Evolution News

Sexual Selection Is A Major Element In Natural Selection

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I have gotten into increasingly frustrating debates with more than one theorist concerning human evolutionary forces. There is a fad these days to assume we evolved into what we are today due to the weather or volcanoes or hunting methods. It seems that people are forgetting the greatest force pushing evolution: sex. From day one when organisms evolved into two sexes, this is the main driving wheel of evolution. For many reasons, Homo Sapiens decided to use many visual clues for mating purposes.

By Sharon Parmet
Medical Center Public Affairs

In the Oct. 29 issue of Science, Bruce Lahn, Assistant Professor in Human Genetics and an expert on the evolution of the sex chromosomes, and his colleague, David Page, of the Whitehead Institute report that the X and Y chromosomes diverged from each other over the course of about 300 million years by going through four discrete stages rather than one smooth transition.

“By fossil digging on the sex chromosomes, we were able to reconstruct the four events that drove sex chromosomes into their distinctive X and Y forms and to date when these events occurred during evolution,” said Lahn. “The farther back in time we look, the more similar X and Y appear, boosting the theory that they arose from a pair of identical autosomes (nonsex-determining chromosomes),” he added.

Sex was not always determined by DNA. In many reptiles, the temperature at which the eggs are incubated determines the sex of the offspring. But when warm-blooded mammals with internal reproduction arose, sex determination by temperature became problematic. Shortly after mammals branched off from reptiles, approximately 300 million years ago, a regular pair of autosomes began evolving into what would become the modern X and Y chromosomes.

Many genes on the human Y chromosome have homologues (analogous genes) on the X chromosome. The presence of these X-Y genes reinforces the idea that the Y chromosome developed from an X-like ancestor.

To Lahn and Page, these X-Y genes serve as the “fossils” they can use to help reconstruct the evolutionary history of sex chromosomes. By comparing the number of mutations between the X form and the Y form of a pair of X-Y genes, Lahn and Page came up with rough estimates of when they were last alike, giving them a ‘geologic’ snapshot of sex chromosomes.

“The reconstruction of the defining events of human sex-chromosome evolution is analogous to the reconstruction of the evolution of species, except that we are looking at changes of a pair of chromosomes over geologic time rather than changes of whole organisms,” said Lahn.

When things try to stay alive, they are subjected to all sorts of selective forces such as disease or even small changes in the environment which brutally eliminates various living organisms. Eating and avoiding being eaten contributes to evolution in a powerful way but the most powerful engine of change is sex or manipulating the sex lives of others. When living things seperated from each other and one became the egg maker and the other the sperm producer, natural selection caused the egg's investment in the future to increase rapidly while the sperm's investment remained much smaller, almost microscopic.

The ideal world for any sperm is to impregnate all eggs, everywhere, continuously. Eggs, on the other hand, can't afford to waste time mating with weak or undesirable sperm so the battle of the sexes has been the flywheel moving organisms into a wild variety. For the female wants excellence. She has to take a huge hit when she gambles on mating. She loses part of her own body in a significant way, she endangers herself by producing spawn and she has severe limits on reproduction so females who take care in impregnations tend to dominate most species.

Here is an example of a swan picking a fake swan as a mate because the fake has all the best attributes:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddle boat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday.

Peter Overschmidt, who operates a sailing school and rents the two-seat paddle boat on the Aasee pond, said the black swan with a bright red beak has not left the white swan boat's side since it flew in one day in early May.

"It seems like he's fallen in love," said Overschmidt. "He protects it, sits next to it all the time and chases away any sail boats that get anywhere nearby. He thinks the boat is a strong and attractive swan."

I have watched the mating dance in nature many times. A typical example in the avian universe is how turkeys mate. Unlike song birds, for example, turkey toms have nothing to do with the hens once the eggs are laid. But this doesn't mean the hens have no say in choosing mates! Once, my son and I came across over 50 wild turkeys in an open field. The hens were walking around the perimeter and in the center strutted over a dozen big toms. The toms were challenging each other. They have the ability to pump air into their chests forming a loud drum and when they gobble, the drum resonates. They puff up the feathers to look as big as possible and stretch the wings stiffly to the ground and then stamp their feet like flamenco dancers.

Then they rush at each other. It is a splendid, hard fight and the loser flattens his feathers and runs to the outer edges of the circle. The hens watch this with an eagle eye, keeping one eye open for any eagles above, and they rush over to the toms that win the fights and crouch on the ground making cooing sounds, heads weaving side to side. Then the victor gets to mount. The hens think, "What a HUNK!" and are deliriously happy to gain the attention of the winner.

I have watched deer mate, too. Once, I was going into the forest to cut firewood when two bucks came slamming through the trees. One wheeled around and charged into the other and they locked horns and shoved back and forth, snorting. A doe was right behind them, watching with such avid interest, she nearly bumped into me. All three broke up the struggle, flipped their tails and took off like lightning.

In most animal or bird populations, the females are the choosers. They want mates who are smart, of good size or strength or have attributes the female thinks are good things to have. I have watched bucks approach does in heat. The buck arches his neck and shakes his antler array to show strength and size and if the female is impressed, she flicks her tail sideways. The buck literally stomps up to her in order to show he is super heavy, not a whimp. It is rather funny to watch.

Same with horses. A stallion will fight other stallions but if the mare doesn't like him, she will tuck her tail firmly between her legs and you can't budge it at all. She will kick the stallion off and whirl around and nip at him with her teeth. It is rather a sport watching a stallion court a mare. She will play coy and move off, he trails after her, nuzzling her and nudging her. She might toss her mane and run a bit to see if he is good at running. She will put him through his paces quite smartly.

Once, at a horse show, a mare went into heat. A man I knew riding a stallion was downwind. They were doing dressage. Well, dressage is supposed to be proud stallions showing off. Well, the stallion dearly wanted to show the Welsh mare his sexual prowess. So he arched his neck as far as he could and began stamping his feet as hard as possible. Stomp stomp stomp. Then he reared up. Look at my *ahem* big ejection system! He danced around on his hind legs, very proud of himself. The rider was increasingly terrorized by this. The stallion began to think, "I will show her how I can fight predators by throwing off this creature who dares to sit on me!"

I ran to the lady holding the mare's lead line and told her to move downwind, fast. We all had a laugh about it afterwards.

Race horses can't be bred easily because the mare looks at the stallions and thinks, "What a scrawny neck! His hooves are too small! He doesn't stamp his hooves when he walks! Yuck!" What breeders do is tie up the poor mare, this is rape, you know, and then bring out some handsome, Ice Age hunk of a breed like Haflingers such as my Sparky, thick necked horses from mountains or far north, with big hooves and the mare will neigh and react with delight and flick her tail. Then the hunky stallion is removed and a race horse stallion is brought out after the mare is blindfolded. The Thoroughbred mounts the mare without any "by your leave" and then is removed before she figures out, she was cheated.

This brings me to the core problem of trying to pinpoint various "causes" for evolution. There is no simple cause and effect, it is various and there is no magic point in time that is distinctive. With humans, this is very much so. Namely, we have not only the classic Darwinian forces at work, we have one thing more: deliberate cultural choices which we impose on nature.

Here is a typical example from the Bradshaw Foundation:

The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade.

Volcanic winter and instant Ice Age may help resolve the central but unstated paradox of the recent African origin of Humankind: if we are all so recently "Out of Africa", why do we not all look more African?

Because the volcanic winter and instant Ice Age would have reduced populations levels low enough for founder effects, genetic drift and local adaptations to produce rapid changes in the surviving populations, causing the peoples of the world to look so different today. In other words, Toba may have caused Modern Races to differentiate abruptly only 70,000 years ago, rather than gradually over one million years.

