Bill Kelso

                                                         VI

                                The Growth of Human Life on Earth

As we stated at the outset of this post a week or two ago, prior to the late 1960s paleontologists and physical anthropologists had little knowledge of where, when and how humans first appeared on the planet.  But after years of major archaeological work in Africa, and important discoveries of fossils like the famous skeleton of Lucy in 1974, and equally important fossil of Ardi in 1994 paleontologists and physical anthropologists now have developed a rather good picture of the origins of early man. That home lies in Eastern Africa.

a.The Rain Forest and The Original Eden

The original Eden where man first emerged may be found in the broad plains that today make up the savannah of eastern Africa. Surprisingly enough, a major shift in the earth's geology may be responsible for the development of modern humans. We now know that around 5 to 6 million years ago, the growing Rift Valley in Africa had created a large mountain chain which blocked rainfall in eastern Africa. Land which had once been a tropical jungle, now began to dry up and become transformed into a semi dry savannah.

                                     The Rain Forest which dried up in East Africa

(If you hit the link below it shows the Awash Valley where the famous Lucy and Ardi fossils of early man have been found. It is possible  that the Awash valley is our original Eden or one of the earliest sites where our ancestors first emerged)

                                          Origins of Man: The Awash Valley

b. The Savannah of East Africa

The rise of the Rift valley which dramatically changed the vegetation in eastern Africa eventually led to the creation of our earliest ancestors. Our former relatives who lived in the tropical forest of Africa, witnessed their environment changing before their eyes, forcing them out of the trees and onto the flat savannah of eastern Africa.  Geographical changes in the earth thus played a major role in creating us, modern day humans, who eventually became a new species on earth about 250,000 years ago.

                                        Pictures of the Savannah of East Africa

Instead of humans living and sleeping in the canopy of a rain forest, primarily living off of the fruit from their tropical habitat, they now had to learn to survive living on the dry savannah. In place of the safety and abundant food supply of the forest, they now had to deal with predators as well as invent a new diet as the lack of rainfall limited their former food supply. In place of being fiber and fruit eaters, humans had to become omnivores who primarily relied on gathering tubers, scavenging or hunting to feed themselves in a semi dry climate.

Fortunately for early man. the geographical changes which forced men out of the homes in the rain forest, also opened up new ecological niches for animal life. Whenever there are unoccupied niches in nature, evolution quickly fills those slots. Today that change is reflected in the large herds of zebra and wildebeests that occupy the plains of east Africa. Once the rain forest thinned out, zebra began to appear about 4 million years ago followed by wildebeest 2 million years later. The roughly parallel development of our ancestors and the large herds that to this day still occupy the savannah of east Africa, guaranteed an adequate source of food for our early ancestors.

In the span of roughly 5 to 6 million years, we early humans were transformed from being basically another primate who lived in the canopy of a topical forest into a kind of proto human who was forced to quickly evolve on a semi desert savannah surrounded by dangerous predators.  

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                                      The Four Stages of Human Evolution

1)Ape Man or Ardipithecus. The Famous Ardi of Ethiopia

The Evolution of modern man went through four stages. In the first state which lasted from about 5 million until 4 million years ago, our ancestors were best called ape men or proto humans. Physical anthropologists technically call this early version of mankind Ardipithecus. It is named after a famous human fossil which has been called Ardi, one of our earliest ancestors which was also found in the Awash valley. While this early human is related to apes and chimpanzees, it is still an open question as to whether our earliest ancestors actually evolved from them. An alternative possibility is that humans, include our Ardi, as well as the other primates including chimpanzees may have evolved from a common ancestor.

                                                   A Reconstruction of Ardi

2)Australopithecus. The Famous Lucy of Ethiopia

As momentous as this first major development was, around 3 million years ago, our early ancestors went through yet another major change. In technical terms, physical anthropologists call this new evolved species of a proto human an Australopithecus and the most famous member of this new species is the famous skeleton called Lucy, presently also found in the National Museum in Ethiopia.

                                         A Reconstruction of what Lucy looked Like

3) Early Humans: From Homo Habilis to Neanderthal 

Thirdly after roughly 2 million years of natural selection, our proto human ancestors called Australopithecus and their famous representative Lucy were transformed into a version of early man which we can call humans. But in evolutionary terms we still had a ways to go before this early version of a human began to resemble a modern man.  Paleontologists have found that roughly 8 previous versions or species of this early human existed before they finally evolved into ourselves, modern day Homo Sapiens. Among our previous predecessors were species called Homo Habilis, as well as our more famous modern cousins Homo Heidelbergenesis who are more commonly called Neanderthals. For thousands of years modern humans shared the planet with these other species until eventually they all died out around 50,000 years ago. 

                                            A Reconstruction of Neanderthal

4) Finally The Rise of Modern Humans or Homo Sapiens

Finally in the fourth and last stage of human evolution, all of the above previous forms of early man were eventually replaced by the development of modern humans whom we call Homo Sapiens. This final version emerged around 250,000 to 200,000 years ago in Eastern Africa.         

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                              Early Evolutionary Adaptations of Mankind

As mentioned in a series of earlier posts, we described how proto humans quickly evolved once they had to make life on the savannah. Many of our anatomical features which were suitable for living in the canopy of a rain forest were ill suited for living full time on the semi-arid plains of west Africa. 

a.Changes in our Feet and Legs

When we made our living traveling in the treetops, our feet had a disposable big toe that resembled our disposable big thumb today. Because such a foot made it hard to walk let along run on the savannah plain the big toe eventually straightened out and became rigid and aligned with all of our other toes.

While living in the forest canopy, our arms were also much longer than our legs. If you spend all of your time climbing trees you main source of propulsion will naturally be your arms. For that reason early man, or Ardi, had arms that were much longer than his legs. But once we humans started living full time on the African plains, evolution altered our bodies so that today our legs are significantly longer than our arms.

b.Changes in our Facial Features

Besides altering the structure of our bodies evolution altered our facial features. In the rain forests of Africa chimps as well as primate humans had protruding jaws because they had higher grinding power that was necessary for them to digest or crack open fibrous and raw food materials. When initially early man began to walk on the savannah he also  had to eat tough fibers which resulted in our ancestors having a large set of incisors, canines molars and premolar teeth. 

When humans finally began to hunt and altered their diet by becoming meat eaters which they subsequently learned to cook, they had a much easier time consuming their meals. The thus did not need a lot of grinding power to eat meat that had been soften due to cooking. As their diet changed so did their teeth which consequently also altered their facial features. 

As their teeth became smaller, their faces became much flatter. Once their faces became more vertical, their noses which had been embedded in their face, became enlarged and now came to dominate their overall appearance. If you look at the following two links, you will see how in a fairly short time, humans acquired a very different appearance.

                                     A Reconstruction of what Lucy looked Like  

                                     Side view of Humans with a Definite Nose Profile                   

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                            When Did Human Leave Africa for Europe & Asia

After living in Africa for 140,000 to 190,000 years, some humans began to leave their initial home for the northern part of the globe around 70,000 years ago. It is often unclear why they chose to leave. It could be because food was scarce, or there was internal conflict among the early humans or because many humans were just curious as to what lay up north.

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                            When Did Humans Evolve into Different Races

When they subsequently decided to move northward around 70,000 to 60,000 years ago, it took possibly 15,000 to 20,000 years before our black ancestors from Africa evolved into Asians in Siberia and Caucasians in Europe. 

By roughly 40, to 50,000 years ago, we humans had become different races. Why was that the case? Because humans have difficulties living with both too much sunshine or too little sunshine, they evolved very different skins colors to cope with their changing environment. 

While the topic of race has often generated a lot of controversy and conflict, we need to recognize that racial traits are merely evolution’s way of enhancing the ability of people to adjust to their environment. In a much earlier post I spent a lot of time explaining why those different racial traits evolved. To not repeat myself too much, I have briefly summarized that material in the following section.

As I explained in that earlier commentary, when early humans first lost their body hair around 2 million years ago they evolved a dark skin to protect their bodies from the harmful radiation from the sun. Since all early humans lived in Africa, the black race was the first race to develop. But as our black ancestors moved north, they eventually shed their dark color and evolved into our two lighter races of Caucasians and Asians. 

The Indians of America are an offshoot of Asians. Because they traveled quickly through Siberia on their way to Alaska, they did not acquire all of the facial and bodily characteristics of Asians. But their straight black hair and their skin color which lead movies in the 40s to describe them as redskins show their affinities with Asians.

a.What Color will people be?

The general rule of thumb is that if you evolved near the hot equator you will have dark skin. 

If in contrast, you move all the way north to Norway, you are only likely to experience 6 to 8 hours of sunlight in winter. If you live even further north, you will experience even less sunlight with some areas experiencing the polar night when the sun never rises above the horizon. Becuse of their lack of exposurte to sunight these  people are in danger of receiving too little vitamin D raising questions about their long term health. To correct this situation the vast major of these people quickly lost their dark skin and became blond and very white Caucasians.

Finally if people evolve in the mid latitudes such as Siberia, they will also evolve lighter skin coloring like Asians. Even among Asians there are distinct difference in their color. If you are northern Asian either Korean or Japanese, you are likely to be very fair skinned. If you ignored Asian’s facial or bodily characteristics you would probably have trouble distinguishing the skin color of some one who is from northern Asia from someone who is from Europe.  But if you look at the color of Asians who live closer to the equator such as the Philippines or Malaysian people you will find that people have darker skin coloring. 

b.The Issue of Height, When will People be Lanky”

Similarly if you look at bodily characteristics of people you can also tell what kind of climate they evolved in. 

If you are raised in a very hot climate like Kenya in East Africa or West Africa you will find many tall lanky individuals.  Why does evolution produce this kind of body structure. 

c.Surface Areas to Volume Ratios.

It has everything to do with the surface ratio to volume of your body which helps determine the amount of heat you lose to the environment. If you are lanky, you will have a high surface area which means your body will easily radiate heat to the outside. If you are also working hard and actively perspiring, you will also lose a lot of body heat. In a very hot dry climate this body structure will help keep you cool and make your life on the hot African savannah bearable.

However if you had the exact same body structure while you were growing up in a very cold Siberia, you would feel miserable. While tall lanky people would be suffering, individuals with more compact bodies would have a lower surface area to volume ratio and thus less likely to lose much bodily heat. A bodily structure that is rational for East Africa would have negative effects on people living in a cold Siberia.

We thus find that the tallest and lankest people will be from hot Africa and the shortest and least lanky types will have evolved in the much colder climate of Siberia and Asia.  In contrast Caucasians will fall somewhere in the middle but closer to the body features of Africans than Asians.

d.A Summing Up

When you see someone, and you see their skin color and bodily size you can tell where their ancestors originally came from. If they are of dark skin color, they are from the equator and if lighter color from more northern latitudes. Conversely if they are tall and lanky their relatives evolved in a relative hot climate while if they are shorter and have more compact frames, they probably evolved in a very cold climate. 

While racial differences have been a source of conflict for centuries, evolution generated variations in skin color to merely help people better adapt to their local environment. Aside from the influence of evolution, mere racial differences have no political, religious or social significance. 

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                             We may Have Come Close to Dying Out

While their early record of migration seems to suggest that humans were thriving as they spread around the world, that apparent success almost did not happen. About five thousand years before early humans began their trek northward the total human race came close to dying out.

Because biologists find that all humans are closely related when they compare their DNA, many biologists and paleontologists  think that around 75,000 years ago modern humans came close to dying out.  This period was one of the 15 period of massive die offs that have occurred over the last 500 million years but it was not one of the top 5 major periods of extinction in which 70% to 90% of all species passed away.

It is thought that this period of extinction which seems to have adversely hurt humans the most, shrank the human population to under 10,000 people, which explains why biologically most humans have very similar DNA.  There are various theories as why humans almost died out including a massive volcanic explosion which blocked sunlight for several years to a unusual cold turn which killed off much of the earth’s vegetation. 

a, A Change of Diet

Fortunately, early man adapted by changing his diet. For most of his existence the earliest species of Homo Sapiens had relied on meat from the numerous herds of animals like the wildebeest  that had developed on the African savanna. Whenever possible early man also ate fruit or tubers or other plant material if they could find it. 

