This article was very interesting. It was written by Ian Tattersall, not a nobody in that kind of scientific field and yet, it shows that human beings have preconceived ideas even though the rest of the article is worth reading. Numerous yesterday, all alone today Homo sapiens is the only one on earth today. In the 50's and 60's, the scientists thought that the hominids had succeded each other, without any form of cohabitation. The only thing that looked appealing was the linear theory of a stooped old hominid who was drown into the darkness of ignorance and who would have slowly evolved into a modern, elegant and intelligent Homo sapiens. Like in the fairy tales, the ugly toad changed itself into a charming prince. That hypothesis was discarded in the 70's but remained lingering in the minds for longer. In fact, we understand today that there was never such a thing as a linear evolution of unique hominids getting human traits as time went by until they become us. Archeologists have discovered plenty of new hominids which were dated of overlapping periods of times, which means that there were plenty of species of hominids and who lived at times around the same periods of time. Australopithecus africanus => Homo erectus => Homo habilis => Homo neanderthalis => Homo sapiens =====> It's all wrong ! According to the author, at least 20 hominids have existed, and more remain to be found. Many of them have "appeared", coexisted and interacted and have eventually disappeared. We only have a vague idea of what really happened and the only data we're sure about are the data about us "humans". Here, the author says that the tools used by the Neandertal men were great but somehow rudimentary, very stereotypical and very rarely made of other materials than stone. He says that the hunting techniques were rudimentary too and that no evidence was found of symbolic thinking and objects before they got in contact with Homo sapiens. He says that the Neandertal men buried their dead ones only so they aren't devoured by hyenas and that there is no belief proven whatsoever in after-life. According to the author, the Neandertal men hadn't the spark of creativity that could have given them the upper hand against Homo sapiens. He says that the "modern" man invented the sculpture, the gravure and rock painting. They invented music and the first stages of writing. The tombs were richly elaborated. In a nutshell, the Neandertal man was manifestly inferior to "modern" man. He says that in Europe, we have no proof of interbreeding between both species. The Neandertal men were quickly replaced in Europe whereas they coexisted a long time with the "modern" man in the Middle East. He says that it's because "modern" cognition went along the acquisition of "modern" behaviours, like the language. He says that the hominids had originally the organs needed to speak but that a cultural/environmental change happened that eventually made the "modern" man speak a language. He says that no symbolic drawings carved or painted means no symbolic thoughts, which is in contradiction with the previous article. He says that language and thoughts are interdependent and figuratively feed each other (which is true, in my opinion) and that both improved alongside. What he says here is interesting. There were numerous hominids living on earth at the same moment, not a linear chain of hominids evolving and leading to humans. What he says about the language is false, lack of specific and symbolic words doesn't mean lack of language and intelligence. We all know that learning other languages is like entering into whole universes of new thoughts, ideas and thinking patterns. If my memory serves me well, the Inuits have 20 different words for the snow but they don't have their own vocabulary regarding high-level modern maths or how to name the different categories of sand in the desert. People use the words that are important and relevant in the local environment they live in, especially back then several thousands of years ago as there were no our modern means of knowing what other cultures do and have invented. It doesn't mean that they are less intelligent or inferior. This latter conclusion of mine will be explained and backed up by recent discoveries about the Neandertal man. Furthermore, it's not because the Neandertal men didn't believe in the after-life that they didn't have the ability of symbolic thinking.
The origins of man in the heart of his genes Here again, the former theories are no longer valid and the scientists are more cautious. The fossils are no longer the only means to try and discover what happened in the past. The geneticists have found contradictory results : the earliest woman would be 200 000 yo and the earliest man, 50 000 yo.... The results of the studies on the DNA must be taken with a pinch of salt because they concern only a tiny amount of our DNA and aren't always relevant when applied to the population history. There are mutations in our DNA and scientists, helped by statistical tools, calculate the ratio and rythmn of said mutations in order to find a common base of DNA material among many individuals or their oldest common DNA possible. The recent progress made in the study and analysis of the DNA has invalidated the theory accepted only 30 years ago. One first result is that the difference between DNA molecules depends on the geographic distance between the populations and their languages (languages especially in Africa and surely because people get generally married with those they can talk to). The closer these populations live, the less diverse their DNA will be. Yet, as for Africa, there are for example Bantu speaking populations who are several hundreds of miles away and whose DNA is much closer than between them both and their closer neighbouring tribes. Mitochondrial DNA Since that DNA comes only from the mother and is therefore only changed because of mutations, it is used as a more reliable tool for statistical studies. They took 147 people from five distinct areas : Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and New-Guinea. The studies revealed that there were as many different DNAs as there were people involved and that the differences between the DNAs of closely located people were bigger than remotely located people, which means that the results contradicted the scientists' expectations. They anyway managed to deduce a lineage from it starting from Africa onward, of which one branch remains in Africa and the other one spreads all around the world. The theory "Out of Africa" was born. Nowadays, the African people have a greater diversity of DNA between themselves than the population of the other continents. This theory was hailed as a great scientific feat. They even calculated the "birth" date of the common ancestor thanks to a ratio of 2-4 % of mutations of the mitochondrial DNA per million of years => 200 000 years ago. And yet, those calculations have no scientific validity !!!! They have used other valid methods of calculation with the very same data and have found different and even contradictory results. The calculations are made from generations of individuals and not generations of populations. In statistical terms, the difference is huge ! Besides, those calculations have taken into account populations that never get interbreeded anymore between each other and we all know that human history is made of migrations, invasions, etc. It's obviously impossible to know what happened in prehistoric times (prehistoric = before history, before we know what happened) in that regard. Furthermore, the level of genetic diversity is linked to the size of the population in question, not to its age. The more there are DNAs in a continent, the more there will be mutations. Africa was maybe merely the most populated continent in prehistoric times, without it being the oldest. Moreover, the supposed stability in time of the mitochondrial DNA has been questioned. It may be subjected to environemental changes and mutations may also make it be back as it was thousands of years ago... The nickname African Eve is spurious because the oldest ancestors found through calculations are merely the oldest ancestors of the individuals whose DNA was analyzed. It may have nothing to do with a whole population of several millions of people. Finally, the dates proposed for the exit of Africa don't match with the datation of the fossils on hand. The coalescence theory This method compares the genes in commun until they find a common ancestor. The time of coalescence is the average number of generations for two randomly chosen lineages to coalesce in a given population. This tool is used to rebuild the demographic history of the populations. The results found are closer to what the fossils indicate but they explain the demographic expansion of the populations, not their apparition. We must take the result of these studies with a pinch of salt because they have as a rule of thumb the fact that the DNA changes always at the same ratio over time. But, two problems arise : they compare the DNA between humans and chimpanzees in order to find when they coalesced but the diversity of the DNA of the chimpanzees is greater than the human DNA. If we take the DNA of another chimpanzee for the statistical calculations, the results may vary dramatically. The only thing the geneticists agree with is that the diversity of the DNA of the African population is huge. The rest is greatly uncertain. The secrets of the Y chromosome Other scientists have used another method based on the analysis of the Y chromosome, transmitted only by men and to men. It's a complementary method to the one using the mitochondrial DNA. Here, the dates found are way younger than those found with the mitochondrial DNA. The problem with this method is that each Y chromosome can have a different ancestor and that it may have been slightly changed through natural selection, but the scientists who used that method took its invariability as a premisse. Here again, there is no certainty at all. Several other studies have been implemented with other parts of the nuclear DNA and all have given results on their own, without any corroboration possible with former studies. The nuclear DNA is a dead-end too. Incertitude is here the keyword. Fossil DNA At the end of the 90's, parts of the DNA of Neandertal man were extracted and analyzed. Given the difference between both DNA (Neandertal vs Modern man), scientists said that they were not our ancestors. Simulations by computer have calculated that the chances that there was interbreeding are really faint because there is no more genetic traces of the Neandertal man in modern humans. The rest of the ending paragraph says that there has been plenty of genetic studies on this subject until now but that they showed that there had been as many causes of errors and misinterpretations. The same DNA can give as many different interpretations as there will be methods to analyze it. The only thing we're sure of is the great genetic diversity of Africa but the latter can also be explained otherwise. As an example of such an incertitude, based on the study of the fossils, nothing impedes the scientists to conclude that modern men appeared in the Middle East. Regarding some statements, please remember that this article was written in 2007 and I took it in purpose in order to show how much their theories have changed in 8 years because I'm going to quote more recent articles in the following days.
my opinion on this is that a nephilim did an unnatural thing with a ape and made a monkey man to mock at god! hope that doesn't offend nobody but I don't believe in ape like ancestors of man that evolved! that doesn't rule out nephilim doing monkey business and seeing to it the remains would be found to latter mock God!
The animals are more intelligent that we thought http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world...ls-funny-reactions-see-reflections-mirror.cnn Edit : After having posted a new video on the thread dedicated to animals, I decided to catch up with the ones Wallflower had posted recently and I noticed that she had already posted almost the same about one last week... Aussielanders.... Wow....!!!!
