| The consensus among palaeontologists, I thought, was that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. |
From the raptors, in particular. But did you see the dinosaur "mummy" complete with hexagonal-scaly skin, just like chickens' feet? That was a hadrosaur and the link between them and birds is a much less straightforward proposition.
"Descended from the raptors" is probably overstating it since small birds were supposed to have been established well before and survived whatever it is the big dinosaurs didn't.
| Seemingly natural extinctions were engineered by man. It's official, Channel 4 news said so just the other day. |
Next week they'll say they weren't.
| The competition between wild species and humans' domesticated or semi-domesticated animals is ultimately untenable. |
You mean the argument has been advanced and refuted that there were domesticated animals when the megafauna died out?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Nature insists on non-consciousness for some reason. |
Even we are largely non-conscious, but what is it about the conscious part that is so different from everything and everyone else?
| Well, the answer presumably is that pain gets our attention more than anything else, and we'd soon learn to ignore the bell ringing. |
By the way, they are or were working on finding the most effective means of giving warnings in aircraft cockpits: conveying a sense of urgency without startling the crew or making it hard to concentrate. (Dunno what the answer is.)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Climate change caused a shift from grasslands to tundra - this is likely to blame (in the case of bison) because it would have reduced the animals' food supply. |
Then why were there billions of bison in living memory (near enough)?
Ah, good: saves us reading it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Ah, good: saves us reading it. |
On the contrary, Dan, it is mandatory since it tells us when and where horses were first domesticated. Orthodoxy has its uses.
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Xerxes
In: The Forest of Dean
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| 140,000 years doing nothing... then suddenly everyone is on scooters. |
This is a recurring theme in postings to this topic. The idea that something suddenly happened to humans 30,000 years ago (or 10k or 70k or 100k) is nothing new -- it used to be 6,000 years BP when religion ruled. But this great leap forward seems to me to be just a matter of perspective. Maybe 10,000 years from now, I can hear someone musing 'humans were stuck on the ground for countless millennia until about 1900 AD when suddenly they literally took off and flew, and then, within only a few decades, they were standing on the moon. Suddenly everyone was flying.'
Look at it this way:
-- Every so often, the sum total of human knowledge doubles. This fact alone ensures that the growth of human knowledge will be exponential.
-- Add to this the fact that the means for storage, retrieval and dissemination of knowledge also doubles from time to time. This means that the total growth in technology will be hyper-exponential.
There is one other essential element in this argument, which is best illustrated with some examples. Think about Marie Curie and ask yourself what would have happened if she had been born 500 years earlier. Whatever she may have accomplished in her life, it would assuredly not have been anything to do with radioactivity. The pace of human development is limited by what has gone before. I could not have been communicating by broadband, Wi-Fi, on a laptop, even ten years ago. I reckon the chap who runs a TV repair shop in my town could easily be a world leader in designing Time-Dilation Quantum Zenosystems. The snag is they won't be invented until about 2500 AD so now he just mends old TVs for a living. If Albert Einstein had been born in Baffin Bay in 1850 say, he might have been a whiz at scraping seal skins, but without even written language he would have been relatively insignificant.
So, from this perspective I could easily have been Boxgrove Man, but I couldn't have been using a laptop. I would be chipping a few flints (or bartering for chipped flints from those who knew how to do that) and grateful for the warmth of fire. My hundred word vocabulary would not have been much use for Applied Epistemology.
It has been proposed that the sum total of human knowledge (including storage, retrieval and dissemination) doubles at present, every 25 years. The actual period isn't important and it could argued that it should be 10, 50 or 100 years. But using 25 years as a model and bearing in mind we are dealing with hyper-exponential growth, let us say that 1,000 years ago human knowledge doubled every 100 years; 10,000 years ago it doubled every 1,000 years; 100,000 years ago it doubled every 10,000 years, and a million years ago it doubled every 100,000 years. The precise timescales and periods are not important, what is important is the answer to those who say that not much happened for hundreds of thousands of years -- they are right! But not for the reason usually given, which is the sudden, even miraculous, appearance of modern man. The purpose of my argument is to say this did not have to be a sudden miraculous change 30,000 years ago. Perhaps it was, but IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE, there is a rational explanation for man's meteoric rise.