But as the vegetation in northern Africa dried out early man migrated south to South Africa. where apparently running out of options, they tried harvesting sea food from the oceans. By changing our diet, humans may have managed to survive a climate change that threatened to wipe out our species. Individuals, who had been primarily meat and vegetation eaters, finally chose to diversify their diet by consuming shellfish during these dire times.

While today many people enjoy sea food, they may not realize that food option was a relatively recent development that our ancestors adopted out of pure necessity.

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                                    Issues to Explore in the Future

While the evolution of our physical characteristics was certainly an important part of becoming modern humans, we still had many unanswered questions. Those include the following three topics:

a.How Did We learn to Talk

First, they include the issue of how we learned to talk. In the next couple of posts I hope to explore this topic in more detail.

b.How Did we Become Smarter

Secondly, they also include the issue of how we humans became so much smarter. While Lucy had a brain of 375 to 475 cubic centimeters, a modern human has a brain of 1260 cubic centimeter which is almost 3 times larger. Paleontologists have debated for years why humans managed to become so much smarter. 

1) Did the Inconsiderate Nature of many People make us Smarter.

Ironically one of the leading causes of human intelligence may have been the fact that modern humans realized that the fellow humans beings were not necessarily all that considerate or kind. 

While early man lived in the forest, he probably lived a somewhat independent and isolated life. But when he ventured on to the savannah of east Africa, he found himself now dependent on other human beings for security and well as for assistance in hunting big game. In this new environment, it was important to know what people were likely to be long term friends. 

People may thus have become smarter because they were desperately trying to figure out who they could trust, or whether their alleged friendships were merely strategic alliance that would be quickly forgotten when they no longer served a useful purpose.

It is ironic that one reason why humans of all species are the smartest is that they knew they had to be careful when dealing with fellow members of their species who were often self interested and not all that considerate.

It is thus surprising that our need to figure out who to rely on, eventually so enriched our brains, that we later could figure our how the universe works. Psychological Intelligence may have also lead to scientific intelligence.

c.How Did we Develop two Parent Families?

Finally a third issues is why did humans form long term two parent relationships. Our two closest ancestors have very different sexual relationships. Chimpanzees are very promiscuous and often hostile in demanding sex with female chimpanzees. In contrast great apes live in harems in which a silver back monopolizes the sexual behavior of multiple females. Given the different paths choose by our closest primate relatives it is interesting to understand why humans choose to live in very different types of families..

                                                      A Post Script on Evolution

Before discussing the above topics maybe we should spend more time discussing the phenomenon of evolution. I mention this become two of our best friends, who were also the husband and wife builders of our house, told us one night at dinner that they did not believe in evolution. Our builder friends are very bright and well informed and known a lot about architecture and structural engineering, but they have no faith that evolution explains anything.

When I wrote that section on the development of man, I realized that probably many of our classmates probably had their doubts that humans had evolved from Lucy,

I thus realized that maybe I need to do a better jobs presenting the outlook of evolution before describing how modern man evolved over time.

However, since old age is catching up with me, and I’m feeling somewhat tired, it may take me a while to develop all of the above themes. 

Bill Kelso

                                                        VII

                                  When did Humans Began to Speak

The issue of when people began to talk is a controversial topic and there is no consensus as to what time period Homo Sapiens began to speak. But one of the most popular options argues that people may have begun to talk at the same time that the famous Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux in France and Altima in Spain occurred between 35,000 and 15,000 years ago. Many paleontologists think that 20,000 year period was so creative and artistic because humans had finally improved their ability to communicate with one another.

                                           Four Forms of Communication

But among paleontologists there is agreement that before humans could actually speak, humans may have devised much earlier forms of communication.  Below is a list of the options.

                                             1.  Eye and Eyebrow Movements

                                             2. Gesture Languages

                                             3. Singing

                                             4. Human Talking

Again all of these options are hotly debated these days by paleontologists.

1.Our Eyebrows and Eyes

Among early humans they may have indicated their feelings by moving their eyebrows and focusing their glaze on people.

Today if we are surprised or pleased with an action, we often raise our eyebrows to express our sentiments. Similarly, we today believe that your eyes can express a range of emotions include fear, happiness uncertainty or boredom. It  is very clear  that our eyes are a nonverbal means of communication. 

If we are upset or concerned with the behavior of another person, we may express our emotions by either blinking or dilating our pupils. When you feel affection for someone your pupils may dilate which is known as puppy love. Conversely if you feel stress, you may blink more often. When we are exasperated with someone we may even roll our eyes, or shift our eyes to the right or left if we are trying to hide somethings. If we are suspicious or a person, we may find ourselves narrowing our glance to indicate our sense of disbelief.

a.The Importance of Having White Eyes: The Sclera

One factor that enhances the ability of our eyes to communicate with other people is the makeup of our sight. Among most animals the most visible part of their eyes is the iris and the pupil. The iris is the colored part of your eye that determine the amount of light that enters the eyes. The pupil is the circular dark opening in the iris that controls the size of the iris.  

b. The Sclera

However, human eyes are different from the eyes of most animals in that our eyes are surrounded by a white fibrous tissue called sclera. Paleontologists have often asked why that is the case. 

Because all early humans had dark skins, the sclera magnified the importance of their eyes. With black skins an individual’s white eye would quickly have caught everyone’s attention and facilitated his or her opportunity to express his emotions. Humans may have evolved white eyes because it may have enhanced their ability to communicate with other individual before they had learned how to talk.

c.How Our Dogs Biologically Copied Us

Because our white eyes have been such a notable part of our appearance it may have caught the attention of our earliest hunting companions. When humans domesticated wolves and bred them to become more pliable dogs, they naturally had to communicate with their new pets. In the process dogs acquired an enhanced muscle in their eyebrows which enabled them to pull their eyes back to their ears. In the process the dog’s eyes became bigger, and even more importantly, the dog’s eyes now revealed their white sclera. 

As dogs saw humans communicating with one another using their eyes, they biologically may have modified their eyes to become part of the conversation.

2. Our Gestures

Besides using our eyes, a second language humans may have employed early in our development may have consisted of hand or body gestures. By pointing or making hand signals people can convey a lot of information. 

For instance, by use of our hands we can attract people to ourselves or tell them to follow us. We can likewise use our fingers to point out either dangerous events on the horizon, or possible sources of food today.

Because we may have relied on gestures for such a prolong period of time, when we finally acquired the ability to talk, our speech chose to use the language of hand or body gestures to make an argument or express an emotion.  While we could now use sounds rather than gestures to express ourselves, our conversations preferred to mimic our previous reliance on physical gestures to make our point.

For example, we often say “I can’t grasp what you are saying.” Or “Hold on, I am not following you.” Or we say “you lost me or “I can’t keep up with your thinking.” If we have difficulties with a topic we often ask our partner ”Will you give me a hand?” or “I could use a helping hand”. If someone performs well we might reply that your behavior “left me breathless.” If you are going to do something risky, you might respond” I’m going to stick my neck out.” Or we say you are running me ragged.”

Even the lyrics of songs often are based on hand gestures. The most obvious examples is Sam and Dave’s popular tune “Hold on, I’m Coming”.

3. Singing. 

A third way of communicating with people is to sing to them. We often think singing must have come after we learned to speak, but there are many animals such as birds and whales who communicate only by singing. It is possible that that was the case with humans.

But while singing is a great way of communicating with a large group of people, it is not a very effective means of communicating with just one person. Today many paleontologists think one reason why humans became so smart is that we had to figure out who we could trust. To achieve that goal you would often want to have a private conversation with another human being about a third party. Given this desire to have more subtle talks with our fellow humans we may have evolve speaking to initiate conversations with just one other person.

4.Actual Speaking

a.Tonal Languages

The best evidence for this proposition that singing preceded individuals talking is the simple fact that roughly half of all languages involve tones. In Africa many people from West Africa have languages with absolute tones while in Asia the Chinese, Tibetans and Vietnamese use directional tones in conversing with one another.

b. Pitch Accent Languages

Besides tonal languages, many other languages use pitch accents to convey meaning. Pitch accent is a phonetic feature of certain languages such as Japanese in which pitch comprises a fundamental component of the pronunciation of words. In the case of standard Japanese nearly every word in the language is consistently pronounced with one of four main pitch accents. 

You can thus think of the different tones in Chinese or the pitch accent in Japanese as similar to different melodies in a song, a linguistic feature left over from an earlier time in which humans communicated with each other by singing.

c. Flat Tone Languages: Were they the Last Languages Invented?

Finally besides relying on the contour tones of the Chinese or Japanese accents, Europeans invented a third form of language using flat tons that are widely spoken in America as well. Given the unusual nature of western language, it is possible that the languages of  Europe and America were the last and final form of spoken language to have evolved.

Bill Kelso

                   When did we Acquire our Specific Languages?

If the question of how we acquired the ability to speak is an interesting topic, the subject of why we speak our present array of languages is another fascinating piece of social history. In learning where we acquired our languages, we also will gain some insight into where our earliest ancestors came from.

As we will explain in a later post, humans began to create more complex civilization around 4 to 5 thousand years ago. During this process humans develop two competing types of economies or civilizations. They were respectively sedentary farming communities and pastoral nomadic communities in which people survived by herding animals such as horses, camels or sheep. It is the conflict between these two different civilization that determines which languages most people speak today. The winners in this conflict between two opposing civilizations also determines where your earliest ancestors came from.

a.Sedentary versus Pastoral People

But before delineating how this conflict shaped our languages, we need to have a better understanding of how these two civilizations worked. For instance, the sedentary people who often lived in fertile valleys or in delta regions associated with a river created cities that were supplied by their farming communities.

 The pastoral people, in contrast, had to live in grasslands where their horses or camels could survive by grazing.  In Eurasia, this grassland is called the steppe, and it is a vast belt of grazing land which stretches from Japan to Hungary in Europe. If you hit the link below, the green stripe across Eurasia is the steppe of Asia which is the home of two pastoral people, the Turks and the Mongols. A second home of nomads is the Arabian desert of Saudi Arabia where Bedouin tribesman live and raised camels in a variety of oasis in the desert.

                                    The Steppe in Eurasia, home of Pastoral People

A third home of pastoral people is the Pontic Steppe which is the western end of the steppe that covers all of Eurasia and it lies to the east of Europe and north of Saudi Arabia. It was also home to the first horses that were eventually introduced into Europe.

As soon as this division occurred between these two types of communities, human history became a violent contest between nomadic pastoral people and their sedentary neighborhoods. This conflict which lasted for over 5000 years eventually determined what types of languages the various people of Eurasia eventually spoke.

b.The Three Nomadic Pastoral People

In the above three cases, the pastoral people constantly attacked the sedentary civilizations that were their neighbors. To help remember these groups the following outline may be of some assistance. As you probably know the Chinese built the Great Wall to keep the Mongolian pastoral people at bay. But in contrast the sedentary civilizations next to the Arab Bedouins as well as the sedentary societies of Europe next to their Indio European enemies neglected to build any kind of barrier to keep their hostile neighbors contained.

1.                                                                 B.

Sedentary Societies                                         Pastoral Societies

1.China                                                            Mongols and Turks Attack China

Eastern Eurasia

2.Middle East                                                      Arabian Bedouins Attack the Middle East.

Middle Eurasia   

3.Europe                                                              Indo Europeans Attack Europe

Western Eurasia.  

Historically when the two civilizations clashed, if the nomadic pastoral people defeated their neighbors, they imposed their language as well as their ethnic identity on the conquered people. In the process they abandoned their pastoral lifestyle and created their own sedentary communities as was the case of the Middle East and Europe.

