Not at all. Take a human 100 yards away from a cheetah. A cheetah has a
0-60 time of around 6 seconds. A human has a 0-18 time of around 3
seconds. Assuming the cheetah can keep up the 60 mph once she reaches it
for over two seconds, they cheetah will catch the human at 165 yards, 8
seconds from starting. Give the human an extra 30 yards (a 130 yard
distance) and the human will be over 200 yards before the cheetah can
catch him, by which time the cheetah will be exhausted enough for the
human to brain her a good one. (the human will have run for only 70-80
yards, so will not be winded.)
>
>
> >>John:
> >>Lots of animals can stand on their hind legs, you don't
> >>need to develop bipedalism for that.
>
> >Michael:
> >But not for long periods.
>
>
> You wouldn't need or want to expose yourself in this manner for long periods.
> Pop up, see what's going on, then hide back down.
Sorry, with group behavior, you always want one lookout looking all the
time. Remember, pre-humans were pack animals, not solitary individuals.
>
>
> >The point is john is that being higher means you can see him
> >when he is too far away to do anything to you.
>
> If he's just a dot on the horizon then it's useless information. If he's close
> enough to make you nervous then there is nothing you can do, you just better
> hope he doesn't see you, otherwise he'll meet (or meat) you for lunch.
Like I just showed, an advance warning of 150-300 yards ensures
protection.
>
>
> >This is how the meerkats work.
>
> Meerkats are not bipedal an so are fast, often faster than the predator. This
> never happens with humans because ground sloths are not carnivorous.
huh, you've never seen meerkats then. They spend a lot of time on two
feet, doing sentry work both on the hunt and around the burrow. I would
say the only thing keeping them from becomeing soly bipedal is the
problems it would incur with their trogloditic habitation, though their
speed is also an advantage.
>
> >>John:
> >>Scavenging was probably much more important than hunting
> >>at this stage.
>
> >Michael:
> >Bull, maybe for the women
>
>
> Lucy would have been a very poor hunter. She had no tools, she was slow, she
> did not have sharp teeth and her claws were a joke.
She also had, as you say, the brain of a chimp. We are talking about the
development of intelligence. So at best, she was the precursor. Also,
chpms are capable of using sticks and rocks as weapons, so dont
disparage the brain. Jane Goodall observed this behavior frequently.
Lucy was also 3 1/2 feet high, so I would only expect her to have a
chimp brain.
>
> Nobody knows what Lucy's "society" was like, but in modern hunter-gatherers
> like the !Kung the woman not only take care of the children they also gather
> mongongo nuts, which turns out to be over half of their food supply and is
> much more reliable than the hunting the men do.
Just like I said.
>
>
> >>John:
> >>there were no spears, or tools of any sort at that time,
> >>ancestors like Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) with
> >>their tiny, chimp sized brains were too dumb to make them.
> >>The first very primitive tools were made by Homo Erectus,
> >>an animal with a much larger brain than Lucy, although much
> >>smaller than modern brains. These very early tools do not
> >>show up in the fossil record until well over a million
> >>years after bipedalism was fully developed.
>
> >Michael:
> >Stone tools did not show up, or haven't been found yet [...]
> >This does not rule out tools made from biodegradable
> >materials. You'd be amazed at how much damage a sharpened
> >bamboo spear can do to an animal,
>
>
> A sharpened bamboo spear would be harder to make than a simple stone tool,
> and if you didn't have stone of bone tools to help you, almost impossible to
> make. The only reason I can think of for Lucy to work exclusively in wood is
> if she wanted to fool future archeologists.
Don't make such statements if you haven't done it yourself. Then again,
maybe your not smart enough to be a prehuman. Looking at how humans
developed their materials technology, they started with the softest and
most malleable materials first. Green wood is extremely malleable, yet
hardens to dangerousness given the proper treatment. A sharp slate piece
can whittle wood very easily. I've done it myself in an outward bound
program.
>
>
> >or a wooden arrow, like that used by montagnard peoples in
> >SE asia or the Kalahari Bush people.
>
> An arrow?! Arrows are High Technology, only a few thousand years old, you
> might as well be talking about a LASER guided bombs.
Bows and arrows date to the dawn of recorded history, more than a few
thousand years. The archeological record has had difficulty finding such
weapons due to their ease of degradation. However, your statement is now
completely wrong, thanks to the Tyrolian Ice Man discovered a couple
years ago. He lived in the last ice age, around 15k-20k years ago, and
had guess what? a bow and arrows in his posession! Given this, there is
no reason why bows dont date to even earlier times. Possibly not as far
back as Lucy, but she's more an ape than human. Erectus might have had
the capability.
The Kalahari Bush people
> are as smart as you or me, but Lucy was not. Lucy was an ancestor of humans,
> however Lucy was not a human, we're talking about an animal with the brain of
> a chimp.
If they are, why are they still living in lean-to's?
>
> Three and a half million years ago Lucy was fully bipedal and had a hand
> almost as good as ours, but she was dumb, her brain ranged from 380 to 450 cc,
> modern humans have a range of 1000 to well over 2000 cc.
and you fail to mention how tall she was or how much she massed. What is
important is the brain/body mass ratio.
>
> >it funny how dates keep getting pushed farther back all the
> >time.
>
>
> I haven't noticed. Until some recent finds people thought you had to go back
> 10 or 20 million rears to find a ancestor common to both humans and apes,
> now they say 5 or 6.
Erectus was originally dated to less than 1.5 mill years. Now hes as far
back as 4-5 million. Sapiens was once thought to go back only
20,000-40,000 years, yet it is now thought to date as far back as 100k
to 150k, maybe even more.
-- TANSTAAFL!!!Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ President retroman@tpk.net Northstar Technologies Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com
Website: http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/ Now Featuring: Mikey's Animatronic Factory http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/animations.htm My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ Transhumanist, Inventor, Webmaster, Ski Guide, Entrepreneur, Artist, Outdoorsman, Libertarian, Arms Exporter-see below. ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}