The animals are more intelligent than we thought Crows can count, and chimps know when they've nailed a test, studies say Sherman the chimp took a memory test and got a reward for right answers, and the experiment showed he had a complex thought pattern. (CNN) Crows can count, and chimps know when they've nailed a test, according to two new studies that say our animal friends may be smarter than we once thought. Like their human counterparts, chimp test takers appear to know when they get a question right. And they seem to know when they've botched it, too, researchers said in a new study published in the journal Cognition. That may seem novel, but it shows that our primate cousins probably share with us a level of thinking known as metacognition. It's more than just knowing something. Metacognition is knowing that you know something. Like humans, chimps can think about their thinking and change their behavior as a result, the researchers believe. Sneaky experiment They had suspected as much, so they devised an experiment to check it out. They gave three chimps computerized memory tests and rewarded them with food for correct answers, but they built in some hitches to tease out signs of metacognition. The reward appeared at a place away from the test area, and when the chimps got an answer right, a sound alerted them that the food was going to appear -- with a slight delay -- at the distant spot. They had to hustle to get to the other station before the food popped out, or it would disappear, or go down the drain, so to speak. But that alerting sound was delayed, too. The apes barely had enough of a heads up to make it to the reward station in time to catch the food before it vanished. After a while, the chimps appeared to get a sense for when they got an answer right and when they didn't. And when they did, they often darted for the food station ahead of that tardy sound signal. If the monkeys got an answer wrong, more often than not, they sat things out. After all, when you've bombed, why go to the trouble? "These untrained, spontaneous confidence judgments demonstrated that chimpanzees monitored their own states of knowing and not knowing and adjusted their behavior accordingly," said the study, which was conducted by researchers at universities in Georgia, South Carolina and New York. But that doesn't mean that they are having the same experience of consciousness as humans do when they experience metacognition, the scientists cautioned. Crows seeing spots When crows are hunted, they may know how many are out to get them, German researchers say. Old hunters' tales say that crows can count. If they see three hunters hide in the woods, they'll stay out of reach until the last one has left -- even if the hunters go gradually, one by one. Crows recognize numbers of dots, regardless of size, shape or arrangement, a study says. There's truth to those tales, researchers at the University of Tuebingen in Germany say in a new study. Crows can recognize numbers of things, and the skill is hardwired into the birds' brains, they say. The scientists trained crows to recognize groups of dots. Then they changed the sizes of the dots, and their arrangements, and the birds still recognized the number. The researchers observed an area of the brain that took in visual stimuli and noticed that the neurons there did not register the size, shape or arrangement, but just the number of dots. "When a crow sees three points, seeds or even hunters, single nerve cells recognize the 'threeness' of the objects," said neuroscientist Helen Ditz. Primate brains do it the same way, the scientists said, which is surprising, given how different they are from, well, bird brains. Source
The animals are more intelligent than we thought Source Either ancient human ancestors like the ape-like creature "Lucy" -- which lived around the same time as the artifacts -- made the tools, meaning humans are not the only ones able to craft sophisticated tools, or humans appeared earlier than currently thought, and their fossils are still waiting to be found. As said above, the scientists have realized at last that the animals were more intelligent than they thought, that the making and use of tools and even bipedalism weren't specific to humans... As a consequence, what if "Lucy" was just an intelligent ape, as intelligent as ours nowadays, but whose species got extinct many thousands of years ago ?
The animals are more intelligent than we thought. Source Careful crows watch their tools Researchers at the University of St Andrews have discovered that crows, like humans, store their tools when they don't need them. The study published today (Wednesday 20 May, 2015) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society is the first to examine how non-human animals avoid accidental tool loss. New Caledonian crows are famous for using stick tools to extract insects from tree holes and other hiding places. Crows hold tools in their bill when foraging, but need to put them down to eat their prey. "We were really excited when we saw crows in our study site carefully placing tools under their feet, to use them again later" says Barbara Klump, lead author of the study. In experiments with wild-caught birds, the researchers discovered that crows look after their tools more carefully when foraging at height than on the ground. Ms Klump explained: "This makes perfect sense because the higher up you are, the more challenging it would be to recover a tool. In fact, wild crows seem to get really upset when they accidentally drop their tools!" Humans use many different tools every day, and are very good at keeping them safe for later use. Dr Christian Rutz, team leader and one of the study's co-authors, said: "When you put a treasured pen in a pen holder, you know where it is, and can quickly find it again. It turns out that crows do exactly the same, sometimes storing their tools in tree holes or behind bark." The crows were extremely good at keeping track of their tools, remembering where they had put them, and reusing them again to extract more meals shortly after. This tool "safekeeping" may be very important, as it means crows don't have to repeatedly manufacture new tools and can spend more time on the critical business of finding food. Exactly how long wild crows use individual tools for, and how far into the future they can plan, remains to be explored.
Here is a video from PBS about Crows and their intelligence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s472GjbLKQ4