1)The Chinese Language

But if we examine these three clashes separately, we see that the Chinese were generally successful in defeating the attempts of the Mongols to capture their homeland. As a result the Chinese were able to retain their traditional language of tones. The one exception to this historical record was when Genghis Khan conquered China in the 13^th century. But his rule lasted less than a century and the Chinese eventually regained their independence. If you hit the following web site you can get a picture of steppe which was the home of the pastoral people of eastern Asia.

                                                  The steppe of Central Asia

2)The Arab Language

In contrast if we look at the Arabian Peninsular in Eurasia, the countries surrounding Saudi Arabia were eventually conquered by their pastoral neighbors. In the process the people of Egypt and Mesopotamia and northern Africa, who never once thought of themselves as Arabs and spoke their own languages eventually adopted the language as well as the identity of the Bedouins  or Arabs from Saudi Arabia. In contrast to the Mongols the Arabs attacked with camels as well as horses. If you look at the following two websites you can get a feel for the original home of the Arabs.

                               The Dry home of the Bedouin who created the Arab states

                                 The Home of the Arab Nomads who create the Middle East

3) The Indo European languages of Europe

Finally the last major conflict between pastoralist and sedentary societies occurred at the western part of Eurasia in an area called the Pontic Steppe, an area just outside of Europe. Prior to 4500 years ago, nobody in any area of Europe spoke any of the 24 major languages spoken by Europeans today. 

In Europe as in the regions outside of Saudi Arabia, a large group of pastoral nomads whom we call Indo Europeans, started raiding and attacking Europe.  Unlike China which was fairly centralized, Europe, which was also highly fragmented, made no effort to build a Great Wall to protect their part of the continent from attacks from their aggressive neighbors.  After a while numerous Indo-European tribes began assaulting and eventually conquering Europe. 

If you are of European heritage and you relatives came from countries like England or Germany, your original ancestors lived on the steppes of western Eurasia. If you also want to see either their homeland or what life was like on the steppes of Europe, hit the following two websites 

                                         Map of the Homeland of Indo Europeans

                          The home of the Indo Europeans who gave us our Language

Because the Indo Europeans were made up of many tribes, they all spoke slightly different languages. The first wave of Indo-European invading Europe roughly 4500 years ago, spoke Greek and Latin, and eventually changed their pastoral ways to build the classical states of Greece and Rome.

Two thousand years later a second wave of Indo Europeans attacked Europe, this time displacing the earlier settlements of Indo Europeans. In place of Greek and Latin, the new invaders from the Pontic Steppes primarily spoke German and imposed their languages on the countries that we today call Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and England. The word English is actually derived from an German Indo European tribe called the Anglos who conquered England after the fall of Rome. Likewise the name for France is derived from another German Indo European tribe called the Franks. Right behind the German speaking tribes were tribes speaking the various Slavic languages.

For those in our class with a European heritage, our ethnic identity as well as our language thus came from the successful attacks and conquests of a second wave of pastoral people from the Pontic Steppe. Our nomadic ancestors who conquered Europe and intermarried with the local population created the present population of Europe.

Bill Kelso

                                                         VIII

                  When did Humans begin to Buiild Civilizations                          

After living a rather simple and primitive life style for close to 200,000 years, when the Ice Age which had dominated the planet for the last 2 million years finally ended 10,000 years ago, man for the first time began to farm and later create small villages.

Finally after years living as primitive farmers and horticulturalists, humans started to build cities some 5000 years ago, creating in the process the earliest civilizations in Egypt, Iraqi, the Indus River Valley or Pakistan and Northern China. 

As noted above, these earliest civilizations eventually had to deal with the attacks by pastoralist. Depending on how successful they were in defending themselves, areas like the Middle East and Europe were eventually conquered and adopted new languages and even new ethnic identities while an area like China maintained her original languages and traditional heritage.

                                When Did America Become a Major Political Power

                                                                   (1)

                                    When Was the Country of America Created

Among the planet’s numerous countries, America was very late to develop and become a major power and civilization, accepted and respected by other nations. It wasn’t until about 350 years ago that the Pilgrams arrived and established a colony in Massachusetts. It then took another 150 years before the US became an independent country, no longer under the control of Great Britain. But even more importantly 180 years had to elapse from the success of George Washington at Yorktown before the McClatchy class of 1963 graduated and left its impact on America.

                                                                      (2) 

                            When Did We Become an Advanced Technological Society

Our generation has been fortunate to be born at the end of the first major period of industrialization in the world. For instance, American homes have only had electricity for around 130 years and refrigerators which were invented around 1913, for about 110 years. This same period saw the invention of airplanes, bicycles and automobiles. 

Likewise, it was not until the late1980s or 1990s that personal computers were widely available, followed by the internet 20 years later.

                                                                     (3)

                             Comparing the Wealth of Americans with other Countries

The growth of industrialization also led to the growth of an incredibly prosperous United States. If you look at GDP per capita the major countries of Europe have a per capital that is about 50% to 66% of the US. If you average the per capita GDP of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, our GDP per capita is roughly 15 to 20 times greater than these four continents.

For instance, while the GDP per capita of America is $81,000  in 2023, that of the rest of the world is considerably smaller. 

                                                   America                      $81,000

                                                   Great Britain               $62,571

                                                   France                         $49,571

                                                   China                         $14,400

                                                   The Middle East           $13,700.

                                                   Latin America              $10,377

                                                   Southeast Asia              $5,810

                                                    Africa                         $2,950

                                                     India                          $2,410.

While it is true that not all Americans have prospered over the last 100 years, especially the working class whose financial position was undermined by the deindustrialization of America, the overall record of Americans looks very impressive when compared to other nations.

                                                                     (4)

                                      What is the life Expectancy of Americans

Besides being fortunate to live in such a wealthy and comfortable country Americans have also seen a dramatic increases in the number of years an average American lives. If you look at the figures below you will see than in 1900 or 125 years ago the average American would passed away at age 43.7. Today the average life expectancy for a man is in the high 70s and the low 80s for a woman.

The fact that so many members of our high school class are still alive indicates that we have enjoyed a more comfortable and healthier life stye than preceding generations including that of our parents and grandparents

                                Year                            Male                            Female

                                 1900                            46.3                             48.3

                                 1920                            53.6                             54.6

                                 1930                            58.1                             61.6

                                  1940                            60.8                             65.2

                                  1950                            65.6                             71.1

                                  1960                            66.6                             73.1

                                  1970                            67.1                             74.7

                                  1980                            70.0                             77.4

                                  1990                            71.8                             78.8

                                  2000                            74.1                             79.5

                                   2010                            76.2                             81.1

                                   2020                            74.5                             80.2

                                   2023                            75.8                             81.1

                                                                        (5)

                                               A Quick Overview of our Life 

If you look at the above data, our generation has lived an enviable life. If you compare Americans today with the history of humans who first appeared two million years ago, as well as with people in other countries today, we have enjoyed a comfortable and prosperous life style for an infinitesimal brief period of time. If you do the math, modern humans, who evolved 200,000 years ago from the original creation of humans 2 million years ago, have lived in sophisticated communities for less than 3% of our existence on the planet. That statistic makes us unique among all of the humans who have ever lived.

Bill Kelso

                                                               IX

                                   How to Make Sense of our Universe

After what was probably a too long review of our universe and planet, it is maybe time to ask what it all means. An interesting question is can we make sense of our universe and our unique origins. I think if we try to quickly sum up events, perhaps five topics stand out.

                                                                (1)

                                    Finally We Can Understand Our Past

The first significant development is the remarkable advancement the natural and social sciences have made in the recent years to finally understand 1) first our home, the universe, solar system, planet and 2) secondly the origins of our species, Homo Sapiens. 

Despite our earliest emergence from the rain forest of east Africa some 5 million years ago, humans have only come to appreciate and understand how complex our history is within the last 100 years or so. Probably 75% of everything we know about our world today was discovered since the start of 20^th century and perhaps 60% of that knowledge was generated after the 1960s, the decade in which we graduated from high school. In this sense we are the first generation of humans to finally have a good grasp of both our home and our origins.

                                                                 (2)

                                            Our Changing View of the World

Secondly, the recently findings have completely upended how we view our universe. Prior to the years we graduated from McClatchy , the natural sciences believed that we lived in a fairly stable world in which the universe, the continents and even life on earth experienced little of no change. 

The subject of evolution which was a radical idea in 1860s seemed to apply only to the area of biology.  In the realm of astronomy or physics and geology there were universal laws that attested to the unchanging nature of our planet. 

But by the late 1960s through the 90s, all of the above ideas were overthrown. As we mentioned earlier the idea of punctuated equilibrium now seems to govern the field of physics, as well as geology and biology. That idea suggests that while at time the earth as well as the universe experienced periods of stasis, or stability, at other times it faced dramatic rebirth or destruction. The laws of evolution now were true of all realms of our existence. Besides life on earth, the universe as a whole, galaxies, the planet and even our own species was constantly undergoing periods of radical change.

But what was most startling was the discovery that our universe and everything in it was maybe a once off event that would eventually die off. Whether we looked at the stars, our galaxy, the milky way, or our solar system, scientists could estimate an expiration date in which everything in our universe would eventually disappear.                             

                                                                  (3)

                                      Our Existence May Owe a Lot to Chance

Thirdly, as remarkable as was the discovery that our universe would eventually cease to exist, was our observation that the creation of advanced forms of life on our planet was perhaps an accidental event. If you are of a religious bent, this conclusion would naturally be troubling. 

To cope with the new findings of the natural sciences today, even the Catholic Church now argues that it accepts the idea of evolution. But in so doing it may be altering the way the church has traditionally seen God. If a Supreme Being is managing the universe, he is acting more like a distant watchmaker rather than an emphatic being who cares about the plight of individuals.

While a watchmaker designs the universe and even winds the clock to start it ticking, his involvement in the universe is minimal once the clock starts working.

While the watchmaker thesis is very possible, the history of the universe seems much more contingent in nature or governed by chance. That is accidental events rather than an overall design by a supreme being seems to both explain why life arose in the first place and why humans first appeared in Africa.

Because we have covered so much material, the following list will hopefully indicate all of the unusual and complicated events that finally lead to life on earth and especially the development of our own species

a.Special Events that Made Life Possible

14.7 Billion Years Ago

Naturally the first and most important question when we try to understand our place in the universe is to ask why our universe was created in the first place. As I indicated in an earlier post, one of the most interesting questions in philosophy is why there is something rather than nothing. Before the big bang there was nothing where we currently live. Was the creation of our universe something special or as part of a long-term never-ending cycle of universes developing and dying only to be reborn again. 

Maybe life has continuously evolved in a variety of universe before eventually finally passing from the scene. The questions are interesting but unfortunately, we have no satisfactory answers about the creation of our universe.

13.9 Billion Years Ago

A related issues is the creation of our Milky Way Galaxy. It occurred 800 million years after the creation of the universe. But while our galaxy was developed early in the universe our Solar System was not born until roughly 9 billion years later.

6 Billion Years Ago

Finally after billions of years the stars of our universe and galaxy finally developed complex chemicals that would support life. It now appears that whenever a new universe is born, its ability to support complex forms of life must wait billions of years until its stars have evolved to the point where it is fusing together chemicals like silicon and carbon. 

Until that point is reached, our solar system, as well as any other solar system in our universe, will be sterile, lacking the chemicals necessary to make complex forms of life like us.

4.7 Billion Years Ago I

Besides the creation of our universe, the second most important development is the creation of our solar system. However, besides its origins, what is unique about our Solar System is its fortuitous location outside the major spiral arms of our galaxy. If our Solar System had been born in one of the major arms of the Milky Way, it might have been destroyed by some nearby dying star.

4.7 Billion Years Ago II

Besides the fortuitous birth of our solar system, what is remarkable is the fortuitous nature of our planet. 

1. For instance, the location of our planet within the Solar System is key to its ability to support life. The earth is neither too near nor too distance from the sun and thus neither too warm nor too cold to sustain animal and plant life forms.

