Dieoff starting in Africa

[biffvernon]

If you are a hunter-gatherer, the northern winter is good time for getting meat. Plant food storage only becomes important after you start farming, Neolithic onwards. For the first 300000 years of human occupation of the British Isles food was probably as easy to come by in winter as in summer.

[DominicJ]

UE
Indeed, monkeys can find a food object, and go and look for a rock they can use to smash it open.
But as far as I'm aware, no species of monkey does it the other way round, it doesnt see a rock, and think, that will be useful if I find a clam later.
They certainly dont find a piece of food, go fuind a rock, break open the food, eat it, and then take the rock back to there "home", and store it for future use.

Which is pretty much what led us down the road of making tools, we grasped that a tool would a useful thing to keep, even in the absense of the food we will use it to open.

Using a tool open food is one level of planning
Keeping that tool after wards is another
Collecting the tool without the food being present is yet another.
Planting a Walnut Tree to be harvested in 100 years is another entirely, one quite beyond me.

[UndercoverElephant]

UE
Indeed, monkeys can find a food object, and go and look for a rock they can use to smash it open.
But as far as I'm aware, no species of monkey does it the other way round, it doesnt see a rock, and think, that will be useful if I find a clam later.

Humans don't do that either. It is a waste of resources.

They certainly dont find a piece of food, go fuind a rock, break open the food, eat it, and then take the rock back to there "home", and store it for future use.

Which is pretty much what led us down the road of making tools, we grasped that a tool would a useful thing to keep, even in the absense of the food we will use it to open.

Using a tool open food is one level of planning
Keeping that tool after wards is another
Collecting the tool without the food being present is yet another.
Planting a Walnut Tree to be harvested in 100 years is another entirely, one quite beyond me.

I can't really explain this better than I already have done. The cognitive ability you are talking about is so important to humans that it must have appeared long before all existing humans had a common ancestor. You're looking in the wrong place, cognitively speaking. If there's a difference between the existing races of humans, it is much more subtle than you are suggesting.

[DominicJ]

Humans don't do that either. It is a waste of resources.

I have a stick, "to stir paint with"......
"That might be useful oneday" is hardly an unknown phrase.

The cognitive ability you are talking about is so important to humans that it must have appeared long before all existing humans had a common ancestor.

Appeared yes, but that doesnt mean it hasnt developed differently in the last 70,000 and 130,000 years.

You're looking in the wrong place, cognitively speaking. If there's a difference between the existing races of humans, it is much more subtle than you are suggesting.

Oh almost certainly, its probably far more relevent to why we split from apes.
I just think its an interesting example, from using primitive tools, to storing primitive tools, to combining primitive tools to make complex tools to faking moon landings, and the reason why I see a stick and think "paint stirer" despite not having paint to stir, but a monkey doesnt see a rock and think, "clam smasher" unless he happens to be holding a clam.

[RogueMale]

When I posted some time ago that US Army studies had found a correlation between intelligence and race there were a few comments about racism, I think I escaped because the statistics didn't put me, white European, at the top of the tree. East Asians are apparently, on average, 10% smarter than me.

I can't speak for you personally, but compared to white people in general, no they're not.

Professor James Flynn and others have examined the apparently higher scores of East Asians. Corrected for obsolete norms, their IQs are virtually indistinguishable from white Americans. He writes about Chinese Americans in his book What is Intelligence?" (page 115-122, my italics):

Setting their genes aside, one thing is clear. Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high IQ rather than the reverse. It is not easy to review the history of their achievements without emotion. Nothing I have said diminishes these people, unless someone believes that achievement with average IQ is less worthy than achievement with high IQ. Only when we connect for the obsolete norms that inflated their IQs can we fully appreciate what they have accomplished. There is an irony in the fact that they overcame bias whenever they encountered it at a time when they did not excel on the putatively unbiased IQ test.

The reasons they do so well, even compared to similar white Americans, are down to culture, e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/ja ... -parenting.

If the stats had put me at the top I'm sure I probably would have been branded a racist or a white supremacist.

Perhaps you might want to reexamine the evidence, looking at various points of view, and read around the subject (dipping into such things as evolutionary theory and artificial intelligence) and see if you arrive at the same conclusions.

Incidentally, Ashkenazi Jews are reputed to score even higher than Asian Americans were thought to (but actually don't). While you could quite safely argue (and I'd even agree with you!) that East Asians are a separate race from whites, saying you'd be ill advised to argue for Ashkenazi Jews being a separate race would be putting it mildly. However, they do have a distinct culture, and I'd look at that first to explain why they, on average, outperform other white people.