Before flints were struck to make tools there was unlikely to be a reliable method for sparking a fire. Before fire, there was no way to smelt metal. Before metallurgy, there was no means to make sophisticated artefacts. Before those artefacts, there could be no precision engineering. Before precision engineering, there could be no clocks, sextants or mechanised science. The end of that sequence is the computer on my lap. I don't know when it started but it could have been a million years ago. It doesn't have to be 30,000 years ago.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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No, Xerxes, it's just you that's stuck in the orthodox paradigm of Man's gradual and ever-upward climb (itself just another offshoot of the Great Uniformitarianist Paradigm). However the reason it is a paradigm is, as you have observed, because it replaces the previous one, The Great Deistic Paradigm.
We, as Applied Epistemologists, are not permitted to follow other people's paradigms but have to go where the evidence takes us. And the evidence is perfectly clear:
1. For several million years the world's leading primate developed new technology at the rate of (let's be generous) one per hundred thousand years.
2. Until the last thirty thousand years when the rate went up to...er...several thousand per every thirty thousand years.
| The purpose of my argument is to say this did not have to be a sudden miraculous change 30,000 years ago. Perhaps it was, but IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE, there is a rational explanation for man's meteoric rise. |
OK, so give it to us.
| Before flints were struck to make tools there was unlikely to be a reliable method for sparking a fire. |
Don't be ridiculous. Fire is easy-peasy once you're not scared of it. Nobody in his right mind ever used flint until after the invention of the flint tinder box (sixteenth century AD?...anybody?).
| Before fire, there was no way to smelt metal. |
But they had fire, goofball! Ever since Pekin Man or whoever.
| Before metallurgy, there was no means to make sophisticated artefacts. |
What are you talking about? The Cro-Magnon toolkit was an absolute bleedin' marvel twenty thousand years before anybody had metallurgy.
| Before those artefacts, there could be no precision engineering. |
Bollocks. The Cro-Magnon toolkit is precision engineering. It is engineered to be exactly as precise as it needed to be.
| Before precision engineering, there could be no clocks, sextants or mechanised science. |
Horse manure. Megalithic science had all these things or at least their functional equivalents. Not that I'd call a sextant mechanised...you just hold it up, old boy, and line it up with your hand.
| The end of that sequence is the computer on my lap. |
No it isn't. The computer is merely the four thousand eight hundred and seventeenth 'major' invention in a sequence that ends at...oh, I forget, I wrote it down somewhere.
| I don't know when it started but it could have been a million years ago. It doesn't have to be 30,000 years ago. |
Nobody's arguing with that that. But before Cro-Magnon, the rate of invention was one per hundred thousand years, remember, so by now you wouldn't have a computer, you'd have a fish hook.
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Xerxes
In: The Forest of Dean
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| No, Xerxes, it's just you that's stuck in the orthodox paradigm |
Really? My education must be even poorer than I had imagined. Please point me in the direction of orthodox literature that deals with the questions in the first half of my posting (the ones you failed to answer) and I will be glad to catch up.
| Before precision engineering, there could be no clocks, sextants or mechanised science. Horse manure. Megalithic science had all these things |
I am aware that there is a thriving industry capitalising on people's wish to believe in lost civilisations with advanced technologies. Just never got round to reading all that stuff.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Really? My education must be even poorer than I had imagined. Please point me in the direction of orthodox literature that deals with the questions in the first half of my posting (the ones you failed to answer) and I will be glad to catch up. |
OK, but since it was a bit waffly it was difficult to deal with.
| This is a recurring theme in postings to this topic. The idea that something suddenly happened to humans 30,000 years ago (or 10k or 70k or 100k) is nothing new -- it used to be 6,000 years BP when religion ruled |
I thought I had dealt with this but since it is centrally important, it's worth going over again. The previous paradigm -- that God started everything in very recent times -- was overthrown by Uniformitarianism, which is the idea that essentially there is no beginning. Everything is just a development of something else.