2. Secondly it is notable for its size. If our planet had been either much bigger or much smaller, life might have died out by now as is the case with Mars. If  much bigger gravity would have made it too hard to walk and live a productive life. If much smaller it might have lost its molten center and subsequent magnetic field which protected our atmosphere.

3.Thirdly is earth’s watery nature. If water had not been transferred from other planets in our solar system to our earth, life would never have evolved on earth. Water is probably the main key element necessary for life to take hold and develop more sophisticated forms of existence.

4.4 Billion Years Ago

But the nature of our planet is merely one of many lucky events that humans on earth have benefited from. If the planet Theia had not crashed into our planet creating the moon, the rapid spinning of the earth might have made it impossible for any advanced forms of life to evolve.

3.3 Billion Years Ago

Similarly at about 3 billion year ago, the  molten interior of our planet began to generate the magnetic field which protects our atmosphere from being blown away by the sun.

3 Billion Years Ago

About 300 million years after creating the magnetic shield our molten earth also started the process of plate tectonics. But the early process of plate tectonics did not create the many continents we see on the earth today. Because the initial rocks created by plate tectonics were very dense rocks called basalt, they eventually sank to the bottom of the oceans..

2.5 Billion Years Ago

However, about a half billion years after the start of plate tectonics, the clash of the various plates produced a new kind of rock called granite that is so light it floats to the top of oceans. This is the start of the creation of continents on planet earth which now cover 29% of the earth’s surface.

If this new rock had not been developed, human forms of life would never have developed on land on our planet. At best complex forms of life might have evolved but they would have consisted of maritime animals such as fish, and perhaps dolphins and whales.

Once again it is interesting how the existence of human life depends on geological changes in the planet. The second major geological change will be the creation of the rift valley in Africa some 5 million years ago.

2 Billion Years Ago

Another factor that facilitated the growth of sophisticated forms of life on the planet was the complex relationship between our atmosphere and the sun. As the sun over time grew hotter, its potential harmful impact on the start of life on earth was softened by the decline of CO2 in our atmosphere. As the sun warmed up the decline of greenhouse gases like CO2 helped  keep the overall temperature fairly stable.

500 Million Years Ago

But perhaps the major reason why we humans eventually appeared on earth is due to the Cambrian Explosion of complex life forms 500 million years ago. This explosion occurred because photosynthezing bacteria had created enough oxygen that the earth could now support more complex forms of life.

245 to 225 Million Years ago

Around 240 million years ago both dinosaurs and mammals, our direct ancestors, appeared on earth. But since mammals were small rodent like animals, they basically stayed out of sight during the day when dinosaurs ruled the world. 

66 Million Years Ago I

If it were not for one unexpected asteroid hit on the earth that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, mammals may have remained a minor life form and never have evolved into humans.

60 Million Years Ago II

As the dinosaurs died off, evolution quickly promoted a burst of life to fill all of the available niches, including the growth of numerous 4 legged predators

58 Million Years Ago

As the number of mammalian predators proliferated, our ancestors took to the trees to find safety.  In the process our earliest mammalian ancestors eventually evolved into the three species of monkeys, chimpanzees and proto humans.

50 Million Years Ago

After the demise of the dinosaurs the level of oxygen which had reached 35% of the atmosphere declined to around 10%.

If evolution had never developed the diaphragm or respiratory pump in mammals, our species may have lacked the energy necessary to eventually develop a complex society in an atmosphere of low oxygen.

30 Million Years Ago

In addition, were it not for the growth of oxygen in our atmosphere to 21% of the air 30 million years ago, early humans, even with a air pump, would have lacked the energy to create any kind of industrial civilization.

5 Million Years Ago

But even more importantly if our planet never had a molten center that constantly consolidates and tears apart continents, it would never have created a rift valley in Africa five million years ago that would dry out the rain forest of Africa. It was this fortuitous event that forced our earliest primate ancestor out of canopy of the rain forest on to the semi dry land of the African savannah. What at first appeared to be a minor geological development, turned out to be a seminal event in the creation of our very own species.

2 Million Years Ago 

Around 2 million years ago, as humans replace Australopithecus as the major form of proto humans on earth, humans began to hunt and cook meat which dramatically changed our appearance. Because we ate softer foods, our faces become flatter and our noses which had been embedded in our face now became a major part of our overall appearance.

75,000 Years Ago 

Even with the demise of our dinosaurs as competitors, humans might have died out 75,000 years ago when our numbers declined to under 10,000 people in another one of the earth’s massive extinctions. As the continent’s vegetation and animal life declined, the ability of we humans to cultivate another source of food, sea food, probably saved us from extinction.

                                                               (4)

                                    Why the Future May be Problematic

A fourth conclusion to draw from the earlier posts is that the future of our planet may be problematic. However, it is always a risky business to try to predict the future. But we also have to realize that if there is one characterization that most adequately describes what has happened over the last 14.7 billion years, it is that change, dramatic change, rather than stability governs the universe. Many of those changes suggest that the future may prose serious risks for future generations of humans.

a.Changing Climate

Among other topics we have discussed, we have seen that the earth’s climate has been very volatile, ranging from a planet totally covered in ice to a planet significantly hotter than today. If in the future, there were another ice age like the last one that covered New York City and Chicago the American economy would be devasted.

b.Changing Oxygen Levels

Similarly we have seen that oxygen levels have varied from a low of 6% to a high of 35% to our present 21%. When  oxygen levels drop, the ability of humans to functions at a high level of energy will automatically decline.

c.Massive Die Offs

Finally our earth in the last 500 million years has experienced 15 major dies offs, one of which almost wiped out all humans 75,000 years ago. While paleontologists are often divided as to what causes the die offs, the causes seem to be events that humans have no control over.

It is important to realize that if these changes occurred in the past they may very well happen in the future. While these changes may not result in the die off of the human race, they may make it difficult for the current world population of eight million today to enjoy a very affluent lifestyle. For most of our history, the vast major of people were incredibly poor living as hunters and gathers. Only in the last 130 years since the age of industrialization have a sizeable number of people enjoyed a comfortable life in which they did not have to struggle to survive.  But if our earth’s climate, oxygen supply or fatality rate increases, that situation may change.

To have a balanced discussion we must admit that we humans could develop the technology to cope with the above possible difficulties. For instance,  humans may be on the verge of creating yet another new species of human beings. Whether it involves people choosing designer genes to implant in their children or installing chips in their brains, people of the future may have very different personalities and lifestyles from those we enjoyed. If AI or artificial intelligence takes off, the future generation of humans may be better prepared to cope with a changing future than we presently are. Fortunately, we will not be around to worry about what the future holds.

                                                                   (5)

                                                    What is our Situation

Finally a fifth topic to draw from our history of the universe is the realization that our journey on this planet has thus been an unusual and fortuitous adventure. On so many occasions things could have turned out very differently from the way they are today. In light of our unique history, we have to realize that our existence in the universe has been brief and fleeting in nature. But we should realize that in a very large and often impersonal universe we have been fortunate to enjoy the gift of life.

a. Part of a Grand Experiment

While most of us are at that stage in life in which we probably only have a few more years to live, we should be thankful that we had the experience to enjoy life. If our universe is a once off event that will eventually disappear forever, we should be grateful that we were part of that experiment. If life were contingent on numerous accidental event, we should be thankful that we were the beneficiaries of those chance events. 

b. A Stable Period of Life

But perhaps the major event that we should be thankful is that we lived during one of the more stable periods of life. Even since the last ice age ended, humans have lived through a golden age of prosperity in which people left their hunter gather background behind them and build large complex civilizations. 

c.A Wealthy and Comfortable Period of Life

We have also enjoyed being part of an advanced society in which people can watch streaming movies, listen to a diverse array of musical genres and enjoy major sporting events. Over the last 5 millions years, only a small sector of the world's population have ever enjoyed such benefits.

We in our McClatchy class were doubly lucky in that we were born in the United States which historically is one of the wealthier and most sophisticated societies ever built. In contrast to the 99% percent of the people who preceded us or who currently live in countries outside of America, we have been privileged individuals. For that we should all be thankful.

If our individual time will soon be up, we should be grateful that in the history of mankind, we stand out for having enjoyed such a great life.

Bill Kelso

While the above posts probably did a better job exploring the nature of our home including the universe and our solar system, our discussion of human beings was rather incomplete. In future posts I hope to spend more time on the process of biological evolution and the origins of man. Besides the development of punctuated equilibrium, biology has gone through two other revolutions which have significantly changed our view of how mankind evolved.

Unfortunately as I approach 80, I have been slowing down. I need to take a break before we discuss in more detail how humans have changed over time.

Bill Kelso

                                   Where did Humans Come From?

After I posted a recent article on the origins of man, based primarily on recent archeological digs in Africa, I decided to look at American attitudes towards evolution. I quickly found that the doctrine is not all that popular.

Instead Americans seem to have three views of the subject and each view has about a third of the public supporting it. 

                                                              (1)

                                              The Permanence of Man

The first group, which pretty emphatically rejects evolution, says that humans have always existed in their present form since the beginning of time. They reject the idea that the complex nature of humans could have been produce in a short period of time by evolution. This view which has an ancient pedigree is best expressed in Michealangelo picture of God giving the gift of life to man. This view insists that man has always looked the way we presently see him.

                                                 God giving the gift of life to Adam

                                                                 (2)

                                                 Divinely Inspired Evolution

A second view accepts the idea that man has evolved over time, but they argue that it is not Darwin’s idea of natural selection that has shaped man. Instead they insist that evolution is more divinely inspired and reflects God’s will. However there are two versions of this second approach. 

The first version argues that God is a distant watchmaker who winds up the process and then lets it run its course. This view is also called Deism and was the belief of our founding fathers such as Washington and Jefferson.

A second version of a divinely inspired form of evolution is called intelligent design and it also believes that man has evolved over time. But they see God as directing and actively involved in the process of evolution rather than as a watchmaker who once he starts the process of evolution becomes a distant observer. Some argue that God is a sculptor rather than a watch matcher who actively shapes the outcome of evolutionary change.

                                                                   (3)

                               The Interaction of Natural and Biological Forces

The third approach, which about one third of Americans supports, argues that man as well as all forms of life have evolved over time and all from the same original source of life. Their main difference with the second approach is their belief that the various biological, physical and geological forces that makeup our world are all independent of one another and operate on separate principles of nature.

In Darwin’s theory of evolution, various organisms of life periodically experience genetic mutations. Natural selection then takes over and either accepts or rejects these mutations depending on whether these mutations enhance or undermines the organism’s adjustment to its environment.

The traditional biological theory of evolution would argue that all the factors that make up natural selection such as the origins of plate tectonics, the climate, the action of asteroids are all separate from one another and operate independently of each other.  

They would reject the idea that the diverse forces of mother nature are part of some master plan. While they would naturally agree that the above factors would eventually interact with one another and impact the world, they would insist that the interactions that produced evolutionary changes were often accidental or contingent in nature rather than part of some intelligent cohesive objective.

Unfortunately there is no way to prove that either one of the above two approaches is superior to the other. Proponents of modern evolutionary theory will often cite a famous medieval argument called Occam’s razor which states that if two theories are in doubt, you ought to choose the simpler one. While this theory is often cited it does not offer conclusive proof that one approach is better than another.

                                                                 (4)             

                                               What the Poll Data Suggests.

If the above polling data is correct and our class mirrors the country at large it means that probably over a third of our class thought the post about the origins of man was way off base and certainly not all that true. If people were religious, they might have felt offended by the secular explanation for the origins of man. A second group may have also agreed that man has evolved but would argued the post was incomplete and one sided. 

That basically leaves maybe a third of the class who might have felt the explanation for the origins of man had some merit. 

a.Reservations about Evolution in my Catholic Family

If the above description of our class is accurate, I must say I certainly understand that attitude and respect it. After all I was raised in a fairly pious Irish Catholic family who also rejected any notion of evolution. 