All trees flower, most humans are unaware of this only because most of them have tiny, greenish flowers. Trees will scatter pollen (male sex) all over kingdom come causing humans to sneeze and their eyes to water. Some of this pollen eventually bumps into the ovas which produce the seeds for future plants. Some trees propagate through roots as well as flowers. But insects began to "breed" tree flowers so they could use them for food. Various insects had different ideas as to what is attractive. Whenever they spotted an interesting mutation, they would spread that mutation's genes throughout the tree population.

Animals eating fruits and nuts of trees did the same thing. Trees that shared tasty morsels surrounding the seed were carried further away and disseminated far afield even though the effort to create a fruit is huge.

The animal/insect/bird esthetics drives evolution at a very hot clip. Humans have exploited this by controlling who has sex with whom with a vengence. We manipulate nature into producing a tremendous variety of tastes, colors, sizes and shapes from small genetic pools. We exploit every possible deformity and genetic flaw to create new types of plants and animals.

We do this to ourselves. Waves of humanoids would start in Africa, our continous cradle, and ripple rapidly outwards. Each wave would go as far as possible and then even come washing back into Africa again.

During our last 250,000 years of evolution, the earth's climate suddenly went into this yo-yo cycle of warm/cold vacillations which stressed all simian populations. During this, humanoids were in a pitched battle with each other over who gets to control the neighborhood and thanks to the forces of evolution coupled with some very violent activities, the winners of this struggle were homo sapiens. Homo sapien females, unlike any of the other great ape family groups, discovered a means of controlling natural selection so they could have mates with big brains who could understand how to protect and feed the family females and their babies. Universally, ape females force their infants to cling to their hair and ride on the mother's back.

Human mothers can't do this. Indeed, I would suggest, when looking for mates, human mothers looked to see if the males had scant hair on their bodies. This would mean they couldn't force the baby to fend for itself. Mothers that rejected their babies when helpless were mothers who didn't have the brains to figure out, helpless babies=smart adults. Smart mothers figured out schemes for carrying the smart babies. Stupid mothers would force the babies to cling to something. So a hairy father meant he probably had a hairy mother which meant she didn't probably have to care so closely, carrying the baby around which meant she probably wasn't sufficiently clever to make tools for carrying the baby.

In virtually all stone age cultures, the men use various schemes for attracting the eyes of the females. They wear various things, they groom themselves in distinctive ways, they dance around with farming and hunting tools, jumping in the air, shouting. Being able to draw pictures and tell stories or memorize the star positions and tell when seasons come and go, the ability to negotiate with strangers, all this was very important to women in the past and they willingly bore the young and carefully raised them if they were impressed with their mates. Various cultures have sprung up that tear at this system, namely, trying to force women into servitude. But this doesn't work unless the males provide the women with the things they need to raise babies.

The cultures that figured out how to manipulate their breeding so they produced vibrant communities flourished. The ones that didn't figure out how to do this, were driven into increasingly marginal lands. Human females have a sharp eye for appearances. We have ears sharply attuned to voice pitch, we have to puzzle out hidden meanings, the music of language is one of many tools we use to determine if someone is a cannibal who will eat our babies or a real potential father who will die for our babies. Psychopaths evolved because the genes of humans that can fool others always lurks in any population.

When humans left Africa and spread out across the planet, killing or driving out all other near or even distant relatives, the populations immediately differentiated, visually as well as linguistically. Each group had its own notions as to what was speech, what was beautiful or desirable. Eye shape, length of neck, legs, ears, nose or color of skin, color of hair, hair shape or style, eye color, any part of the body that could be seen with the eye or smelled with the nose was a candidate for special selections causing populations to be come very rapidly, variable.

A simple matter of where fat is deposited on the body has been used for mating choices. I sat in a parkinglot today, watching the tremendous variety of humans walking past. Short legs and big belly, tall and thin, pettite and small boned, fat only on the rump, fat mostly on the torso, some of the earliest representations of humans that look like humans, the artists concentrated on where the fat layers went.
Evidently, fatty tissues were important, more than the face, hair or other attributes.

Today, in a social millieu of excessive plenty, the possession of layers of fat is considered ugly and common and the most powerful humans are repelled by this and their eyes seek out slender and tall genes. Possessing many recessive genes as possible is important, too, since the rich and powerful want VISUAL TAGS TO IDENTIFY EACH OTHER aside from their obvious wealth. As in all previous eras, they contend with the problem that they, themselves, are not the ideal vision and the need to insure their children are this vision of perfection.

Many deal with this paradox by cheating. Fixing their noses, surgically removing the now unsightly fat, dying the hair, whitening the skin, the pampered poodle look is the ideal. Females, in particular, carrying the genes of these cultural tags, are quite valuable. Women without these tags must counterfit their appearance so they can tap into the wealth of powerful males who might spurn them, otherwise.

The modern world suffers from this obsession to breed visual ruling class identifying tags. Hitler was the maddest one in this regard, he carried hardly a single attribute of the ruling class stamp so he decided to literally stamp out millions and millions of humans in his quest to perfect an alpha homo sapiens, the Superman and Superwoman ruling Untermenschen.

It is no coincidence that this image of rulership coincides with the visual appearance of much of the European Norman ruling class. When oil was discovered in the Middle East, many men there ran off to find European Norman wives. The desert women who evolved through centuries of family building in that region tend very strongly towards jet black hair and natural sunscreen skin, were rejected for a while. In Asia where red or blonde hair meant someone was starving to death, for hair turns red when starving, after the European conquests, many Asians now dye their hair in order to increase their desirability.

I am predicting, as wealth and power collects in Asia, this need to alter themselves to look like a small subset of European ruling class people will fade and eventually, women will want straight, black hair instead of blonde, for example.

In the fashion world, it is nearly wall to wall tall, skinny, mainly blonde women with long fingers and necks strutting along, eyes examining the acouterments of the males who are watching them, checking them out, seeking rock stars or billionaires to latch onto and grab some of that wealth and power for their potential offspring. Short, fat women need not even think of trying for these men.

And so it goes. If civilization collapses, and this happens with shocking regularity, the short, "frumpy", darker skinned women will be triumphant since Mother Nature likes stubborn strength and the ability to keep on going even when starving to death, to hang onto fat fiercely so the mother can share it with her baby, to be protected from the capricious sun's rays, as well as strong hands and strong feet.

Throughout nature, females look for strength. And males want females who can raise a clutch or chicks or a baby. No babies=no evolution/no future.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Hobbits Are A Different Species

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I finally had time today to sit down and examine the "hobbit" skull. I draw a lot of faces and use photos and other items to study how faces are built upon the bones below. I took one look at the Hobbit's skull and it was immediately obvious it is not any homo sapiens. So I drew on top of it, following the contours. Meet the shy dweller deep in her lush forest as she leaves her Hobbit hole.

The scientists who revealed this astonishing find are very aggravated that news stories ran all over the place yesterday "debunking" their find. I was very angry about those stories, too, for there was no hard data to back up the contentions that this wonderful creature was just "a diseased human."

Here are the scientists who found the skull and tools, debunking the debunking:

When I discussed in an email that the other finds of Homo floresiensis were being ignored, Alan Mann, professor of anthropology at Princeton University, reinforced Martin’s point of view in an online reply: “I am aware of the other, very fragmentary materials, but they show nothing of the features that would distinguish these guys from the very small living locals.”

Peter Brown, however, denounces this in an exclusive to Cryptomundo, and says critics should be asked “to point you at a human mandible with the same features as those from Liang Bua. Claiming that they have the same features as small local people is simply untrue.”

