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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

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Re: Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

#271

Post by rowanG077 »

xeromal wrote: post #239
calepayson wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire is rad but I don’t see how it explains modern civilization. If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?

Probably because our interference with their breeding selects for non-smart qualities.

What interference? The animal world was free to evolve for the majority of the history of the earth. Literally millions of years and nothing came of it. Until we came along.

Re: Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

#272

Post by Kerb_ »

rowanG077 wrote: post #271
xeromal wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because our interference with their breeding selects for non-smart qualities.

What interference? The animal world was free to evolve for the majority of the history of the earth. Literally millions of years and nothing came of it. Until we came along.

Domestication, the process we put animals in to make them peaceful enough to provide a calorie surplus without stomping the early humans to death because they got scared by a branch

Re: Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

#273

Post by ljf »

eru wrote: post #258
ljf wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to 23andme I am 2 to 4% neanderthal, and I think of myself as human...

While funny, I don't think this has much bearing on the topic at hand: we share a lot of DNA with chimps as well (or rather, the last common ancestor between chimps and humans). But that doesn't mean we should call chimps human. So the shared genes alone can't be used as a reason to call Neanderthals human.

True, but while all humans have chimp dna, many humans have 0 percent neanderthal dna - are they more human than me?

Re: Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

#274

Post by eru »

ljf wrote: post #273
eru wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While funny, I don't think this has much bearing on the topic at hand: we share a lot of DNA with chimps as well (or rather, the last common ancestor between chimps and humans). But that doesn't mean we should call chimps human. So the shared genes alone can't be used as a reason to call Neanderthals human.

True, but while all humans have chimp dna, many humans have 0 percent neanderthal dna - are they more human than me?

No human had a chimp ancestor. But humans share a fairly recent common ancestor with chimps.

Some human had Neanderthal ancestors, some did not, as you rightly suggest. However, all humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that's much more recent than our last common ancestor with chimps.

Ie we only have 'chimp DNA' in the sense that we share a lot of DNA with them, and that we haven't changed too much since our last common ancestor. Exactly the same is true of us and Neanderthals.

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