My uncle, for instance was a Catholic priest and my aunt was a nun in a covenant in San Francisco, My grandparents were especially pious and once my grandfather retired they would attend high mass every day and every evening they would say the rosary hour followed by listening to Bishop Fulton Sheen talk about living a good Catholic life.

I remember my grandparents were really skeptical of education in general and evolution in particular. When I said I wanted to go to college they insisted that if I had to go, I should at least attend a Catholic College like Saint May’s College or even better a Catholic college like Boston College or Notre Dame which catered to the children and grandchildren of Irish Immigrants.

While my uncle who was a priest was less hostile to academic ideas like evolution, he was a believer in Intelligent Design rather than Darwin’s notion of evolution.

Most of my relatives thought my interest in human origins was misspent. After 1974 when an American named Donald Johnson discovered the famous skeleton Lucy, Linda and I started taking our vacations in Africa to visit many of the famous dig sites. When we told our family about our trips, they thought we were wasting out time. Very few of my family members accepted the idea that we might have originated in Africa.

                                                                   (5) 

                                                       Skepticism in Africa

Ironically as Linda and I acquired an interest in the origins of mankind, we were surprised to find that there were as many if not more skeptics of the idea of evolution in Africa than in the US. Admittedly our evidence was more anecdotal than scientific but we found the ambivalence among many Africans to be totally unexpected.

Maybe we should not have been so surprised. Given the poverty of most African nations, African nations initially showed little interest in the study human origins. The main impetus for the growth of human origins came from an Englishman named Louis Leakey who began the first major dig in the country of Tanzania. Today he is also famous for his many famous students such as Diana Fossey who studied the great apes and Jane Goodale who studied chimpanzees.

b. Foreign Studies of Human Origins

Because Leakey knew that humans shared 99% of their genes with chimpanzees and 98% with great apes, he wanted to study the three mammalian primates together to gain some idea of their common ancestors.

Because of Leakey’s success, by the 1980s there were numerous American paleontologists doing work in Africa. By the end of the decades just about every major American university had established a new department studying the nature of human origins.

c. Africans Take the Lead

By the time Linda and I started going to Africa, local Africans were beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in their country’s search for the origins of man. Many of these African paleontologists who had earned degrees from American universities, were instrumental in established research centers in their own country.

However, when we visited the main sites in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia we found that many Africans were ambivalent about their country’s role in the new field of human evolution. While all of them showed great pride in the fact that their country and continent was maybe the birthplace of humanity, they were also troubled by the religious implications of the new findings.

d. Religious Reservations

Until we started spending time in Africa, I had not realized how religious many Africans are. While north Africa is overwhelming Muslim, west Africa has many countries with both Muslim and Christian populations. In contrast in East Africa the countries are overwhelming Christian, ranging from 85% of the population in Kenya to around 70% in Ethiopia.

The above significance became clear when we were in Kenya and our guide who was proud of Kenya’s contribution to human paleontology, asked me if I was a Christian. I remember I told him I was raised in a pious Catholic family. He then asked me how I resolved my Catholic faith with all of the new findings. I replied that I did not know how to resolve the two very different ideas. I just said that they were two alternative ways to view the world. 

The sentiment of our first guide was repeated during other trips to Africa. In Tanzania we had a wonderful agent who was very affable and helpful but he was very religious and troubled by the new findings.  He asked us to refrain from talking about evolution in his presence. Despite his aversion to the topic, he was very good at his job and during our stay at Leakey’s dig in Tanzania he got one of the workers to take us to the spot where Leaky had found Homo Habilis. If you remember an earlier post, humans first evolved from Lucy and her relatives around 2 million years ago. The very first of the 8 species of humans was Homo Habilis a find that made Leaky a star of the human paleontology world. 

While our guide took us to many great sites, the findings so upset his religious beliefs, that we had to limit our enthusiasm about visiting such great places. In various other casual conversation with residents in all the countries of east Africa, people keep voicing questions about their Christian faith and the new findings of paleontology.

e. The Threat of War

One top of these religious problems, we encountered yet another problem in Ethiopia and that was the start of a civil war in the country. Fortunately our guides had walkie talkies and they could tell if there was fighting going on in our future destinations. Our guides also managed to get us released from military stops where troops were looking for rebels.

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                                                Exploring the Options

When we finally stopped traveling to Africa, we had the feeling that the study of human origins was steadily growing in popularity while also stimulating pushback from an active religious community in Africa.

At that time I never realized how unpopular the idea of evolution was in the US. I might have also underestimated how many people might normatively reject its secular outlook of how human beings have evolved. When I finally got around to studying the polling data, I thought maybe I should just forget discussing human origins on the McClatchy website. 

However, I decided not to. Increasingly at American universities the study of human evolution has become an increasingly popular subject of study. The subject matter that is listed in the post is a subject that is increasingly taught every year at most American universities.

f. Answering Unanswered Questions

But I also thought that while there might be some people who have serious qualms about the doctrine, they might also be willing to see how theories of biological evolution explain 1) why animals appear the way they do, 2) how animals interact with one another, and 3) how they explain really difficult questions such as why humans became the smartest animal on the planet.

Even if people do not agree totally with the theory, some classmates might be surprised at how interesting are the insights that evolutionary biologists have developed over the past couple of decades. Modern evolutionary theory often offers explanations for human and animal traits that the other two theories are silent about.

I know that when Linda and I initially got interested in studying the topic in the early 80s, the findings were so fascinating that that we became hooked on the subject. Hopefully some of the evolutionary explanations may be equally intriguing and appealing to other members of our class. I am hoping that people’s sense of curiosity might overcome their reservations about the doctrine of evolution so that they would at least look at how evolutionary theory explains our dominant presence on this planet.

Diane Hinesley (Malone)

Bill Kelso

Dear Diane

Thanks for your nice letter. I know you like traveling and exploring new places. In case you are interested I thought I would tell you more about Africa, a fantastic place to visit.

                      Learning About Early Man: The Best Museums

If you are interested in the origins of man, there is no better place to see than Africa. However, conditions vary from one country to the next. Ethiopia has perhaps the best collection of ancient fossils as both the famous skeletons of Luci and now Ardi are in the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addas Ababa. 

Unfortunately because Ethiopia is a very poor country, its museum is rather threadbare. Hopefully some NGO or international group like the United Nations Heritage Fund will give them a grant to update their facilities.

Another country with a great program in human paleontology is Kenya. While Ethiopia is best known for early or proto man, Kenya is best known for later fossils from our genus Homo which eventually leads us to our species Homo Sapiens. Most of the fossils in Nairobi are thus post Lucy and consists of fossils from the human line such  as Homo Habilis or Homo Erectus. 

In addition Kenya is a much more prosperous nation than Ethiopia and has a first rate museum of human paleontology, perhaps the finest museum of human origins in the world. The country is also turning out a lot of very well educated young paleontologists who are becoming tourist guides.  Evidently you can make more money taking around wealthy Americans, Asians and Europeans than you can make by becoming a curator or college professor in Kenya. 

                           Armed Conflict and Rogue Soldiers and Cops

However, besides the quality of the museums and guides, you need to be aware of the political situation in each country. When we were in Ethiopia we got partly caught up in a very violent civil war. There are four main tribes in the country who seem to be constantly at odds. 

If you get stopped by troops, they can be pretty abusive. Because of the poverty of the nation, sometimes rogue policemen or soldiers will stop you and detain you in the hopes of securing a bribe. Fortunately, we had a wonderful guide who refused to be intimidate by anyone who also was very well spoken. He managed to get us out of several difficult situations because he was so persuasive. Because of his help, we managed to become good friends with hm and even sent him money as he struggled financially during the civil war in his country.

                                    Learning about Wildlife in Africa

Besides learning about early man, Africa is a great place to study animal behavior. At roughly the same time as proto man descended to the ground in east Africa, the large herds of zebra, wilderbeest and gazelle also emerged on the African savannah. In evolutionary terms, whenever there is a great die off or the environment is dramatically altered, mother nature quickly acts to fill the empty ecological niches. Besides creating numerous forms of herbivores, she also created numerous predators such as sabretooth tigers, lions, and hyenas and eventually humans

In a later post we shall see how these animals herds evolved to take advantage of the grassland on the African savannah while also defending themselves against their numerous predators.

In fact, for most of our early lives, humans were also prey or the hunted rather than predators or hunters. In the first several million years of our existence, humans had to struggle to survive. We shall see that what today we described as post-traumatic stress disorder may be part of an evolutionary adjustment humans acquired during our many years as rather helpless prey on the exposed grassland of Africa.

                                   Learning About the Slave Trade

Finally a fourth reason for visiting Africa is to see some of the after effects of the slave trade on select African tribes. While today there is much talk about slavery in America, we have to realize that Arabs were also major slave traffickers. While Europe and America got slaves from west Africa, Arabs got slaves from east Africa, If you hit the following link you will see that Ethiopia

                                 Map of Ethiopia next to Yemen and Saudi Arabia

is right next to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, two areas that constantly raided east Africa looking for young girls to be domestic slaves. 

                              Making their Women Unattractive as Domestic Slaves

To discourage slave traders from kidnapping their women, African tried to disfigure their women making them unattractive to Arab slave traders. To appreciate how dramatic was this change hit the link below about women with lip plates.

                                            African women with Lip Plates

Ironically while initially this practice was to make their women unappealing, with the passage of time, this alteration of women’s faces has become a source of attraction among females of some tribes. If you are in Ethiopia, you can visit some of these villages of remote tribes where the women have unusual looks.

However, I am ambivalent about this kind of sightseeing in Africa. If you go to these villages, the people are incredibly poor and will demand that you pay them to take their picture. But while they desire your money, they are understandably hostile to foreigners wanting to view them because of their unusual appearance.  In most of these village all of the men walk around carrying AK47s and they and their wives are often very inhospitable to foreigners.

After spending a little time in these villages, you feel like you are practicing the worst kind of voyeurism. After a while I felt that I as well as a few other stray visitors traveling in northern Ethiopia were not respecting a group of people who historically had suffered from the attacks of slave traders.

                                               An Unusual Continent

In this brief survey you can hopefully see what an interesting continent Africa is. Whether it is learning about early man, understanding how animals as well as humans learned to cope with predators or merely visualizing the long term impact of slavery on people, there is no other place in the world like Africa.

Bill Kelso

                                     Animals Who Love Music

Ever since I was a kid I loved music. But I never knew how many other people shared that interest. But the answer is probsbly quite a few. When I was in jr high and spend my weekends with my brother at Towers Records the place was always full of people.

In scanning the internet recently, I discovered that many animals also love music. Maybe they have more in common with humans than we realize. If you decide to watch the following link, be sure to watch the parrot who will end up doing a little dance to the music.   The picture of the elephant extending his trunk to the musicians is also priceless. It is also interesting that animals seem to like country music. This video probably makes people in Nashville very happy.

                                            Man sings to animals

Bill Kelso

                                           The Popularity of Music

I was able to find another video of animals who are music lovers. In the following clip a group of cows come running to hear a girl play an accordion, a woman singing and several guys playing the classic Dixieland song, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” a song made famous by Louie Armstrong in the 60s.

It is also interesting to learn that many animals have diverse musical interests as they seem to like listening to jazz as well as country music. 

                                                Animals who love Music

Diane Hinesley (Malone)

Diane Hinesley (Malone)

Bill Kelso

Dear Diane:

I am glad you and your friends had a nice trip to Africa. Also thanks for the tip about Carribean music. I was not familiar with their tradition of playing with steel drums at all.. The music sounds interesting. I will try to find more information about the subject on the internet.  Maybe with a little luck I can even find a video of Carribean musicians playing with steel drums. Again appreciate your information about music.

