I sometimes joke that our brains were needed during glacial periods to survive, and now we just invent chores and make fuss over everything just to keep it busy.
The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
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Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#12Alternatively, humans hunted the big games to death after acquiring big brains that enabled more cooperation when hunting. Curious if the decline in big game happened in places without humans.
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#13I sometimes joke that our brains were needed during glacial periods to survive, and now we just invent chores and make fuss over everything just to keep it busy.
Where's the joke though?
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#14This line of thinking falls into a common issue I have with evo-psych work. The paper proposes a mechanism that could select for intelligence, but doesn't provide evidence that the mechanism caused humans to evolve to be intelligent.
It's the equivalent of the "Is-Ought" fallacy for empirical sciences.
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#15Ok - so how does this account for the hunter gatherer cultures in North America and Africa into modern times? Bison do not count as small game. Also, if you kill an elephant how much of that beast can you (and all your tribe) hope to eat? I'm not even sure if this is a causal inversion or just a co-incidence; humans may well have had nothing to do with big game until they were anatomically modern. Where is the eviden…
There's actually some evidence (though also some debate) that early human hunting led to the extinction of megafauna in North America in the late Pleistocene age. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5693/70.full
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#16I believe that the series of extinctions that cleared the way for (and perhaps necessitated) the rise of intelligence in apes was the great filter . I can't ignore global warming as another possible filter, but I think the big one is behind us.
Assuming there is only one big filter, which I think is unlikely.
Any mega black swan event is a filter in its own since it's disturbing the system you are adapted to. The worse event is one that disturbs the system you are dependant on.
Climat change is terrible, but it could be worse. We depend on oxygen. Gravity. What else await for us ?
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#17Kinda weird to bring the Neanderthals into it in the last quote. First, the timeline don't quite fit, there seems to still have been large prey around when the Neanderthals disappeared. Second, I thought the modern view was that they merged back in to the homo sapiens line rather than outright die off?
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#18I believe that the series of extinctions that cleared the way for (and perhaps necessitated) the rise of intelligence in apes was the great filter . I can't ignore global warming as another possible filter, but I think the big one is behind us.
I fear the collapse that will accompany the Holocene Extinction is unfortunately ahead of us.
And is happening at a rate that is hard to fathom...
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#19The assertion that humans are unable to stop themselves from completely depleting the resources that they depend on rings true to me. I think Jared Diamond wrote a whole book about this.
Re: The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper
#20Alternatively, humans hunted the big games to death after acquiring big brains that enabled more cooperation when hunting. Curious if the decline in big game happened in places without humans.
The last mammoths lived on an island without humans. Or perhaps, without humans until the very moment that those particular mammoths died out.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191007081750.h...