[RogueMale]

But if height, skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, predisposition to baldness can all be influenced by genetics, why not intelligence?

It isn't a simple thing like height or hair colour. We can easily measure them, there's only one thing to measure for each, and have even found the genes which influence them. That's why no one argues with the proposition that Dutch people are, on average, taller than pygmies, or that Swedish have, on average, lighter hair colour than Chinese.

Contrast this with intelligence. Someone might be excellent at map-reading yet be completely tone-deaf. Or be very good at negotiating with people yet be hopeless at calculus. How important are the different components of intelligence? How do you measure it? On the genetics side, there are a few genes which have been found which influence intelligence, in very roundabout ways, and differently in different environments. Google for Ariaal and DRD4.

[RogueMale]

Rest
How do you account for the fact that civillisation never really took off in Africa, and North America?

You might want to read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

Can you imagine if instead of the Europeans doing it to Africa, it had been the Americans carving up Europe?

Erm, Europe was carved up by the Americans and Russians.....
Belgium is an artificial state where the two sides, possibly three if you include brussels, hate each other.[/quote]

Ah, but the Flemish hate the Dutch more than they hate the Walloons, and the Walloons hate the French more than they hate the Flemish. Hence Belgium. But does it still exist? They've been unable to form a national government for over a year now.

[DominicJ]

Rogue Male
Oh dont get me wrong, I'm not claiming theres an intelligence gene, nor do I put any faith in IQ tests.

I was quite careful to skirt around intelligence, and concentrate instead on forward planning, but even that is probably far too broad an area, and a collection of genes that affect it likely affect a dozen other things as well.

[clv101]

I've never really understood the "everybody's equal" idea. It seems to me that everybody is different! It also only seems reasonable that some of the differences are correlated with specific areas of the planet (rather than being random).

Folk in one part of the world are different to folks in another part. This is due to a whole load of reasons including environmental, cultural and a population's history.

[UndercoverElephant]

Humans don't do that either. It is a waste of resources.

I have a stick, "to stir paint with"......
"That might be useful oneday" is hardly an unknown phrase.

The cognitive ability you are talking about is so important to humans that it must have appeared long before all existing humans had a common ancestor.

Appeared yes, but that doesnt mean it hasnt developed differently in the last 70,000 and 130,000 years.

You're looking in the wrong place, cognitively speaking. If there's a difference between the existing races of humans, it is much more subtle than you are suggesting.

Oh almost certainly, its probably far more relevent to why we split from apes.
I just think its an interesting example, from using primitive tools, to storing primitive tools, to combining primitive tools to make complex tools to faking moon landings, and the reason why I see a stick and think "paint stirer" despite not having paint to stir, but a monkey doesnt see a rock and think, "clam smasher" unless he happens to be holding a clam.

Did you read this article?

http://archaeology.about.com/cs/humanor ... lombos.htm

Blombos Cave is a site at the very tip of South Africa where great strides in understanding the development of modern human beings are being taken these days. While much of the recent press attention has been on the scholarly debate on whether humans evolved once in Africa (the Out of Africa theory), or several times all over the world (the multiregional hypothesis), a quiet revolution has occurred centered on what it means to be human.

Given the ramifications, it is not surprising that the revolution has been quiet ("silent", more like.) 80,000 years ago, something happened to a group of humans living on the coast of South Africa which represented the "final push" towards fully modern humans. This involved two key innovations. The first was a level of symbolic thought necessary for the creation of works of art and the second was the ability to adapt to a different way of life in a new sort of environment. Together, this indicates an enhanced capacity for cultural evolution. For humans, it marks the beginning of the end of physical evolution and the end of the beginning of cultural evolution.

Fine. Now add another bit of the jigsaw puzzle:

http://archaeology.about.com/od/sterms/ ... disper.htm

The Southern Dispersal Route refers to a theory concerning an early migration of modern human beings from southern Africa to the east along the coastlines of Africa, Arabia and India to Australia and Melanesia between about 70,000 and 45,000 years ago. The original Out-of-Africa theory said modern Homo sapiens came northward out from Africa about 45,000 years ago, and then diverged along different routes to Europe and Siberia and South Asia. Archaeologists still believe a wave occurred to the north, but growing evidence supports this earlier southern route into South Asia.