Take Care

Bill

Steven Lindfeldt (MidTerm)

 Bill,

Thanks for your research and your effort to make us all smarter humans at our advanced age. Maybe smarter than we deserve to be.  ( You know I have to put my reading glasses on to read this as I type.)  You spurred me to do a little reseach so I would have the names and dates correct for the story of my only close encounter with real anthropology. It was the spring of 1966.Still at UC Berkeley. A friend of mine,Rob, was dating Ann, the daughter of a famous anthropology professor. Ann had gone home for the weekend. That was all of about a mile from the south side of campus up Euclid Ave into the Berkeley hills on the nothside of campus. Rob had never been to the professor's home. He wanted to see the house and "hang" with the Prof. So I agreed to go with him. I guess I had nothing better to do. We are "hanging" at the house when a taxi pulls up out front. An elderly stately gentleman exists the cab and comes to the door. The Prof greets him warmly and escorts him into the house. The taxi driver is unloading a pile of luggage onto the sidewalk. The Prof looks at Rob and me and "got It".We went out to get the luggage and haul it in the house up the stairs to the guest bedroom. Amongst the luggage was a trunk. It was not heavy, but it was sealed very tightly. We came down stairs to see who was this person. It was Louis Leakey. Direct from Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. He was in the Bay Area to raise funds and lecture on his most recent discovery. The bones of the oldest human ever on earth whose bones were in the trunk we had carried to the guest bedroom. That was my first and only close encounter with real anthropology.

Bill Kelso

Dear Steve

I really enjoyed you letter about meeting Louis Leakey when you were at Berkeley. Until I read your letter I didn’t realize that he was giving lectures in America and raising money as early as the 1960s. I knew he had been profiled many times in Ameridan magazines, but I thought he primarily just stayed in Tanzania.

Given how expensive it was to undertake extensive digs in Africa I guess it makes sense he would raise funds in the US.

In any case, because of his extensive work in Africa, most people today would probably say that he is really the father of human paleontology and physical anthropology.

I remember reading a lot about his efforts to create the field of human paleontology. Prior to Leaky’s move to Africa in the early 1930s, most people in his home country of England had no idea about our human origins and showed little interest in the topic. While a few individuals were aware of the skeletons we today call Neanderthals, they had no idea of where we originated or how modern humans had developed. 

If people thought about evolution at all, they insisted that man must have originated in either Asia or Europe. Given the racial climate in the 30s and the discrimination against blacks, many Europeans insisted that if humans had evolved it must have occurred in Europe.

But Leakey strongly disagreed. Because he believed that humans as well as all the other primates had descended from a common ancestor, he insisted we human had evolved in Africa and not Europe. Despite a lot of criticism, he struck out on his own.

                      The Major Finds

At that time most anthropologists thought he was just an eccentric individual with some radical ideas. You have to admire him for his perseverence and his ability to ignore criticsm. However, after Leakey and his equally famous wife Mary moved to Africa, they started making many startling discoveries. The early criticism of Lakey soon gave way to  admiration for his major discoveries. Today the Leakeys are famous for three major finds.

a.Stone Tools

First they were the earliest paleontologists to find evidence that our ancestors started making stone tools around 2 million years ago. Since early humans did not become the dominant hunter in eastern Africa until about 70,000 years ago , early man used their stone tools to crack open the discarded bones from the kills of lions. Instead of being a hunter, early man was a scavenger, trying to find enough to eat from the left over remains of the top predators in east Africa. Since lions lacked the ability to crack open bones, our early ancestors could make a living by eating parts of the body that were hard for the major predators of east Africa to consume.

b. Early Human Fossils

The second major discovery of the Leakeys was the discovery of Homo Habilis, the skeleton of the very first species of our genus Homo. Homo Habilis who became known as “The Handy Man” was the first of 8 versions of early man that eventually lead to Homo Sapiens.

c. Early Footsteps

Finally the Leakeys gained a lot of press when Mary discovered the footprints made by early man, proving that at an early date man was bipedal. These early finds were widely published by the National Geographic and other science based journals.

                                            The  footsteps of early man

                                       The Americans Show up in Force

Because of the above finds, Leakey who had been a pioneer in looking for evidence of early man in Africa, was soon joined by a whole array of Americans who started their own digs in Africa.

 Since American universities were wealthier than comparable groups in England, numerous American colleges started major research efforts in east Africa.  The most famous of these American groups was led by Donald Johanson who discovered the skeleton of Lucy. Johanson and his team who loved rock and roll music, were playing the Beatles' song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” when they made their famous discovery, hence the name Lucy.

In light of the above success many American universities began to offer course in the origins of early man. The University of Arizona even created a well know research center which they asked Johanson to head.

                                             Changing African Tourism

Besides influencing the courses taught at American universities Leakey started to have an impact on African tourism. Right after WWII, when many African nation obtained their independence, they began to sponsor safaris in which tourists could watch the vast herds of animals that occupied the savannah of east Africa.  Because of Louis and Mary’s famous paleontological findings, several African nations found that many tourists also wanted to visit the famous dig sites in their country. It thus dawned on several African countries that they could combine people’s desire to learn more about their heritage with their interest in African wildlife.

While initially the study of early man and the safaris of east Africa seemed two unrelated events, they were in fact intimately linked. After all the origins of both early man and the rise of the animal herds on the African savanna were both caused by the same event.

The rift valley which had created a rain shadow on east Africa had dried out the previously existing African rain forest, creating in its place the semi arid savannah of east Africa. To fill this empty ecological niche, mother nature evolved modern man and a whole array of herbivores and predators. Whenever there are major disturbances in the environment, mother nature quickly acts to fill any ecological void.

Secondly, besides having the same cause, it was also clear that early man had made his living on the very plains that supported the herds of wildebeests, zebras and Thompson’s gazelles.

While today tourists can see millions of animals scattered on the horizon, they had to realize that for the previous 41/2 million years early humans had shared that savannah with similar animals. Humans along with zebra and wildebeest had faced the same problems in obtaining food and avoiding predators.  The interesting question was how defenseless and slow humans managed to survive this rather harsh environment.

Even more fundamentally Leakey’s created even more opportunities for people to learn about their ancestors. While today people can google Ancestors.com to find if their ancestors lived in England, or Germany or Asia or western Africa, today they can search further into their past. If they so choose, they can now go to east Africa and see where their earliest relatives happened to live.

So Steve, it must have been quite an occasions to meet Leakey. Very few people make a major change in the way people view the world. But Leakey not only altered what some American colleges teach, and how African tourism is structured, but he also changed the way we came to understand our human origins.

If Leakey had not defied conventional wisdom by moving to Africa to search for early man, we would probably still be in the dark about our early heritage. All in all, you had a unique experience with a very important individual.

Steven Lindfeldt (MidTerm)

Bill,

Thanks for the informative response to my attempt at a humoress story about my close enounter with real anthropology. I think what we are doing here is called "lifetime learning". On the other hand my recent contribution to lifetime learning was a comment I left on a video from a You Tube Vbloger where I explained the history of bubble gum in packs of baseball cards.  I don't remember Louis Leakey paying much attention to Rob and myself.

Bill Kelso

Dear Steve

Thanks for  your good natured and entertaining comments about Leakey. My comment was way too long and detailed.  I think it’s a defect I acquired from teaching so long.  A lighter touch is always desirable.

Bill

Bill Kelso

                 Learning About our Biological Home and Early Man

At the risk of repeating myself from previous McClatchy posts, I thought some of our classmates might want to know additional information about our origins before they pass away. If such an objective is one of our goals, we are fortunate to live in an age in which the natural, and biological sciences have made great strides in explaining how our planet works and who we are. In fact one of the defining feature of the last 60 years has been the ability of many scientists to increasingly understand and make sense of the world we live in. As we shall see the world has turned out to be a much more interesting place than we could ever had imagined.

The benefits of this new outlook may be very personal and even comforting for some individuals. After all if we have some sense of our collective history, as well as knowledge of the world we briefly inhabited, it might be easier to accept the fact that our time on earth is limited.

But I realize that not everyone may be interested in learning what the biological sciences have discovered about our planet. As our time draws short, many people may just want to enjoy their lives and spent more time with their families. The last thing they may want is to feel that they are back in school, having to learn new material. The above position is a very common and popular view. I think just enjoying daily living is a very pleasurable and a satisfying way to spend your final years.

                                                                (A)

                                         An Introduction to our Biological Home

However, if you happen to find yourself curious about our past, or just bored with the present, learning about how humans evolved can also be an enjoyable experience. Many of the recent findings of the various science may surprise and perhaps even astonish you, enabling you to view the world from a whole new perspective.

                                                                   (1)

                             Seeing Order in Place of Unconnected Random Events

But if this new knowledge surprises you, it raises the obvious question as to what insights could possibly change our perspective of the world. Prior to several hundred years ago, life seemed to consist of innumerable incidents that seemed unconnected and unrelated. In fact the makeup of life was so diffuse, we just tended to ignore it because it seemed to consist of so many random happenings.

However with the growth of the natural and biological sciences in the past several centuries, all that has changed. Over the last 100 years the natural and social science have come to realize that there is an inherent order and coherence to our world that previous generations failed to see.

For instance, as noted in an earlier post, Newton’s theory of gravity made us realize that such disparate events as the revolution of the earth around the sun, the spherical nature of planets, the creation of high tides in the oceans, the slowing down of the earth and the increase in the length of the day are all due to the same force, gravity. 

Similarly when we look at either tropical ecologies, or rain forests or arid deserts, we quickly will realize that they are all governed by the same simple rules. In biological communities similar forces may shape the way organism as diverse as plants, animals and humans behave. 

For instance the very reasons why humans look different because we are members of different races may explain why Christmas trees with their pyramidal shape and numerous branches at their base look so different from the rounded canopy and naked trunks of oak trees.  What once appeared to be separate and diffuse events in different parts of the world now appears to regulated by the same common rules that dominate the planet. Rather than living in a diffuse chaotic world, we appear to live in a world that operates on a universal and similar set of regulations.

                                                                    (2)

                                                       Seeing the Invisible

Besides living at a time when we are able to realize that the apparent chaos of the planet contains a few simple universal rules, we have the benefit of being able to visualize a world that previous generations never knew existed. Most importantly, the greatest achievement of the recent scientific break throughs is its ability to enable us to finally apprehend the invisible world that characterize our planet. Beneath the world that our senses constantly experience, we now know there is a hidden world that we cannot directly perceive. This apparently hidden world that we are not aware of, both structures our planet and shapes the way we live our lives.

Whether it is Einstein’s notion that we live in a space time of curved space or the geologist’s notion that continents are constantly crashing into one another or breaking apart or Darwin’s idea that all forms of life are constantly changing and evolving, we now can understand and visualize our world in way our ancestors never even dreamed of.  In light of our short history we were previously unable to recognize how the makeup of land had changed, and the appearance of man had evolved over the last five million years. Given their limited knowledge, our most recent ancestors had to live in the present, a period frozen in time, unaware of their past and totally clueless about the future.

                                                                     (3)

                                                       What Does it All Mean?

Besides seeing the world differently, we can finally ask what it all means. In light of these new developments in science, humans for the first time have the opportunity to ask questions and discover interesting points about a world we have often taken for granted. Prior to the 20^th century, most humans merely stared at the world around them in total silence. Because we knew so little about our planet, we were totally unable to ask what the makeup of the world meant or was trying to achieve.  In place of quietly watching what once appeared as a blank and sterile world, we now have the knowledge to finally ask meaningful questions about the world we see every day.  

For instance, plants, unlike animals cannot run away from predators.  If that is the case, an interesting question is why is the planet still green? Why have vulnerable plants been able to not only survive hungry predators, but flourish over time. Similarly why do we have flowers in our backyards?  Could flowers actually be a way that plants can keep predators at bay enabling plants to defend themselves from hungry herbivories.

For the first time we can even make sense of our physical environment. For instance, why do only some continents have mountains and other have few or no mountains. Why are mountains found in particular places in continents such as California but not in Iowa. If you live in California with its coastal range and Sierra Nevada mountains what does that tell you about early history of your state. 