In October 2005, in Nature, Mike Morwood’s team described more fossil remains, including a mandible, arm and other similarly small bones from nine individuals. Two mandibles also share dental features and lack of a chin, a portion of the jaw common to all Homo sapiens regardless of size.

“We can now reconstruct the body proportions of H. floresiensis with some certainty,” the researchers wrote in the Oct. 11 online issue of the journal Nature. “The finds further demonstrate the LB1 … is not just an aberrant or pathological individual but is representative of a long-term population.”

I agree with them. My artist's eye which studies human faces closely all the time is strongly struck by the differences within the face of this....shy forest dweller.

First: the eye orbits are huge! As a proportion of the skull, much much larger than homo sapiens! Here is a classic microcephalic skull.

This is a multiple view of the Hobbit's skull.

Click on image to enlarge

The orbits of the shy forest dwelling hobbit are huge while the microcephalic skull keeps the orbs in proportion to the face, unlike the hobbit, the face is scrunched up whereas the hobbit's face is open and clear with a long upper lip/nose and no chin whereas the human has a very sharp, obvious chin!

Here is a human skull and neandertal skull side by side.
Neither has huge eye orbs! Neither looks remotely like the hobbit. And both dwarf the hobbit's skull. The primitive tools found with the hobbit look like Archaean period tools not the later Stone Age tools, the hobbit's brains were smaller than homo sapiens or other near relatives but packed in more social/tool using skills than any of the older members of the Great Ape families.
Here is a homo erectus skull. Note how much more great apian it looks! Like a gorilla. Not like the hobbit's skull which looks more like small forest dwelling monkey skulls. Yet it is certainly very close to us, genetically. Much closer than the chimpanzee. The genetic differences were probably extremely small, less than 0.5%.

Also the teeth are not sharp. The jaw is wider at the hinge than ours probably for chewing on hard to chew plants and nuts. But a chimpanzee can rip a human apart with their sharp fangs, this gentle creature couldn't cause us much fear or harm!
Click on image to enlarge
Here is my scale of comparison. It is plainly obvious that the hobbit skull has some very strong non-homo sapiens aspects to it. The orbs are the same size as ours yet the head is much smaller plus the shape is totally different, the orbs being nearly totally round in the forest dweller and in humans, this oval shape that has a cruel edge to it's formation. Sagging downwards from the nose.

The noses are totally different. Humans have a bridge whereas the hobbit doesn't. The top of the nostrils in humans has a sharp upwards tilt while in the hobbit, this is missing entirely. The nose opening is the same size for both with the hobbit perhaps somewhat larger, again, a small human would have a small opening there.

The cheekbones stick out much sharper on the hobbit and no chin while it is the opposite in the human skull. Lastly, the tops of the heads are significantly different with probably the hobbit having more muscles attached to the top but not as many as the other Great Apes who have huge ridges there. This truly makes the hobbit well within the class of homo erectus-family groupings.

I really wish they were still running around in the forest, darting in and out of shafts of sunlight. What a tragedy they are no more!

Culture of Life News Main Page

All Humans Like To Interfer With Natural Selection

Elaine Meinel Supkis

One of the greatest books ever written is Darwin's "The Descent of Man." I have read this giant work several times in my life for it pays to refresh the memory and touch base with the fountainhead of all critical thinking concerning evolution and our place at Nature's table. I am not a biologist or an anthropologist but I am a humanist who has raised and bred animals all my life.

Darwin's Descent of Man is online:

IT is not my intention here to describe the several so-called races of men; but I am about to enquire what is the value of the differences between them under a classificatory point of view, and how they have originated. In determining whether two or more allied forms ought to be ranked as species or varieties, naturalists are practically guided by the following considerations; namely, the amount of difference between them, and whether such differences relate to few or many points of structure, and whether they are of physiological importance; but more especially whether they are constant. Constancy of character is what is chiefly valued and sought for by naturalists. Whenever it can be shewn, or rendered probable, that the forms in question have remained distinct for a long period, this becomes an argument of much weight in favour of treating them as species. Even a slight degree of sterility between any two forms when first crossed, or in their offspring, is generally considered as a decisive test of their specific distinctness; and their continued persistence without blending within the same area, is usually accepted as sufficient evidence, either of some degree of mutual sterility, or in the case of animals of some mutual repugnance to pairing.

When I was a child we always got young chicks every couple of years to replace hens aging out of the flock. My parents let us pick out exotic birds in addition to the heavy duty egg layers. Back in the late 1950s in Tucson, we had some Black Giant hens. Photo courtesy of the McMurray catalogue. During the 19th century, farmers competed with each other to produce a wide variety of livestock with a tremendous number of characteristics. They took animals from all over the world and "refined" their characteristics and added on variations of characteristics. This is when Kennel Clubs and Cat Shows and Bird Fancier Shows were all founded.

The race horse pedigree is the oldest. Since all race horses descended from the small circle of champions founded in the 18th century, record keepers tracked every horse for all these years. We see the results of this inbreeding for speed this very week as the breed falls apart, horses that once lived for over 25 years now seldom hit 20 years if they are race horses no matter how pampered they are.

Back to the Black Giants: I also had a rooster who was an exotic breed from the Victorian era. Buff Conchin Bantam These bantams came from China---many bantam breeds came out of China and Japan.

All these exotic syles of bird were created by humans deliberately controlling their sex lives. No bird was allowed to choose its mates, they were confined by artificial barriers from communing with other birds on their own. Manipulating sex partners meant breeders could choose characteristics with impunity.

When we kept the huge hulking Black Giants with the little bantam, he was delighted. From his point of view, these big hens were just fantastic. The tiny brain told him, "Pick the biggest hen, she will produce many chicks!" He adored the Black Giants and turned his beak up at lesser sized birds. In turn, the Giants had no mates at all except for him so they would patiently squat as low upon the ground as possible to mate with him.

A rule of thumb is, all chickens can mate with all other chickens and all have totally fertile offspring. Ditto with cattle or horses or dogs or cats. All domestic animals, when barriers to sexual mingling are removed, revert to mating based on size, swiftness, battle hardiness, territorial moxie and sneakiness. And all are fertile.

Some of our domestic animals are not very distant from their wild cousins. They, too, can breed successfully and be fertile. I once had an Asian wolf-type domestic dog from Mongolia. The coyotes in my mountains love to lure domestic dogs into traps and then mob them and eat them. Sometimes, I would hear someone's pet barking and barking and disappearing downstream, barking and then suddenly the screams of dionysian joy from the coyote pack and a final scream from the pet, and they would rip the pet apart.

Well, every time Duke escaped, he ran down to the river. The coyotes would be lurking there. Evidently, the head female, being wild, had a vision of the ideal mate and she took one look at Duke's large size and love triumphed. Not only did she not eat him for dinner, she mated with him. Unfortunately, now we have coydogs that are bigger and stronger than the original pack.

Humans interfered with the sex lives of their captive animals probably because of two forces: vanity and utility. We want things to look certain ways to amuse ourselves. The color of the animal being bred, the shape of the head and body, tails or no tails, speed or weight. The many colors of domestic animals who have no sense of color recognition as part of their sex lives thanks to our interventions destroying the urgency to choose, are no bar to breeding when humans exit the scene. Black cats will mate with striped cats and short dogs will mate with tall dogs.

This human interference for fun was also done to identify one's livestock. Namely, if one tribe had brown cows it would pay to cultivate spotted cows if one wanted to keep track of one's own herds.

This extended to humans themselves. The genetic variations on the African continent in the human populations is greater than the genetic varieties found at the fringes of the great human migrations such as the population that ended up isolated on Australia. Even so, when looking at all sorts of humans lined up according to appearance, even though all the variations within this single species is huge at the same time these humans are all very closely related and can bear each other's young without the slightest difficulty.

