From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Mon 27 Oct 2003 - 14:44:45 GMT
At 09:38 AM 27/10/03 +0000, you wrote:
> --- Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com> wrote: > At
>
> > Calvin argues that the final 2 fold expansion of the
> > brain was largely
> > driven by the human line moving into areas where
> > accurate projectile
> > hunting was the only way to get through the winter.
> > Lots about "glacial
> > pumping" in _Ascent of Mind._
>
>I can see how that might work, but doesn't the
>palaeontological record suggest that the final
>transition from archaic H. sapiens to H. sapiens
>sapiens occurred about 135,000 bp, and therefore
>_before_ the migration to the glacial north?
The human line's expansion into the north is (if I remember correctly) at
least 800,000 years back. They were expanding into big game areas.
http://www.williamcalvin.com/1990s/1999intelligence-chapter.htm
Calvin discusses the temporal link here going back 2.5 million years or
so. It is not entirely clear cut but reasonably sound.
http://williamcalvin.com/bk5/bk5.htm
This is a link the entire contents of _Ascent of Mind._ I really have to
get another paper copy. I gave my copy to Richard Dawkins as an example of
excellent work congruent with his when Calvin's book was briefly out of print.
"Yet we humans thrive on such challenges: the fickle climate seems to have
pumped up our brain fourfold larger than the ape-sized brain -- and that
was all walking-upright hominids had, back before the ice ages started 2.5
million years ago. A key aspect of the pump: massive ice sheets create
unusual population booms when they melt."
"Population booms on the frontier when ice melts back cause the
frontier-type prehumans to become dominant. But the ice again advances,
pushing the new population south, into competition and interbreeding with
tropical hominids. In this way, a minority becomes a majority. This
demographic pump spreads essential-in-winter genes, such as those
facilitating hunting and fire-making, around the tropics."
Keith Henson
>I haven't read that book by Calvin, so perhaps he has
>a counter-argument....
>
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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