The human story was grafted into this paradigm by arguing
1) that Man is just a slightly different version of the hominids and
2) that technological advance is always a gradual (including eventually an exponential) development of what went before.
You seem to be a proponent of this orthodoxy.
| But this great leap forward seems to me to be just a matter of perspective. Maybe 10,000 years from now, I can hear someone musing 'humans were stuck on the ground for countless millennia until about 1900 AD when suddenly they literally took off and flew, and then, within only a few decades, they were standing on the moon. Suddenly everyone was flying.' |
No, that's the whole point of using a statistical approach ie the graph I proposed to you. There is only one transition from virtual flatlining to an exponential advance. And that would appear to be around 30,000 BP. Of course we cannot totally rule out that (let's say) 1900 will not turn out to be some other great turning point but that won't rule out the first Great Turning Point.
Look at it this way:
-- Every so often, the sum total of human knowledge doubles. This fact alone ensures that the growth of human knowledge will be exponential. |
Well, it's somewhat tricky summing 'knowledge' (especially where there is no evidence) which is why I prefer technological advance. But if you insist: as far as we can tell hominid knowledge did not advance except at a normal animal pace ie they made a discovery every hundred thousand/million years or so (knowledge of fire, knowledge of flint knapping, er...that's about it). After 30,000 years Cro-Magnon started doubling his knowledge every (what) thousand years, then at shorter intervals until now it's every twenty-seven point three two recurring years.
| Add to this the fact that the means for storage, retrieval and dissemination of knowledge also doubles from time to time. This means that the total growth in technology will be hyper-exponential. |
In so far as I understand this, I agree. But it doesn't apply to the hominids, does it?
| There is one other essential element in this argument, which is best illustrated with some examples. Think about Marie Curie etc etc |
I really couldn't follow this. I gave up reading it in fact. Perhaps others did better but you'd be well advised to make points rather than write essays if you want to really engage. (Including, if I might say so, with your own orthodox preconceptions.)
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Before precision engineering, there could be no clocks, sextants or mechanised science.
Horse manure. Megalithic science had all these things
I am aware that there is a thriving industry capitalising on people's wish to believe in lost civilisations with advanced technologies.. |
I fear you are doing what you periodically are prone to do -- mixing us up with the Crazies. I was merely pointing out that the Ancients had time measuring devices that did the job of clocks and astronomical sighting devices that did the job of sextants. I then pointed out neither clocks nor sextants are "mechanised science" in any absolute sense. And that therefore your argument appeared to fall. But, please, if you wish to cast the argument wider, do so.
| Just never got round to reading all that stuff |
We do get round to reading all that stuff because these very enthusiastic and intelligent researchers come up with material that academics are paid to ignore. I commend them to you.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| On the contrary, Dan, it is mandatory since it tells us when and where horses were first domesticated. |
Yes, "about 12,500 years" ago. We knew that.
| Dale Guthrie, of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, thinks climate change and a shift from grasslands to tundra is likely to blame because it would have reduced the animals' food supply. |
Lemme get this straight: it's cold, Bering is dry land, horses walk over, towards the ice, and have plenty to eat. It warms up, the glaciers retreat, exposing more of Alaska, if not all of the Americas, but filling up the Bering Strait so they can't go back away from the ice. Grassland turns to tundra, which is what happens if you go towards the ice cap, but they never thought to go the other way to where the grass is still growing...