Click here for a map showing probable migration routes.

This suggests to me that the tribes migrating out of the continent practiced breeding designed to make themselves easily identifiable, visually. This is where the concept of "beauty" arose. Chimpanzees will mate with each other with very few barriers, the only one being not to mate with siblings. But all human tribes had to "outbreed" for political and geographical reasons so to keep things under control, I suppose various tribes insisted on characteristics which they considered their own "markers" be used and these various visual tags assisted them in choosing mates from outside the family circles.

Back to Darwin:

Now let us apply these generally-admitted principles to the races of man, viewing him in the same spirit as a naturalist would any other animal. In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by the long habit of observing ourselves. In India, as Elphinstone remarks, although a newly-arrived European cannot at first distinguish the various native races, yet they soon appear to him extremely dissimilar;* and the Hindoo cannot at first perceive any difference between the several European nations. Even the most distinct races of man are much more like each other in form than would at first be supposed; certain negro tribes must be excepted, whilst others, as Dr. Rohlfs writes to me, and as I have myself seen, have Caucasian features. This general similarity is well shewn by the French photographs in the Collection Anthropologique du Museum de Paris of the men belonging to various races, the greater number of which might pass for Europeans, as many persons to whom I have shewn them have remarked. Nevertheless, these men, if seen alive, would undoubtedly appear very distinct, so that we are clearly much influenced in our judgment by the mere colour of the skin and hair, by slight differences in the features, and by expression.

Here is the official UCLA website for history of our species. I recommend it highly.

As usual, Dawin puts it pretty plainly: because humans breed everything they control to have desired appearances and characteristics they also do this to themselves. The differences between the various European stocks are nearly invisible to breeders in other cultures who are socially trained to look for specific, different beauty tags. If a population has only black hair, for example, hair as a beauty tag is ignored while the slenderness of the fingers or the space between the eyes are closely examined. In European communities, hair color is a very strong marker and is often the first thing the eye examines when seeking beauty markers. Just like peahens look at the tails of peacocks for beauty markers while ignoring the size of the chest, for example, so Europeans look at the hair. In Asia where hair is nearly universally straight, there is no "eye" for curly hair, if it shows up, it is rejected as alien. Yet all straight haired people can mate with and produce fully functional young. Indeed, all humans can interbreed just like all our captive animals.

What is particularily interesting is that humans that traveled away from each other 50,000+ years ago like, say, the people who first colonized Australia, could effortlessly mate with and produce young with the first Europeans who arrived there suddenly only 200 years ago. In nature, when populations become very isolated for long periods of time, they evolve away from their host population and can't mate. So far, all homo sapiens are totally related to each other.

Here is a textbook explanation of how populations intermixing over only 300 years leads to nearly universal GENETIC similarities even as the exterior appearance is still fairly big concerning melanine cells, hair shape or nose size.

More recently, Brazilian researchers decided to test how well common racial classifications actually work. In Brazil (as in the United States!) people are generally confident that they can tell the difference between those with European ancestry and those with African ancestry.

Flavia Parra and his coworkers at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil examined this idea by taking blood samples from people who live on an island off the coast of Africa, close to the area where most Brazilians of African descent originated (Africans came to Brazil through the colonial slave trade). Then, they also took samples from a group of Portuguese people, the European ethnicity that was the origin of most Brazilians of European descent. Last, they took blood samples from Brazilians who appeared to have European descent, Brazilians who appeared to have African descent, and Brazilians who appeared to have “mixed” descent (“blacks,” “whites,” and “intermediates,” respectively).

What do you think they found? First, there was enough genetic difference between the African and Portuguese samples to compute an index of African ancestry. When they applied this index to genetic differences between Brazilians, people commonly classified as “white” and people classified as “black” were indistinguishable from each other genetically. In other words, the way people classify each other by physical looks has little to do with the ways in which they actually vary genetically.

It seems that humans have managed to collect a variety of very insignificant genes which express themselves as physical attributes which can be used by the eyes to ID into distinct groups nearly identical genetically related organisms.

Readers of this blog know that I feel this drive to artificially enhance various characteristics which are useful for identifying family groups caused humans to kill off all near relatives that lacked various identifying markers. For example, one group of people that moved out of Africa 75,000 years ago after the great volcanic eruption in Indonesia weakened many other humanoid species, loved big noses. Noses are very easy to spot and make great identifiers.

Looking at pictures drawn by Japanese artists of European invaders and traders show they were shocked by and amused by the giant noses of the Europeans. Far from considering them beautiful, they thought they were silly and very unattractive. Ditto the funny eyes. Eyes that would move poets and painters in Europe were jokes to Asians.

After many years of interaction, the tables slowly or rather rapidly turned and the last 50 years, many Asians want wavy or curly hair, hair of many different colors and those funny noses and eyes and other markers of beauty created artificially by European tribes thousands of years ago.

Many populations use surgery and chemicals to make themselves look like various ideal sex objects while not using breeding for the ability to spot differences in order to breed artificial poplations that can ID each other from sight has so confused things that populations are becoming less and less location specific and if globalization of sexual contact continues, we will all look as similar as one chimp does to another.

Of course, this is why so many populations are stressed out and trying to preserve this artificial system from disappearing. This means cloistering themselves like the Jewish community in Israel, for example. In Africa, many tribes are literally butchering each other to prevent change from occuring. In Europe, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the savage termination of cross-population marriages was another expression of this force.

In America, the "great melting pot", white European populations had sex frequently with the African population until it became very difficult to tell who was who so the white population passed noxioius sex laws and used birth certificates like they were race horse breeders to track "tainted blood" since the usual facial/skin/hair markers failed.

Hitler did this in German and Europe using birth records to locate and murder Jews since simple physical markers were useless. Many a Jew murdered by these insane nuts were more "Nordic" looking than most of the Nazi party and Hitler in particular.

Many people try to twist data about genetic differences in order to proclaim superiority over other human populations. This causes all sorts of wars and distresses. Today, in Iraq, there is ethnic cleansing erupting thanks to the American invasion as various groups try to restart the breeding/discrimination machinery so they can ID each other visually, seeking even tiny alterations and exaggerating them.

This brutal process is, like all artificial breeding projects, killing many innocent people. Understanding why humans created "beauty" and how this construct operates is important for the survival of the species, "Homo Sapiens." Now that we can genetically engineer ourselves you can bet, the one creature on earth that lusts for and actively pursues tremendous artificial variations in nearly anything it gets its hands on, will use these new tools to alter itself beyond all recognition as the race to create unique and desirable subgroups rages out of control.

In other words, our own tools to control nature will be turned back upon ourselves and instead of using artifice to make ourselves beautiful, we will try to make ourselves genetically seperate until we can't breed. This won't be a good thing, by the way. Isolated populations deteriorate or get overwhelmed by invaders. Like when homo sapiens met neanderthals and they couldn't interbreed.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Scientists Dispute "Hobbits" Bones--Genetics Research Shows Human/Ape Split Not Clean

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The debate over the history of humanity rages onwards. Scientists shed increasing light on the subject thanks to genetic research coupled with archeological research. The "hobbit" bones found in Indonesia still baffles everyone. Meanwhile, the human/chimpanzee split shows interesting intersections.

The migration of earliest humanoids and chimpoids meant they didn't vary much, genetically, for a long, long time.

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer 1 hour, 45 minutes ago
NEW YORK - Humans and chimps diverged from a single ancestral population through a complex process that took 4 million years, according to a new study comparing DNA from the two species.