Finally, we can even ask as well as find satisfactory answers about the behavior of animals. For instance, on the savannah of east Africa where human originated why do the vast herds of zebra, gazellas and wildebeest undertake a massive  migration every year. 

When human first left the rainforest to live on the Africa plains, did they also migrate with the vast herds of herbivories.  What was the purpose of these vast migrations. Even more interestingly how did early humans who were small, dim witted, not very strong and incredibly slow animals manage to survive possible attacks by numerous predators such as lions, an early form of bears and hyaenas? Does the behavior of baboons, the only monkey to live on the ground, provide clues as to how vulnerable early humans survive on the African savannah? The above types of questions we will try to answer in the following posts.

                                                                      (4)

                                             Looking at Three Elements of Life

To get a fuller appreciation of our lives, it is probably advisable to look at three separate topics. First I wish to spend more time on the doctrine of evolution and how it has evolved over time while secondly I want to spend more time talking about our home, the biosphere.  This topic will supplement our earlier discussion of our physical home which included our universe, galaxy solar system and planet. Thirdly, I want to spend more time talking about the evolution of our species Homo Sapiens. In the earlier post we sketched out the emergence of early proto man some five million years ago in eastern Africa. The most famous of fossils of our early existence on earth are today known as Ardi and Lucy. But I thought that early sketch of our distant ancestors was too brief to really do justice to the subject. To correct that deficiency, I hoped to spend more time describing how man have evolved over the last 5 million years. 

                                                                    (B)

                                                     The Topic of Evolution

Hopefully by now the need to study evolution is obvious. We have to spend more time learning about evolution because it is the primary force that has shaped life on earth. It is also the major factor that has determine the nature of modern human beings.

If some mysterious force called dark energy as well as gravity and Newton’s laws of motion determines the makeup of the universe, and the theory of plate tectonics account for the geological nature of the earth, then evolution is the force that shapes life on our planet. It is impossible to have any elementary knowledge of vegetation, animals or even ourselves if we do not know the fundamental principes of evolution. However, if you look at the beliefs of most Americans, only about a third of the population have much faith in the idea of evolution. But the situation is not hopeless. Despite many people’s reservations about Darwin, they may be intrigued by his theory’s fascinating account of both why and how life emerged on earth. 

a.The Evolution of the Doctrine of Evolution

Over time the theory of evolution has become even more interesting. In a following post, we shall see that Darwin’s theory of evolution in the 1860s has been completely revised over the last 80 years. In fact the whole field of biology as well as the doctrine of evolution has experienced four major revolutions since we graduated from high school that has completely transformed Darwin’s earlier notion of evolution. Ironically even the term biology is of fairly recent usage. When Darwin was alive, he called himself a naturalist rather than a biologist.

b. Evolution finally asked about the Quality of Life

Even more significantly, one of those four revolutions greatly enlarged the scope of the questions biologists ask. Whereas most people think of evolution as concerned with the origins and development of life, a field called sociobiology raised questions about the quality of life on earth.

If major forms of life only occurred 500 million years ago, how can we best characterize it. In the late 1970s many biologists started to emphasize that when life appeared on earth, it was often selfish in nature, concerned only with its own survival and propagation. 

Regardless of what level of life we examined, the world seemed to be a violent and contentious place. Within species, life was often chaotic and brutal. As paleontologists looked at our cousins, the chimpanzees, they were struck by the violence of chimpanzee life. The males constantly fought with one another to gain status and power. In many case the Alpha male was viciously torn apart by a coalition of other chimpanzees who wanted to replace him.

As zoologists also started studying mating habits within different species, they likewise found out that mother nature was often cruel in its treatment of the female sex. More often than not females of countless species were often sexually assaulted and physically abused as males tried to force themselves upon a possible mate.

The violence within species was often matched and exceeded by the conflict between species. As Darwin himself even acknowledge, in life there was often an arms race between predators who tried to enhance their ability to subdue their prey, and their victim who tried to evolve effective defense against their attackers. Life it seemed was often a harsh world in which many species including early humans struggled to survive.

c. How Evolution Tried to Check Animal and Human Selfishness

These findings that much of early life was contentious, selfish, and often violent caused an upheaval in the biological sciences.  Besides focusing on the anatomical changes in species, biologists enlarged their focus and began to also analyze the often hostile nature of life on the planet. Since most organisms would have trouble reproducing if conflict was the only factor shaping evolution, biologists started asking how evolution has tried to limit or control the selfish and self-interested nature of plants, animals and humans.

While it is a tremendous stretch to argue that plants, animals have become more ethical in time, they maybe have become more strategic in creating temporary alliances to deal with emergency situations. Many biologists now believe that plants, animals and even humans have evolved to the point where they have acquired an enlightened sense of self interest in helping others in times of need. In biology this doctrine has become known as the idea of reciprocal altruism. In assisting others in troubled times, you hope that they will offer the same degree of help to you in comparable situations. In place of true compassion or consideration, many animals including humans have realized that if they act generously towards others, their actions may also benefit themselves. While most organisms from all walks of life are still selfish, they have come to pursue their individual interests in a more creative and sophisticated fashion.

d. How Civil Evolution Compliments Biological Evolution

Finaly we need to take a final look at evolution because it appears that by 70,000 years ago it had run its course. Ironically enough, while paleontologists have argued that biology shaped our destined for the first 4.9 million years of our existence, they now argued that the evolutionary process had led to the creation of modern man who presently can override biological developments. The significance of that evolution change was that modern man could now rely on his civil or human evolution to replace or compliment biological evolution. 

As humans had evolved bigger brains and more sophisticated hands and feet, they had developed the ability to modify their environment by the use of their own reason. 

To illustrate this point, take the example of how humans have dealt with the issue of extreme cold. Whereas in the past Darwinian evolution had altered our anatomy by either changing our skin color or our physical shape when we faced cold conditions, today humans have can now either alter our architecture or the means of heating or cooling our homes to deal with comparable frigid situations. Ironically the very success of human evolution had enabled humans to surpass biological evolution in shaping how we live our lives. As humans biologically evolved, we acquired the ability to substitute human ingenuity for the wisdom of natural selection.

                                                                     (C)

                                      The Idea of Animal and Plant Communities

After learning some principles of evolution, we secondly hope to look at the makeup of the ecological communities we live in. When Darwin first articulated his theory of evolution, humans knew very little about the plant and animal kingdoms that we inhabited.

But in yet another major modification of Darwinian thought, the discipline of biology saw the development of the modern theory of ecology in the late 20^th century which greatly enhanced our understanding of evolution. To everyone’s surprise the world of plants seemed more exciting and complex than anyone could have imagined. 

While looking at our yards our gardens, we may think the biological world of plants is rather boring and unimaginative, with very little happening. But if we can draw on recent American culture, our yards may rival at times, the Desperate Wives of Beverely Hills in terms of plants cooperating and then competing with one another, Peyton Place in terms of constant sexual activity going on, or a military war zone as plants employ a variety of tactics to keep predators at bay. Unfortunately, because of our limited attention span, we often cannot see this complex and fascinating behavior occurring in front of us.

a.The General Rules Governing Biological Communities

In light of the above developments, we want to focus on 4 different issues. As we described earlier, modern humans have three different homes. They include 1) our physical homes which include our universe, our galaxy and solar system, 2) our biological community which includes the plants and animals that populate our planet and 3) our man-made created home which involves the homes and infrastructure of our urban environment. 

While the study of our physical home including the big bang that created our universe is an interesting topic, it does not have much impact on our daily lives. In contrast our earliest biological community, the African Savanna, has left its distinctive mark on our physical and emotional makeup. To appreciate how our biological homes have shaped us, it is necessary to understand how the different ecologies that make up the world operate. Today scientists now recognized that there are simple rules regulating the natural world that surrounded us. The study of those rules are today called the study of community ecology. In many ways ecology is comparable to sociology in the social science. Whereas sociology tries to describe and explain the interactions between people, ecology tries to describe the links between different species in nature. Surprisingly enough, all ecologies communities seem to be governed by the same set of community regulations.

b. Predator Prey Relationships

Secondly, after outlining the simple rules that govern various biological communities, we need to study in more detail predatory prey relationships. The drama you see everyday on the African savannah primarily involves the attempts by the numerous predators on the African savannah to capture their prey. Over the years the wildebeest and zebra have evolved various strategies to elude their hunters 

d. How Human Prey Survived Attacks by Predators.

Thirdly, we need to study early biological communities in east Africa to understand how our distant ancestors also managed to survive a world full of predators. Building on our earlier discussion of predatory prey relationships, we shall try to speculate how our early ancestor managed to fend off their attackers. For most of the 5 million years that we lived in eastern Africa, humans were merely another prey hunted down by an array of animals ranging from lions to leopards and hyenas. In light of our initial physical weakness, limited sized brains and lack of speed, it is an interesting questions as to how we survived so long in this hostile environment. By looking at baboons, a monkey species, that left the trees to live on the plains, we might gain some insight how early huma coped with a hostile environment.  

We shall see that after living a rather precarious life for millions of years, humans had evolved by 70,000 years ago to the point that they in turn had become the hunter rather than the hunted. In developing the bow and arrow and a throwing spear, modern humans had finally become the dominant predator on the plains of Africa.

While initially paleontologists primarily studied the fossils of early man, we now realize that to fully comprehend our earliest ancestors we also have to understand the world they lived in. While most of our attention has been focused on how we humans have changed over time, an even more interesting question is to ask is how early humans managed to live on the biodiverse African plains that have historically been dominated from 9 to 14 carnivores.

d. A Glimpse of the Planet in the Present and Past

Unfortunately much of that early world has disappeared. While the earliest environment that humans grew up in were extremely biodiverse ecological communities, today they have been replaced by more monotonous and unform communities with very little plant or animal diversity.

Fourthly as we shall soon see, much of the human population has apparently lost interest in preserving the world we grew up in. As our human population has dramatically expanded over the last two centuries, we created endless subdivision to house the rapidly growing population of the 20^th and 21^st century. When humans were not tearing up the landscape to build more homes, they were establishing mega monocultural farms which grew only one type of crop. In light of these developments, the planet has been transformed.   

                                                 The Serengeti of Africa

The one exception to this development, has been the decision of both Tanzania and Kenya to preserve one section of the African Savannah that emerged when the rift valley destroyed the rain forest of east Africa. That area which today is called the Serengeti, which is a Masai word meaning endless planes, today gives us some insight into the world our ancient ancestors lived in for close to 5 million years. 

                                         The Disappearing Serengeti of America

While today the Serengeti is the most biodiverse area of the world, at one time other areas like the American Midwest, had its own Serengeti that were home to millions of animals. To fully understand the evolution of man, we need to have a better understanding how the world has changed as humans have come to dominate the planet. While it is difficult to realize today, the Great Plains of America were once similar to the endless plains of east Africa.

For instance both areas were even created by similar geological forces. In Africa the rift valley created a rain shadow as its mountains blocked moisture from the Indian Ocean, drying out in the process the indigenous rain forest of east Africa. In America the clash of two land masses created the Rocky Mountains which likewise blocked rain from the western US reaching the Great Plains, undermining the temperate rain forest that had previously existed in the area. As the following post show this new American Serengeti stretched from North Dakota to Texas.

                                   The Great Plains of America: Our Serengeti

While the animals in America differed from those in Africa, the two continents had similar ecologies. The existence of once vast herds of American buffalo and pronghorn antelope on the plains was comparable to Africa’s wildebeest and zebra on the African savannah. Today the American grizzly bear and wolves who now survive by retreating to the remote mountains of American once roamed the Great Plains attacking and killing American herbivores similar to the way lions and hyenas today roam Serengeti.

                          Buffalo on the Plains     Wildebeests on the Savannah                                              

Unfortunately while Africa has tried to preserve part of that early environment, we Americans have completely transformed and destroyed our American Serengeti .

