The first “Walking Critters settled down” thread.


Quote:

Ma was born approximately 3 million years ago and belonged to an ancient ancestor species of ours called Australopithecus. She was born in Africa, perhaps Eastern Africa, where archaeologists have discovered a concentration of australopithecine fossils, including the famous “Lucy” found in 1974. Three million years ago is approximately halfway from the time when our species first split from the chimpanzee and bonobo line to the modernday,

Ma weighed 65lbs. She walked much like us, very unusual in that time! Apes do NOT walk like us even if on their hind legs.

Ma did not have fire or weapons. She was small enough even eagles occasionally made a meal of one of her species, let alone predation by felines. Ma became pregant and gave birth. Now she had to carry her baby causing her to spend 25% more energy. Her whole day was avoiding predators, finding food, eating it raw which took most of her day, just like champanzees with their strong jaws spend 6 hours a day eating their raw food.

She could not leave her baby somewhere—the baby would cry and Ma would not find her baby again. So she had to carry her baby all day, with it climb a suitable tree to spend the night hopefully out of reach of predators.

Ma invented a baby-carrying sling! Gathering food, covering distance, dodging predators just got easier. She tied the vine into a sling using a knot—even chimps can tie a knot.

More importantly—the idea of making tools was invented.



There you go—bet you thought fire or the wheel was the first invention  :) Inventions had to be invented first.

Oh—the male who got Ma pregnant had no interest in helping Ma look after the infant. Some things never change, eh?

Baby horses are on their feet within an hour of their birth, chimpanzee babies can cling on to their mothers’ fur. A human baby, now or 3 million years ago, is totally helpless. Why is this?

Humans—and their ancestors—grew bigger brains and so bigger heads than apes or other species. The birth canal can only be so wide.

The evolutionary adaptation—human etc babies are born before they are fully developed! If human babies were carried until they reached the stage of development of a chimpanzee baby then pregnancy would take 20 months and birth would be impossible. Human babies spend the next 12 months growing a million synapses a day.


Quote:

In all primates, an evolutionary trade-off occurs between larger brains and infant mortality, and each species has arrived at its own equilibrium. The question archaeologists have asked is how humans arrive at such a perverted one. Presumably, when hominins first branched off the chimpanzee line, hominin babies could soon cling to their mothers.Today, H. sapiens have one of the largest body-to-head-size ratios in the animal  kingdom despite walking upright. It’s an oddity biologists call the smart biped paradox. The evolutionary explanation for the paradox is that hominin mothers like Ma birthed their babies earlier in their gestation. Essentially, Ma’s baby was born two or three months premature, before its head could outgrow the exit. Since Ma, the change has only become more pronounced. If H. sapiens birthed babies at the same developmental stage as chimpanzees,

Yet some here now seem more chimpnanzee than hominoid  ;D ;D ;D

Well, this series will be completed, eventually, elsewhere.