By analyzing about 800 times more DNA than previous studies of the human-chimp split, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard were able to learn not just when, but a little bit about how the sister species arose.

"For the first time we're able to see the details written out in the DNA," said Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute. "What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual."

The researchers hypothesize that an ancestral ape species split into two isolated populations about 10 million years ago, then got back together after a few thousand millennia. At that time the two groups, though somewhat genetically different, would have mated to form a third, hybrid population. That population could have interbred with one or both of its parent populations. Then, at some point after 6.3 million years ago, two distinct lines arose.

The only way to understand all this is to look at the whole environment 10 million years ago. Starting with the concept of the Garden of Eden, namely, where all the Great Apes originated, and why they spread and why some came back into Eden which is equatorial Africa, this all hinges on two forces at work: the war over territory waged by various groups and rapid geological changes that led to the latest series of iceages.

Humans first evolved from tiny tree dwelling, insect eating creatures which were nocturnal during the rule of the giant dinosaurs.

Archonta is a term used to group primates, bats (Order Chiroptera), tree shrews (Order Scandentia) and flying lemurs (Order Dermoptera) together, as well as many extinct mammal groups such as primate-like microsypoids, and rodent-like plesiadapids and carpolestids. Bats are accomplished flyers, and have a fossil record extending back to the Eocene, about 45 million years ago. The origin of bats, has not been resolved, because earlier fossils from the Paleocene 60 million years ago are only known from teeth, which do not tell us if they were flying mammals. Modern bats are divided into two groups microchiopterans and megachiropterans. Megachiropterans are larger and do not have much of a fossil record. The relationship between the two groups is subject to some debate.

Primates are the most well studied group of all mammals. Fossil evidence for primates is also very extensive, going back to the early Eocene 55 million years ago. Primates are identified by the structure of the ear bones, in particular the shape of the petrosal bone. The rodent-like plesiadapids and carpolestids are often grouped together with true primates, because no fossil ear bones have yet to be discovered, showing if they are truly primates or not. These groups, do not have a post-orbital bar (cheek bone), which all modern primates have. Plesiadapids were very diverse after the extinction of the dinosaurs, but went extinct just as the rodents were diversifying in the late Eocene 40 million years ago. The first true primates are the adapids and omomyids. The adapids looked remarkably like modern lemurs, which some people suggest that they are ancestral to. Omomyids, were small and had large eyes. They looked a lot like modern Tarsiers. Most scientists believe that humans and most modern primates evolved from the omomyids, rather than the adapids. Antropoid primates include South American monkeys (Platyrrhini) and old world monkeys (Catarrhini) as well as Apes and humans (Hominodidea). Fossil apes have a well studied fossil record, going back 22 million years ago in Africa.

It is rather amusing that bats come from the same family. Maybe this is why right wingers who act like aliens from outerspace call us "moonbats."

We know, despite having virtually no fossils from the earliest years of our evolution due to the fact that we were very small and easily eaten, the roots of the ape species lie back during the reign of the last dinosaurs simply because there are many monkey species in the New World as well as Africa. Rapidly, South America shot away from Africa starting from just before the meteor hit the Yucatan.

Click on image to enlarge
Already, at 50 Ma (million years ago), Africa was cut off from South America and not yet touching Eurasia. During this time, tailess apes rapidly evolved into many species. They overwhelmingly preferred jungles and trees with plenty of water.

Click on image to enlarge
During this period, as the various monkeys and ape species flourished, there was great variations within the ape family, namely, the tailess tree swingers. Unlike monkeys who use their hands while using the tail to hang around, these apes lost their tails when they were ground dwellers and when they took back to the trees, used their hands instead. They evolved long arms for swinging as well as short legs for when they ran on the ground. They lived happily in the jungle Garden of Eden in central Africa. Evidently, they were so successful, they kept extending their territory.

Click on image to enlarge
When Africa crashed into the Arabian Subcontinent, this caused rapid geological changes in the African Rift Valley as well as opening up a whole new world for the tree swingers. These swingers swung their way out of Africa during this warm Eocene and spread throughout Eurasia including colonizing the volcano chains all the way down through Sumatra. This was not a one way street. Once all the niches were filled, successful apes then traveled back into Africa. Once there, they found their nearest relatives and evidently, not being homicidical like humans, managed to mate with them according to this latest data concerning our genes.

A whole horde of monkeys also made these same trips. It seems that monkeys and apes are very prone to spreading out. I would surmize, this is due to our joint interest in eating each other. Horses, for example, don't eat each other or near relatives. From humans on down to virtually all monkeys, this desire to dine upon one's relatives is a very strong force.

For example, here is a story about a stoneage tribe who suddenly fled their jungles.

By JUAN FORERO
Published: May 11, 2006
SAN JOSÉ DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia — Since time immemorial the Nukak-Makú have lived a Stone Age life, roaming across hundreds of miles of isolated and pristine Amazon jungle, killing monkeys with blowguns and scouring the forest floor for berries.

But recently, and rather mysteriously, a group of nearly 80 wandered out of the wilderness, half-naked, a gaggle of children and pet monkeys in tow, and declared themselves ready to join the modern world.

"We do not want to go back," explained one man, who uses the sole name Ma-be, and who arrived with the others at this outpost in southern Colombia in March. "We want to stay near town. We can plant our own food. In the meantime the town can help us."

While it is not known for sure why they left the jungle, what is abundantly clear is that the Nukak's experience as nomads and hunter-gatherers has left them wholly unprepared for the world they have just entered.

The main point of interest of this article is not only how readily the tribes moved outwards fleeing stresses but they also had pet monkeys with them that were baby monkeys they adopted and which they eat when the monkeys become troublesome adults. This reveals a clever human twist on eating relatives. Namely, one reason why humanoid brains evolved very rapidly and why humans became weaker physically is because we come from a branch of the ape family that figured out how to use guile to cultivate trust so we can eat.

The jungle stone age dwellers assured the reporter that their very favorite food is monkey meat and the very tastiest part is the brains. In Asia, they even sell monkey brains in a can. The near universal prohibition on cannibalism is to stop the Blue Beard effect, namely, men eating their mates or children.

When the early chimp/human strolled back into Africa after wandering all over Asia, the gap between the stay at homes and the returnees evidently was smaller than that between horses and mules, for example. Namely, they could mate and bear children. When the climate suddenly worsened 5 million years ago as we began to enter the present round of ice ages, the larger proto-humans which evolved into chimpanzees, took over the Garden of Eden territory and never left it, content to fight with each other ferociously for resources. So their teeth grew sharp and their arms strong as they ceased the total upright walking which the explorer apes that traveled thousands of miles perfected and using their knuckles, strolled along on all fours again.

The chimp/humanoids that were shoved out of the pleasant jungles had to fend for themselves on the increasingly hot, hostile ground. So the engine of evolution slowed down to a crawl for the chimpanzee population and went into high gear with the human population. Each subspieces of human would suddenly expand outwards and kill off all other near relatives for as the brain grew in size, the ability to tell each other apart grew, too. Often, it lay in the ability to communicate. Sharing sounds led to the ability to discern intentions or dissuade attacks not to mention seduction.

This is why the discovery of the Hobbit bones in Indonesia has so many people excited. If they are really the bones of another species of humanoid and lived a mere 20,000 years ago, this is quite amazing considering how much humans love to eat relatives!

But some scientists think the "hobbit" was merely some people suffering from diseases, not an earlier relative.

John Roach
for National Geographic News
May 18, 2006
The "hobbit" humans that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores some 18,000 years ago were actually a population of modern humans stricken with a genetic disease that causes small brains, a new study says.

