>>they adapted a grasping hand into a *throwing* hand. And it is perhaps >>the increased brain power necessary to accurately project a missile to >>its target that really started our incredibly fast ride up the river of >>intelligence.
> I've heard that too, and it would be a very hard way to make a living.
> I think even major league baseball pitchers, who are better at it than
> 99.99% of the other members of their species, would soon starve to death
> if they were just eating animals they killed by throwing irregular rocks
> at them.
(Putting aside for the moment the mental image of Nolan Ryan stalking cattle on a Texas ranch with a rock in his hand) Wasn't there a recent study suggesting that early hominids killed game mostly by charging them directly with spears rather than throwing them? I seem to recall it was someone who noticed that the injury pattern of these hominids closely matched those of modern rodeo riders.
Ridley makes a good case that the rapid development of intelligence was from sexual selection rather than adaptation.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC