21 Comments

Wolves howl to communicate beyond line-of-sight, which is useful when coordinating a search party across a wide area of uneven terrain; back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it doubles the area a given group can search in a given time, just by reducing redundancy and the need for relays. It's possible early humans picked up howling just like wolves picked up hand gestures.

Expand full comment

You make a very good point in emphasizing the potential difference between modern hunter gatherers and those of the past. We know that there are differences. If only that modern hunter gatherers are still hunter gatherers.

The species is clearly selected and adapted for long distance running. We are far too good at it to assume it was the result of an accident.

Another aspect that deserves thought and research is the long-term cooperative relationship with the other great long distance runner, dogs. The two best long hunters on the planet have been working together since time immemorial with adaptations for this relationship visible on both sides. To the extent that dogs and humans can read one another's gestures even if they've never met.

Expand full comment

Maybe no coincidence that our first domsticated animal - wolves / wild dogs - are also persistence hunters.

Sure ambush hunting is less effort, if it works. Ambush hunting large animals is also more dangerous and has a higher probability of failure.

Expand full comment

Definitely true. Living in a country with few English-speakers and less than fluent grasp of the local language, I am daily astounded by how naturally and universally people learn to communicate with gestures.

Usually it relies on common-knowledge that "speaker" and "audience" can see all relevant pieces of the situation and have known motivations.

With how strong and versatile gesture / body language is, what would have pressured the creation of spoken language? It seems spoken language is most useful for refering to people / objects not present (though this can be done in sign language too, but is more sophisticated than the naive gestural language I encounter).

What would precipitate the need to talk about non-present others? The benefits are obvious, but presumably many animals get on fine without this ability. What changed?

Expand full comment

In Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech by William C. Stokoe [google books], Dr. Stokoe argues... well, that gesture came before vocalization. Haven't read it yet.

I can imagine that standing upright frees your front paws up to do other things. Having one noun ("you") and one verb ("there") expressed in gesture can lead to some pretty complex planning. You (me), you (that guy), you (that guy), there (where we all see the food). You (that other guy), there (watch our stuff). The lines between body language and gesture, and gesture and sign language, and sign language and vocal language, can get pretty thin.

My bias: I'm a sign language interpreter.

Expand full comment

FYI - I believe this article was used as a primary source for the bestselling non-fiction book on the Tarahumara indigenous tribe of Northern Mexico, BORN TO RUN. Great read for anyone interested -

Expand full comment

Why are you separating wartime from rule enforcement? Most wars seem to be started by owners of distance weapons to get other people to follow their rules. It's only falling cost of technology that lets distance weapons to be owned and easily operated by a majority of people.

Expand full comment

glad to see you linking to Bingham's paper on the throwing theory. His new book on the subject is here: http://www.amazon.com/reade...

Expand full comment

Damn,just like Little League baseball!

Expand full comment

That paper that found humans' shorter toe length gives a huge efficiency gain in running, but none in walking, suggests that running has been an important focus of adaptation.

Also, it's not a study or anything, but the television show Nova did a stunt a few years ago where they had ten months to train a bunch of sedentary people (many of them obese) to run a marathon, and almost all of the subjects were able to complete the marathon! It's kind of amazing that almost any human can run a marathon.

Expand full comment

You should probably read the first article, or at least its last section.

The quote only says that endurance hunting is rare among modern hunter-gatherers. The context is skeptical of ancient practice, but there is no direct evidence either way.

The point of the article is that there are adaptations for running. It was selected for and is not just a byproduct of walking. That is compatible with walking being more important, though.

Expand full comment

I suspect that being able to walk easily has been more important than running.

I didn't know that cursorial hunting was rare, but I'm not surprised. Waiting for an animal to show up and then throwing spears at it sounds a lot easier than spending days running it down.

The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture has somewhat about the evolution of hands, and (at least when the book was written) whether improved hands drove intelligence or the other way around was a disputed topic.

Is there evidence from fossil bones about what sorts of activities paleolithic people did the most?

Expand full comment

My guess is that the ability to injure cospecifics easily would lead to a breakdown in chimp-like dominance hierarchies. Coalitional enforcement and social politics would co-evolve, in order to (1) strategically manage the new-found ability and (2) provide leading individuals with some kind of 'legitimacy' or political cover, such as by making troop leadership largely egalitarian, or dependent on the "leader" providing resources or services to the troop.

Expand full comment

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with food preparation I've been curious about.

We need a brain of a particular size to discover fire/food prep. We need enough gut freed up in order to have the metabolic needs for bigger brains. We need to have better food in order to survive with a smaller gut. We need to discover food prep to get better food.

But let's say we become bipedal first. So, in the early days, we don't use food prep for better food, we use a wider range to procure better food (more nuts, more game). We've got free hands, but perhaps we've got cruder tools to use with them. Those of us with bigger brains both coordinate better and make better tools, giving us more reason to have more dexterous hands.

What makes bipedality so useful? Our hands are free to carry our tools around. We no longer have to hope that the game comes to where our tools are, we can carry our tools to the game. Since all other animals need to bring the tool to the prey, we've become much better at it, and tools becomes a viable long-term strategy for the species.

Greater range allows for greater nomadicism. So now we've got a species that's better at carrying and using tools, and going from place to place in accordance with the seasons. So now, any minor advantage in those fields--better hands, better running, better brains, better food prep, better group coordination, greater lexical understanding of the animals and plants in any particular location at any particular time... will be a boon to the species. So now, the smarter, more social throwers become dominant.

Wow, a lot to think about.

Expand full comment

individual hominins faced more environmental variability than do chimpanzees. … This would favor social learning capacity.

"The Dymaxion Map shows that (1) the colder an area gets, the more the annual temperature variation, and (2) the more the geographical temperature varies annually, the more inventive the humans who live in those areas have to be to survive. If you live by Lake Victoria in eastern Africa and youwish to cross it, you will invent a wooden boat. If you live beside Lake Baikai in central Siberia and you wish to cross that body of water, you will invent a wooden boat in the summer and skates and sleds in the winter. The people who live in the colder areas are not more inventive - they simply have many more environment-caused occasions in which to employ all humans' innate inventiveness. Move humans from a hot country into a cold country, and they become as inventive as those who live there - or they perish."- R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path 1982

Expand full comment

This BBC documentary has more on persistence hunting http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Expand full comment