The argument is being made by a group of scientists who have analyzed all the scientific evidence presented so far about the evolution of the proposed species Homo floresiensis.

Preliminary analysis of the remains pegged them as belonging to a totally new species (see hobbit fossil photos).

But gaps in the understanding of how these people existed alongside modern humans and came to wield sophisticated stone tools are coming under greater scrutiny.

In a comment appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, researchers challenge the evidence used to rule out the notion that hobbits were modern humans with a disease known as microcephaly.

This genetic disorder causes smaller brain size in modern humans and can also lead to short stature.

If they were really small humans who lived as a tribe, this is still interesting when one considers how much diversity we have despite very little genetic drift. All humans of any stature, color, hair qualities, whatever, can mate and bear fruitful young.

This is the real riddle! In birds, for example, tiny differences equals inability to mate. Virtually undetectable differences bar fertility! This is true in nearly all the animal world. Horses and donkeys can mate but not bear fruitful young. Lions and tigers are slightly closer to each other but it remains a strong rule, usually, animals with just one or two differences can't mate.

Not only are humans extremely diverse looking, when we "tame" any plant or animal, we "unlock" their genetic underpinning and speed up evolution to light warp speed and achieve the same effect! Namely, because we force them to express many changes rapidly, they still can mate! So all chickens no matter how they look can mate with all other chickens with ease. Take a rooster with stripes and show him some red hens and off he goes to mate and the red hens don't mind. In nature, that nearly never happens because the red hens would run away and the male wouldn't be interested in them anyway.

Since the qualities the animals express are desired by humans, the males and females can't use appearances or size as mating guides so they simply mate with no discrimination. This loss of discrimination makes them fare poorly in nature. Or it causes them to revert to an earlier model, for example, horses in the wild tend, over time, to turn brown and mottled so they blend into the landscape. This is due to the natural pressure of the predator community that eats colorful horses that stand out.

Horses living in nature in cold climates will evolve white fur in winter and brown in summer, for example.

So one can assume that all the variations in human appearance is artificially produced by humans choosing to breed in various ways that distingish themselves from other human tribal groupings. And that this is a fairly recent thing most likely developed by homosapiens itself. For this group of Great Apes was created in the Rift Valley cauldron and when they walked out of Africa, they were heavily armed with fire, stone and deadly spears and most likely already taming various animals. They killed whatever was in their paths especially other humanoids.

They left Africa 75,000 years ago right after a tremendous volcanic eruption in Indonesia which killed off or weakened many humanoids and changed the climate briefly but very disasterously for a few dozen years, thus propelling up and out of Africa, waves of humans. In less than 10,000 years, the outermost edge reached Australia. By 12,000 years, the last Neanderthal was eliminated.

Since then we ruled the planet. Coincidentally, 12,000 years is when the last "Hobbit" was alive, too.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Climate Change Plus Humans Plus DOGS Killed World Wide Mega-Fauna

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska claims trees overtook the mastadon habitat and that is why they died off. Alot of the plains mega-fauna died off 12,000 years ago. But this didn't happen! Plenty of megafauna survived! Buffaloes and grizzlies, just for example. Imagining how this works requires thinking like a farmer.

National Geographic:

Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
May 10, 2006
The plot thickens.

New findings suggest that an ongoing, epic whodunit may actually be a whatdunit. That is, climate change, not humans, may be what killed off Ice Age mammoths, horses, and other large animals in North America.

Dale Guthrie, a researcher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, has spent some 20 years examining more than 600 bones of large mammals from Alaska and the Yukon Territory.

His analysis points toward climate as the culprit.

Guthrie's data, published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature, shows that increases in moisture and warmer temperatures 13,500 to 11,500 years ago allowed for edible plants to migrate north.

But then the milder climate backfired on the big mammals. It paved the way for trees, which eventually outshaded and outcompeted the low-lying plants the animals depended on, Guthrie says.

There are many problems with his hypothosis. One is, anyone who has any experience with horses and cattle (forget giant elephantine animals!) is, NO trees can grow unless you fence them away from the large grazing mammals! Period. Even if pine trees can grow, they get smooshed. I had one of America's biggest ox teams. Each boy weighed in at over a ton. Where they walked, when the ground was damp, they left deep imprints. Imagine now a herd of 100,000 Chip and Dale ton+ oxen stampeding across a flat plain!

Worse, these giant cattle I owned came from Switzerland which is mountainous. So they not only ranged on the plains, they lived in high mountains. And they could graze on nearly anything.

Trees were candybars to them!

Chip and Dale would take their sweeping horns which spanned four feet and hook them on tree branches and pull the branch down and eat them. They would snap off branches. They would rub against trees including pine trees and knock them down. When shedding fur, Sparky, the Ice Age Horse from Switzerland and Chip and Dale would rub the old fur off using pine trees. The stags in the forest would come into the fields to rub the fur off their growing horns in early fall. I have actually seen them doing this.

The trees take a lot of damage. No great plain has many trees precisely because massive herds of tree killing animals roam about seeking trees to destroy! Grazing herds=savannah grasses. Grasses and grazing animals evolved in tandem. There is NO FRICKING WAY that trees can "push out" any grazing animal! One silly Sparky and eliminate all the trees for 100 square miles over the course of a year if he isn't penned into his pasture which he spends all day trying to figure out, how to get out.

So this scientist, being not a farmer, thinks that tiny saplings can destroy a mammoth's home turf. Gah.

What happened back then and why did it not affect the vast herds of elephants and lions gazelles and whatever in Africa? Well, humans figured out how to hunt not only with spears but with DOGS. Sparky broke out of his pasture today. So my dogs got to work, barking at him. Wooo woo woo. They snapped at his hocks and he kicked them. Woo woo woo. Out comes the human. "Sparky, get back into your pasture," she yells. Sparky snorts and goes into his pasture.

National Geographic:

Now a new study of the fossil record fuels the debate about the cause of the creatures' fate.

In North America two major events occurred at about the same time as the megafaunal extinctions: The planet cooled, and early humans arrived from Asia to populate the continent.

For decades scientists have debated which of these factors was responsible for widespread megafaunal extinctions.

Was the climate change simply too much for the animals to withstand? Or did the ancient mammals succumb to human hunting pressure?

Many experts suggest a combination of these factors and perhaps others, such as disease.

"It's hard to see this as one of those things where a single piece of evidence will make it obvious what happened," said Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Now, if I wanted to eat Sparky, I would have chucked my spear into him and he would have fed the dogs who know deep in their brains Sparky=food. This is why they bark at strangers, too. Strangers=food.

BBC News:

A survey of British skulls from the early part of the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, shows societies then were more violent than was supposed.

Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.

Details were presented at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and reported in New Scientist magazine.

Blunt instruments such as clubs were responsible for most of the trauma.

Early on, one of the biggest breed of dogs, the English Mastiff, evolved on that small island. I once had a magnificent English Mastiff, Cleo. This lovely 250 lb dog was fiercely loyal to me and if anyone came wandering onto our lands, she would came stampeding out of nowhere to assault them. Her bark was very loud and she was so scary, she scared bears. One day a black bear came to raid the honey hives in the dark. Sparky hates bears and he ran home to neigh at us.

Cleo ran outside and bellowed at the bear. She then took off into the woods chasing the bear who ran faster and faster, they both disappeared over the ridge and we went hiking, calling back the dog. She came home, panting, the bear never came back.

Once, some people who were rather unfriendly decided to pay me a warning visit. They had criminal records and were pissed that I talked to the police about their activities. Wooo woo woo went Cleo as she pelted down the mountain as they drove up, spittle flying from her gaping mouth. She attacked their truck and they went into reverse, yelling. The other dogs ran up and chased them down the mountain and then down Greenhollow Rd. They never came back, either. (I was also there with a great defense tool in my hands, heh).