The theory goes that modern H. sapiens with a generalized subsistence strategy based on hunting and gathering coastal resources (shellfish, fish, sea lions and rodents, as well as bovids and antelope), traveled along the coasts eastward. On the way, they undoubtedly met other hominins (such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus and/or Neanderthals), probably replacing them...

So the final wave of humans which actually left Africa were the descendents of the Blombos people from the southern tip, and their route out of Africa was coastal. Undoubtedly they met other hominins, but the idea that they replaced them looks suspect to me (guess what the motivation of the author might have been???) These were coastal specialists, and they were probably small in numbers compared to the humans occupying the interior of the continent. That is likely to have included not only H. erectus and heidelbergensis, but other groups of H. sapiens (including the people from whom the coastal specialists were themselves originally descended). It seems highly unlikely to me that the coastal specialists replaced all the other humans in Africa, especially when we consider the results of the Human Genome Project which I referred to earlier in this thread.

If you put all of this together, it amounts to a revolution in our understanding of the origins of modern humans, but the ramifications in terms of the debate we've been having in the last few pages are very significant. To spell it out, it suggests that the gene pool of the final wave of humans which left Africa and colonised the rest of the world ("cro-magnons"), displacing H. erectus and the neanderthals on the way, was derived from a small group of humans who had begun to behave in ways we associate with fully modern humans. The gene pool of the humans who remained in Africa is much more diverse. The only explanation I can see for this is that native sub-saharan Africans are only partly descended from the group which left, and partly/mainly descended from humans who were not on the line which led to the Blombos people - the ones who had not made that final push towards modernity.

The main parts of this puzzle have been in existence for several years now, but you don't hear much about it in popular science rags or TV programs. I believe this is because leads to conclusions which are politically very dangerous indeed. It is another "inconvenient truth", rather like climate change, peak oil and size mattering after all...

[biffvernon]

Using a tool open food is one level of planning
Keeping that tool after wards is another
Collecting the tool without the food being present is yet another.
Planting a Walnut Tree to be harvested in 100 years is another entirely, one quite beyond me.

I've planted several walnut saplings. Does this mean I'm further along the line of evolutionary progress than Dom?

[biffvernon]

I've never really understood the "everybody's equal" idea. It seems to me that everybody is different! It also only seems reasonable that some of the differences are correlated with specific areas of the planet (rather than being random).

Folk in one part of the world are different to folks in another part. This is due to a whole load of reasons including environmental, cultural and a population's history.

I think 'everybody's equal' and 'everybody's different' can both be true, simultaneously.

A fat blue-eyed man and a thin brown-eyed woman have an equal right to vote.

A Laplander and a Papuan are equal under the UN Convention on Human Rights.

'Equal' does not mean 'same'.

[UndercoverElephant]

I've never really understood the "everybody's equal" idea. It seems to me that everybody is different! It also only seems reasonable that some of the differences are correlated with specific areas of the planet (rather than being random).

Folk in one part of the world are different to folks in another part. This is due to a whole load of reasons including environmental, cultural and a population's history.

I think 'everybody's equal' and 'everybody's different' can both be true, simultaneously.

A fat blue-eyed man and a thin brown-eyed woman have an equal right to vote.

A Laplander and a Papuan are equal under the UN Convention on Human Rights.

'Equal' does not mean 'same'.

In other words, although people do not have the same abilities, they do have the same rights. That is all I have suggested in this thread, and it attracted an accusation of racism, which it isn't.

[DominicJ]

I've planted several walnut saplings. Does this mean I'm further along the line of evolutionary progress than Dom?

Well, its not a line, that implies theres a destination, and we're all going there, which isnt the case, and although I havent planted any walnuts, I do wish too, but, if it makes you feel better

[clv101]

I've never really understood the "everybody's equal" idea. It seems to me that everybody is different! It also only seems reasonable that some of the differences are correlated with specific areas of the planet (rather than being random).

Folk in one part of the world are different to folks in another part. This is due to a whole load of reasons including environmental, cultural and a population's history.

I think 'everybody's equal' and 'everybody's different' can both be true, simultaneously.

A fat blue-eyed man and a thin brown-eyed woman have an equal right to vote.

A Laplander and a Papuan are equal under the UN Convention on Human Rights.

'Equal' does not mean 'same'.

In other words, although people do not have the same abilities, they do have the same rights.

Indeed, that much should go without saying.