Oh, I seee: it's a comedy.
| He concludes a combination of influences likely led to the equine disappearance. |
So much for "best attributed to a coincident climate/vegetation shift".
| Spaniards reintroduced horses to the Americas in the 1500s. |
Yes, clever how they reintroduced horses they didn't have
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| This is a recurring theme in postings to this topic. The idea that something suddenly happened to humans 30,000 years ago (or 10k or 70k or 100k) is nothing new - it used to be 6,000 years BP when religion ruled. But this great leap forward seems to me to be just a matter of perspective. |
I was making a different point: and it was meant to be ironic. Whenever it was and however suddenly modern humans appeared, I take it they were 'suddenly' just like us. And what we -- and every other species remotely like us -- is like is sedentary. My objection is to the way "mankind's epic journey" is portrayed: as an epic journey. Regardless of knowledge and technology, it doesn't make sense to say humans occupied one corner of Africa for 140,000 years and then 'exploded' into the rest of the world, including the rest of Africa, in the last 60,000 years.
| -- Every so often, the sum total of human knowledge doubles. This fact alone ensures that the growth of human knowledge will be exponential. |
Ignoring the tautology for a second, the sum total of every other species' knowledge does bugger all. The fact that we're talking about knowledge at all, let alone its accumulation, says we're in a new ball game. I agree that we are no different in essence, only in degree, from other animals, but this degree of difference deserves its own explanation.
| The pace of human development is limited by what has gone before. |
Absolutely. That's evolution for you, in its broadest sense. But, as Mick alluded, flint-knapping enables you to do other things, but whether you actually do it is another matter. Hominids apparently did not. We did.
| the reason usually given, which is the sudden, even miraculous, appearance of modern man. |
Nobody round here is arguing for the miraculous, except in a figurative sense: there is definitely something here for us to put our finger on.
| The purpose of my argument is to say this did not have to be a sudden miraculous change 30,000 years ago. |
Think what you like about the humanity of the Neanderthals that buried bodies with flowers or shaped handaxes around fossil shells, the evidence is still that the Cro-Magnon appeared with a much more diverse and finely crafted toolkit, works of art, maybe even weaving...
(And even if we did think of Neanderthal advances as part of the same million-year-long continuum as Cro-Magnon's, the lack of evidence that one descends from the other is a problem!)
It is probably significant that the earliest known evidence of fishing is from Africa, 50,000 years ago.
| there is a rational explanation for man's meteoric rise. |
Yes, we presume so.
Don't be pedantic. You know what he's saying.
Conversely, Xerxes, it's easy to be led astray by what is easy to say: be careful that you can mean it, too.
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Xerxes
In: The Forest of Dean
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First of all Dan, thanks for your rather more lenient mauling of my posting. Then,in response to
| the sum total of every other species' knowledge does bugger all. |
Are you old enough to remember when Blue Tits and other bird species discovered how to peck the tops off milk bottles and by this means avail themselves of the cream beneath? There was good evidence that birds of more than one species learned this behaviour from one another by observation. They probably hastened the demise of milk rounds - bottles left on the doorstep for more than a few minutes usually got raided.
Even minute brains the size of a Blue Tit's can acquire and utilise knowledge. AE has not convinced me that our intelligence is not part of that same process. (Please spare us cheap jokes about bird brains, Mick).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| (Please spare us cheap jokes about bird brains, Mick). |
Not a chance, dogbreath. The advance you mentioned is clearly colossal. So we know birds are capable of astounding feats of learning. And yet we also know in the several humndred million years since they evolved from the dinosaurs (or whatever) they acquired...let's see....astro-navigation, building nests, imitating the sound of a camera shutter...er...that's about it. One per n million years. Or average for animal advance. Well done, bird brains!
And yet, and yet. Once somebody comes along and leaves out a bottle with a shiny cap...pow! Now do you understand how two fairly similar species (hominids and Thoroughly Modern Humans) can a) invent stuff at the rate of one per n million years but as soon as they are in a position to imitate/emulate/observe/whatever they b) take off.
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