The deadly combo of dog and man is what destroyed many fauna. We ate everything in our path and when the larger game was killed, trees could finally grow again.

Scientists think the domestication of dogs happened first in the great plains of Eurasia and spread rapidly. This is simple to explain. When humans without dogs met ones with dogs the dog owners won. Ancient chroniclers point this out. Egypt, when becoming an empire, used dogs in battle, for example. The city builders in the Euphrates valley fought with massive mastiff style dogs. They made many carvings and paintings showing how these dogs fought. One victory parade in Egypt had 500 fighting mastiffs marching in it.

There are carvings showing kings in Eurasia using early chariots to hunt lions using mastiffs. In every carving or painting, the mastiffs are pulling down the lions while the spear and bow hunters pepper the lions with their weapons.

The hunting humans in the New World wiped out mastodons who propably had few predators and were therefore defenseless when meeting a serious predator conglamorate. But the giant bears which we now call "grizzlies" could fight off the dogs and humans sufficiently to keep alive. And the giant oxen which we call "buffalo", thanks to their eternal battles with the wolves, could evade humans hunting them. So why did horses disappear?

Back to Sparky: for some reason, horses like to fool around with humans. Don't ask me why. But they can't help themselves. Like zebras in Africa, they probably moved at the perimeter of vast cattle herds. This meant, the dogs and humans could pick them off even as the more dangerous cows ran off in a massive stampede. I suppose that one day, in Eurasia, instead of eating the horse, someone captured some and used them to herd the cattle. And thus, the first cowboy, some neolithic genius, domesticated two important large grazing animals.

Note that reindeer in Lapland had the same fate: instead of being eaten by the humans and dogs, they flourished down to this day, being herded by the humans and dogs and being used for transport as well as harvested carefully.

The same goes for Africa: cows and goats and other useful animals are herded hither and yon by humans and dogs. They flourish, too. Indeed, this human/animal interface is what characterizes most environments across the planet.

In Australia, only the large kangaroo survived the invasion of the humans and their dingo dogs. This is because the kangaroos move very fast, jump very high like gazelles and can fight fiercely when cornered and they don't interfer with the human's habitat like cave bears, for example.

Do note that gazelles and mountain sheep and all such animals did NOT go extinct when humans invaded. This is because they are either very swift or lived in steep mountains. What destroys their environments is desertfication. This is the real developing danger. Deserts can't hold many niches for large animals.

Culture of Life Main Page

Early Homo Sapiens And Their Dogs Hunted And Killed Neanderthals

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists now say there might be almost no overlap of humans living with Neanderthals. They believe the Neanderthals simply dematerialized. I suggest we and our dogs not only hunted and ate them but the dogs left few bones behind.

Space News:

Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com Mon May 8, 12:02 PM ET
The number of years that modern humans are thought to have overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe is shrinking fast, and some scientists now say that figure could drop to zero.

Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia from 230,000 to 29,000 years ago, petering out soon after the arrival of modern humans from Africa.

There is much debate on exactly how Neanderthals went extinct. Theories include climate change and inferior tools compared to those made by modern humans. Anthropologists also disagree on whether modern humans and Neanderthals are the same species and interbred.

And now, some scientists dispute whether they lived side-by-side at all in Europe.

OK, how many geological years did it take for the barbarian hordes to overrun the Roman Empire? 50? 100? When looking into the dim past for fossils, 100 years is an eyeblink. The humans who left Africa had already wiped out all their nearest relatives except for the jungle apes. After being expelled from that Garden of Eden two million years earlier and developing a strong taste for meat which is hard to find in jungles but easy to find on the savannahs, the human tribes tended to avoid each other because I am supposing we ate each other. So the propulsion of people outwards was very strong, so strong, humans ended up in Australia in what is to geologists, an eyeblink.

Whereever humans came, all other humanoids died. This destruction of all other savannah dwelling humanoids was pretty complete. The Neanderthals were closer to homo sapiens and knew how to use tools that were slightly worse than homo sapiens but they didn't have the sophisticated language tools that the invaders had. The invaders had better tools, better everything.

And most likely, dogs. These dogs accompanied the colonists who ended up in Australia. Wherever humans are, dogs are. Our tribal mentality is very similar to dog packs. It would explain why there are few Neanderthal bones for our scientists to pick through. Dogs can chew the smaller bones of humans which are no bigger than deer bones, to nothing. They can worry and gnaw on bones until there is nothing left. They even like to gnaw on hooves. So during the long winter months, the dogs hung out with the humans, chewing up all the bones.

Reuters:

Armed Sierra Leonean police are hunting up to 20 chimpanzees which killed a local taxi driver and injured three American visitors after they broke out of a wildlife sanctuary, officials said on Tuesday.

The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in forested hills outside the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown where the incident happened, has been closed since Sunday's attack by the screaming and excited apes, which mobbed and mauled the four men.

"Some people had turned up at the gate before normal opening time, and before staff could react, they realized somebody was being attacked," the sanctuary's director, Bala Amarasekaran told Reuters.

The animals killed local taxi driver Issa Kanu and bit and mauled three U.S. employees of a construction company helping to build the new U.S. embassy in Freetown.

The three Americans, Gary Morris, Paul Gregory and Donald Ford, were flown to the United States on Monday to receive medical treatment for their injuries.

Amarasekaran said the attack was the first incident of its kind since the sanctuary was set up in 1995 to give shelter to orphaned and abandoned chimpanzees. It is billed as one of Sierra Leone's leading eco-tourism attractions.

Last week's chimp attack shows what happens when humans and chimps interact and humans are disarmed. The chimps are stronger and faster. They can kill using very little. Modern humans make the mistake of going around nature fairly disarmed. Normally, all animals are scared of humans and the only way we can live with them is to tame them so they don't fear us even when we plan to kill them. The taming of animals coincides with the annihilation of all humanoid relatives of our species.

We now know that chimpanzees aren't gentle creatures at all but are like us. They eliminate their own species in competition in the wild. Gorilla.com:

Two employees at Utah's Hogle zoo were injured this morning in an incident involving chimpanzees. Three chimpanzees were out of their primary enclosure and had access to the employee service area. Two of the animals became dangerously aggressive and an employee who was present in the building was seriously injured. Another employee who came to assist obtained minor injuries. Emergency protocol was implemented as soon as staff was aware of the situation. The initial priority was to protect the lives of the people involved and contain the animals. One chimpanzee was safely contained, but the other two had to be shot. One died of his injuries and the second is alive, but seriously injured and under veterinarian care. To ensure safety for the general public, all visitors who were present were escorted inside buildings until all animals were secured.

The chimps saw the humans disarmed and so they attacked. We are trying to keep these chimpanzees in various penal situations in order to see them. In this particular battle, armed humans showed up and killed or severely injured the chimpanzees. These chimps had lost their fear of humans because of their sheltered situation. In Africa, though, they hide from humans who eat them which should tell us something.

If we eat them now, we ate them in the past! And to our eyes, all non-tribal members are "dinner."

Scientists like to say that the Neandertal's environment changed and they simply rapidly died out. But when one considers what changes occured, there seems to be only one that is remarkable: the invasion of Eurasia by a new wave of violent humans who were rushing outwards to avoid each other's tribes thanks to ferocious warfare in Africa.

This last group of colonizers from Africa finally developed sophisticated enough social systems to stemm the tide of cannibalism. The most sophisticated system we devised was to figure out with the help of our dogs, how to domesticate animals. This didn't stop us from killing each other and this situation remains today. Our demented desire to eliminate all human competition might end in WWIII.

