Human evolution; possibly we first appeared earlier (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 01, 2018, 14:07 (2276 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID’s comment: H. sapiens are only as old as the oldest fossil we can find, and those fossils are few and far between. We still don't know when we appeared in our earliest form. The article concentrates on the arguments about the significance of the tools. But it raises the issue of how long we had a big complex brain and didn't use it much. Under the dhw theory that concepts had to be implemented and that necessity 'pushed' the appearance of a larger, more complex brain, one must wonder why it took so long to really use it. What happened to the 'push'.

“Necessity” is a misleading term. My hypothesis is that at different stages of evolution, new concepts exceeded the implemental capacity of existing brains, and so the process of implementation resulted in expansion (greater capacity), until the brain reached optimum size in sapiens. There is no mystery about why larger-brained erectus hung around for one or two million years not making many (if any) advances, just as there is no mystery about why even-larger brained sapiens hung around for 270,000 or possibly even 370,000 years without much progress – although the article suggests you are wrong in your assumption that there were no advances at all. They survived perfectly well without major new concepts, but when eventually the “geniuses” came up with new ideas, these IMPROVED their survivability/living conditions. In sapiens, the intelligence involved in creating these improvements eventually led to other “geniuses” thinking in terms that went beyond the driving forces of survivability and material improvement.

It is you who have created a mystery because of your insistence that your God is in control and his sole purpose was to produce the brain of sapiens. So why all these other pre-sapiens brains and the millions and millions of years before he came up with the one he wanted? But you prefer to ignore this “gap”. Once you take off your anthroblinkers and accept the (theistic) alternative that your God set up the initial mechanism whereby organisms autonomously made their own evolutionary way, you have a clear explanation for the ever changing bush and all the “gaps”. Because like every other species, hominids, hominins and homos simply went on surviving until the next phase, which in most cases was extinction but in our case was and is further improvement. How long we homos will survive is, of course, another issue, since we have now reached a stage at which the ramifications of some of these improvements have become life-threatening!