And geologists 100,000 years later won't find too many bones from that!

Culture of Life News Main Page

Human Interference With Bee Ecology Is Now Killing All Wild Bees

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The tiny parasite, Varroa Destructor has been running out of control and is now killing off nearly all wild bee colonies worldwide. Human interference with bee evolution has created a terrible problem that can only be cured now by breeding a different sort of bee.

Guardian:

Bees - which have been loved by Britons ranging from William Shakespeare to Jill Archer - are the quintessence of Britishness. Yet it transpires we are importing them regularly. What is happening? The answer, say beekeepers, is a simple one: a malaise has been spreading through the nation's apiary industry with alarming implications. Thanks to foreign diseases and the spread of drug resistance among infectious agents, the buzzing bee, as sure a signal of summer's onset as traffic jams on the M5, is now at risk of being stifled.

'The situation is very serious and very worrying,' said Dr Ivor Davis, of the British Beekeeping Association. 'We are suffering serious declines in our bee population and that has damaging consequences. People are doing anything to try to put things right and restore populations, and that includes importing bees from Europe and Australia but it is not clear this will help us in the long term.'

Britain's apiary crisis can be traced back to the Nineties when hives were first struck by varroa destructor - a parasitic mite that feeds off the bodily fluids of bees. Populations plummeted, particularly among the nation's wild swarms which have virtually been eradicated. Only colonies tended by people survive in this country today. New feral colonies are sometimes established but without a keeper to help will only survive for a short time before succumbing to disease.

'The honey bees that buzz around your garden and which help to pollinate your plants now all come from colonies that are cared for by humans,' said Davis. 'Effectively, we have no wild bees left in Britain at all now, only ones that are tended for and protected by keepers.' That is bad enough. However, new strains of varroa, resistant to the chemicals that had been used to treat the condition, have started to infect hives in the past year. Their appearance has triggered renewed alarm, with beekeepers reporting major dips in honey production.

I have apiaries here on my mountain. For many years, I have raised hosted bee colonies. The domestic European bee is a friendly insect on so many levels despite having stingers. They lead fascinating lives. Just this week, a neighbor's dump truck carrying topsoil up the mountain broke down near the bee's hive. They were rather upset about this strange beast being so near so the guard bees made their loudest buzzing sounds around the truck. Bees can be very quiet or extremely noisy. Normally, when they want to scare off strangers, they make super-loud bzzzzt sounds close to the face. In this case, close to the hood and headlights of the truck.

My husband and I stood near the truck for a while, not moving. They buzzzzt us up and down, not one stung us and after ten minutes, seeing all was safe, they flew back to the entrance to the hive and continued their alert hovering. My present hive is only one instead of the usual four or so thanks to the awful Varroa mite infestation problems. I had a really nice hive of Varroa resistant bees last year but a powerful storm came and the 80 mph winds blowing from the south shot into their hive and killed the queen.

Now, the hive is sheltered from any strong winds and a new colony which was wild, occupies the hive and so far, they have lasted a year without incident.

Wikipedia:

Varroa destructor was until recently thought to be a closely related mite species called Varroa jacobsoni[1] [2] [3]. Both species parasitize the Asian honey bee, Apis cerana. The mite species originally described as V. jacobsoni by Oudemans in 1904 is part of the same species complex, but not the same species that made the jump to Apis mellifera. That jump probably first took place in the Philippines in the early 1960’s. Only after Apis mellifera were imported to the Philippines, it came into close contact with Apis cerana. Varroa as a parasite of Apis cerana, also became a parasite of Apis mellifera. Up until 2000, scientists did not positively identify Varroa destructor as a separate species. In 2005, we know that the only varroa mites that can reproduce in colonies of Apis mellifera (Western honeybee) are the Korea and Japan/Thailand genotypes of Varroa destructor.

This mite probably co-existed for thousands of years in relative isolation due to the vast deserts and the high Tibetan plateau to the west and the Siberian tundra to the north. But since WWII, the mass movement of bees has picked up tremendously mostly thanks to aeroplanes which can swiftly move them from place to place economically. Many diseases and infestations have been rapidly moving around the earth since modern transportation has picked up armies of hitchikers. There used to be forests of graceful elm trees across America when I was a small child and virtually every single one of them was annihilated by a European fungus, for example.

The swift movement of alien diseases and parasites can hit native populations hard. The domestic/wild bee population is being literally annihilated by the Varroa mites, for example. This is unnatural. Normally, anything that kills off all its hosts ends up not existing so there usually comes a balance within nature that is what makes our ecosystem run rather than fall apart. One of the fancies of humans that is most destructive is the idea we can circumvent evolution by using various poisons and strategems. These systems run against the iron laws of evolution and since few of these methods eliminate the problem, evolution causes any parasite or disease to rapidly mutate as the few survivors madly multiply. These mutations always makes things get worse and worse. Most of our agricultural triumphs in the last 100 years are all, virtually every one, a temporary patch that has now created a host of monsters we find harder and harder to control.

Of course, preserving populations by allowing natural barriers would go a long way to saving most species. In America, for example, bee hives are carted all over the place. Most orchards, unlike in pre-20th Century transportation methods, used to keep hives. To keep the bees happy, clover was grown around the apple or pear trees, for example, so the bees could make honey all summer long. Now, thanks to the industrialization of all farming, orchards have no full time bees but instead, rent them. This means infected hives often travel more than 3,000 miles round trip a year, stopping at various orchards as the trees bloom, then going south for the winter.

Winter kills off many parasites and molds but when bees from warm climates come north each year, they bring infections with them. So the bees in the north not only have to endure cold winters, they now get no abayance in exposure to disease! Most human interference with nature can turn deadly for the animals and plants we manipulate. Our needs are often at odds with sheer survival which is why we have to carefully tend those living things we tame. And up until recently, we collectively, did an amazingly good job at this.

But that was due to localism. Namely, a problem in Korea didn't affect a farm in Oklahoma. Today, there is no quiet corner on this earth.

Bees co-evolved with butterflies and flowers. These two insects have great color sense and they took the meagre, pale, tiny, nectarless proto-flowers and through their harvesting choices, caused a giant evolutionary explosion in color, style, smell and type of flower. The joy we get from these lovely expression of vegetable sex are due entirely to the aesthetic choices of two insect families. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the butterfly and the bee were hard at work, altering the countryside.

Butterflies are suffering too, like the bees. All of nature is being harried and harrassed by human attempts at monoculture farming using poisons. I am fortunate that, unlike the poor bees trying to pollinate professional orchards that use pesticides, there are nearly no farms left here so much of the harvesting by my bees is organic nectar and it tastes wonderful.

BBC:

A South Korean bee farmer has covered his body with nearly 200,000 bees in protest over a territorial dispute between Japan and South Korea.
Ahn Sang-gyu, known for his bee performances, had tears running down his face as he was stung 200 times.

He was protesting against Japan's claim to a number of rocky islets located in waters between Japan and South Korea.

Called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, the area has caused a long-running rift between the nations.

"The honeybee dares to abandon its life when enemies are attempting to attack, to protect its own home. From now on, I hope these bees will contribute to protect our Dokdo", Ahn Sang-Gyu said.

I suppose I could use my own bees to make a political statement. On the other hand, I don't want to have them sting me 200 times, either. I could ask the swarm to go on the attack. Stopping bees is difficult! The mind reels thinking about the possibilities.

All I know is, it will be a very bad thing, if we lose our bees! But the only cure for this scourge is to help evolution run her course. All other methods are doomed to failure. And of course, stopping the carting of bee hives all over the place as if anyone is going to do THAT! Foolish humans.

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