                                                                  (D) 

                                                The Study of Modern Man

After reviewing the environment in which early man lived, we need to look at our third major development which entails the study of how early man came to flourish on the African plains. To appreciate how our ancestor, who had once been hunted on the African savannah, come to eventually be the top predator, we need to look at three developments. Interestingly enough, all three of these developmental changes are linked.

a.The Selfishness and Violence of early Man

The first development was the decline in the violence that probably characterized the life of our early ancestors. This violence included not only attacks by possibly carnivores but also conflict within and between early man. Faced with a dangerous environment in which many animals could possibly attack them, early humans need to quickly figure who among their colleagues they could rely on to assist them in warding off external attacks.

Given the selfishness of many early humans, it was an intellectual challenge for early man to determine whom they could trust and who would likely abandon them if they faced a difficult situation. 

b. The Growth of Human Intelligence

In light of the seriousness of these dual problems, the insecurity of early man is probably one of the main reasons humans became much smarter. The second major development in the creation of modern man was the dramatic increase in the size of our brain and the growth of human intelligence. While initially we had a brain of around 375 cubic centimeters, it would eventually grow to be around 1350 cc. 

But the growth of human brain power is only part of the story. In addition to becoming smarter we also had to become much more curious and inquisitiveness. While somebody could be very smart, they may lack the drive to either learn new ideas or explore in more detail their world. Being bright and being inquisitive are two different traits. 

That situation seems to be the case with early man. While his brain slowly increased over 5 million years, early man built little, crafted few tools and had few major accomplishments to his credit. It is only very late in the game, around 70,000 years ago that humans started to show some creativity by becoming hunters for the first time, making bows and arrows. It was even later around 30,000 years ago that he showed some artistic ability and started to create the wall painting in Lascaux France and Altimir Spain that has capitated modern man. While early man’s intelligence seems to have grown steadily over the years, his sense of curiosity seems to be a much later development.

It is thus ironic that the defining trait that sets humans apart from all other animals of this planet, which is their elevated sense of intelligence and curiosity or inquisitiveness, may be a result of the duplicitous, inconsiderate and selfish nature of early man.

c. The Growth of the Two Parent Family

Finally for the third and last development on modern man we have to investigate the rise of the two parent family. Of all the species on the planet today only humans and the vast majority of birds are likely to live in long term two parent families.

The rise of our unique family situation may be a result of our growing sense of intelligence. As humans began to acquire larger brains, it became increasingly difficult for women to engage in childbirth. While five million years ago humans had evolved pelvic bones that were more than adequate for women to deliver babies when humans had rather small size brains, that situation became more acute once our heads became enlarged. 

To solve this problem, one option was for evolution to expand the size of female pelvic bones. But if our skeleton became enlarged to facilitate human birth, our altered skeleton size would make it difficult for women to walk normally let alone run. That situation would have been fatal in the Africa savannah full of predators. We thus faced a conundrum. An evolutionary change that might facilitate human birth would endanger the mobility of their mothers. Conversely, a comparable evolutionary changes that enhanced our ability to walk would jeopardize the birth process and raises questions about the long term survivability of the human race. 

The answer to this pressing dilemma was for humans to start delivering babies prematurely. In contrast to the birth of a young chimpanzee, who with a few days can ride on the backs of their mothers, human babies are born helpless and unable to fend for themselves. 

But if having babies prematurely solves one problem, it raises a host of other problems. If a human mother has to spend an inordinate amount of time nursing and taking care of her child, the question remains how she would be able to obtain enough food to support both her and her newborn child. The answer may be that humans will have to invent a seldom used new form of family to raise their kids. Like most birds who raises very helpless and vulnerable, humans will create a while new type of relationship to raise their children.  The increasing fragile nature of newborns among homo sapiens may be one reason why humans, unlike our great apes and chimpanzee, live in two parent families.

                                                                  (E)

                                                             Conclusion

In the quest to better understand both our biological home as well as our human origins, hopefully we can gain some insights into how evolution works, as well as appreciate the rules that seem to govern biological communities. In the process we should able to learn how and why humans came to be the dominant form of life on the planet

                                                               Outline

                                                                  A.

                                    An Introduction to our Biological Home

                                          An Invisible Rule Governed World

                                                                  B. 

                                                The Theory of Evolution 

                                                      Intro to Evolution

                                                    The Plant Kingdom

                                              Modern Evolutionary Though

                            How Evolution limited Human Violence and Selfishness

                                                The Rise of Civil Evolution

                                                                    C.

                                           The Theory of Community Ecology

                                          The Rules Governing Community

                                                   Predatory Prey Relations

                                               How Humans Survived as Prey

                                         The Serengeti vs The American Midwest

                                                                    D.

                                                           Human Biology

                                                  How We Became Less Violent

                                    How We Became Smarter and More Inquisitive

                                         How We Developed a Two Parent Family

Bill Kelso

                            An Introduction to Evolutionary Theory

As noted earlier evolution has never been that popular a doctrine in the US. Presently only about a third of Americans think it explains life on our planet. To explain why people both reject and accept Darwin’s notion of evolution I want to 1) first look at why Pre Darwinian ideas rejected evolution, and 2) secondly see why subsequently Darwin developed his notion of descent with modifications. 

                                                               (1)

                                     Pre Darwinian Views of Evolution

If you look at the recent history of mankind, it is easy to understand why the public tends to dismiss notions of evolution. After all humans had never seen any human let alone any animals changing their appearance. Their only experience with the evolution of animals was the proliferation of different dog breeds in 19th century England. But that change had been a result of artificial selection rather than impact of some mysterious biological process called evolution.

a. Every day View of Humans and Animal Life

While humans had witnessed many changes in society, in all cases they seemed to be the result of human actions rather than biological evolution. Ever since humans abandoned their nomadic life of hunters and gathers, people have seen society becoming more technologically sophisticated and complex. Given their relative brief period of life, especially compared to the history of the planet, they witnessed no noticeable changes in the appearance of their fellow human beings. 

It was true that change was a constant feature of modern life. But if any change occurred, it was because of human ingenuity and intelligence rather than some vague notion of natural selection. To all appearance there was no hidden force called evolution that was shaping our lives.

b.Greek and Christian views of Natural History

If everyday experience seemed to undermine the doctrine of evolution, the idea of evolution was also rejected by two philosophical traditions that came to underlie western civilization.

The first doctrine was developed by the Greeks 2500 years ago. Unlike many early civilizations the Greeks developed a naturalistic and philosophical rather than a religious history of the world. As part of their naturalistic view of the world, the Greeks insisted there was a Great Chain of Being that linked all segments of life together. The Greek Philosopher Aristotle went one step further and argued every element in that great Chain of Being followed what he called its teleology, which was its specific or final goal. 

According to this classification system each species occupied a link in a chain of ever increasing complexity. Each item in life also reflected its final purpose. While this chain explained the diversity of life, it had no room for evolution. After all the Greeks believed that life had an inherent order that was static, immutable and reflected some larger philosophical purpose.

Four hundred years after the Greeks, Christianity becomes the dominant outlook of most Europeans. While Christians tended to adopt the Greek idea of a Great Chain of Being, they made one significant change in the doctrine. They insisted that man, who occupied the top position in the Chain of Being, was also made in the image of God.

This view is best expressed in Michelangelo’s famous picture of God giving life to Adam in the fresco of the Sistine Chapel. If man reflected the image of God, it is hard to see why any divine power would tolerate the idea of evolution.

                                                     God Giving Life to Adam

c.Doubts About the Great Chain of Being

However, by the 17^th to the 19^th century, Europeans starting finding fossils of animals that no longer seemed to exist.  The most notable of those fossils were the large bones of animals that we today called dinosaurs. If there was a Great Chain of Being, it was hard to explain why these massive animals no longer existed. 

An even more dramatic find occurred in 1856, three years before Darwin publish his book on evolution, when quarry workers discovered the first Neanderthal skull. Despite the primitive nature of paleontology at that time, the skull appeared to be an earlier more primitive version of mankind.

In light of these new findings, many began to question the idea that all examples of life had always existed in their present form. There were too many life forms that seemed to have no place in the Great Chain of Being. Despite these doubts, the people who had misgivings about the Great Chain of Being, initially lacked an alternative doctrine to explain the existence of life on earth. 

                                                                 (2)

                                  The Rise of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

a. Mathus Offers a New Insight

While Darwin was one of those with misgiving about the Great Chain of Being, he soon found that the writings of Thomas Malthus, a famous British demographer and political economists, provided a possible alternative explanation for the existence of life on earth. 

Malthus’ major contribution has been his idea that human populations faced a potentially life threatening dilemma. He pointed out that human populations tended to grow geometrically in time while the growth of food production increased at best arithmetically. In light of this situation Malthus predicted that humans would eventually outstrip the available resources and thus die of either war, disease or starvation. Darwin soon realized that Malthus findings would apply to animal and plant populations as well as human populations.

b.  The First Source of Change

While Malthus ideas were suggestive, they were not a complete answer or substitute for the idea that life was static and non-changing.  To achieve that goal Darwin modified Malthus findings by suggesting that the various organism in the world would soon adjust to their potentially dire situation by enhancing their ability to obtain food. Instead of dying by famine, as suggested by Malthus, animals and plant organisms would compete in a kind of arms race to find some ecological niche where they could isolate themselves from the efforts of competing members of their species. If the present food supply was inadequate for a population, various groups within that population might try to develop new living arrangements in the existing environment. By changing their anatomy, or digestive track, or area of residence, one species might alter its current features or even evolve into an alternative species that could then exploit different sources of food and survive in a competitive environment.  

Darwin’s major insight was that both the Greeks and Malthus had failed to see that the world was constantly changing. In a variable world in which environments constantly evolved, organisms had to mimic the changes in the environment if they wish to flourish and reproduce.  Among other factors, climate might change, food supplies might become more or less abundant and populations might increase. As the world developed or evolved, plants, animals and even humans had to adjust if they wanted to avoid Malthus’ pessimistic predictions about the future.

c. Darwin’s Second Source of Change

While Darwin initially focused on the competition among animals to explain the development of new features in a species or even the rise of totally new species, he soon expanded the idea of natural selection to include changes in the natural environment as a source of evolutionary change.  For instance, as noted earlier in our discussion of human evolution, people run the risk of dying if they are exposed for too long to the dangers of solar radiation. To limit that risk, natural selection created different races of humans to either mitigate or enhance their ability to handle either too much or too little sunshine. Likewise humans evolved tall lanky physiques to dissipate heat in hot climates like east Africa and shorter more compact bodies to preserve heat in very cold climates like Siberia.

Other examples of organisms adjusting to their environment are too numerous to mention. But an obvious example is either the one humped camel of Saudi Arabia or the two humped camel of Central Asia. While human races evolved races to handle the problem of sunshine, other animals like camels evolved anatomical humps to cope with an environment that had a limited supply of water.

The source of evolutionary change was thus two fold: the creation of new species arose from either competition from other plants and animals or adverse developments in the environment which could pose a potential danger to the health or well being of an organism.

d. Darwin’s Descent from a Common Ancestor

But in an even more controversial point, Darwin also speculated that every form of life had all evolved from a single species. Darwin was thus not only insisting that all animals and plants including mankind, have changed over time, but that they were all related. Whether it was a rather lowly house plants, a minor insignificant insect, or a megafauna like an elephant, humans shared a common ancestor with all of the life forms that came before it. It appeared that life on earth consisted of one gigantic family, who had all originated from the same ancestors.

e.  Darwin’s Descent with Modifications

Surprising enough, Darwin did not call his new doctrine a Theory of Evolution but rather a Theory of Descent with Modifications. Darwin argued that as nature changed, or what he came to call Natural Selection, life forms would have to evolve new modifications if they wanted to survive and flourish in a competitive harsh world. 

                                                               (3)

                                             The Search for Evidence.

After developing his theory Darwin began a search for evidence to support his speculations. As we shall see the evidence that all life forms evolved from a single ancestor has to wait for the development of a new subdivision in biology called Evo Devo.

But evidence for the fact that species had dramatically changed over time was quickly forthcoming. Fortunately Darwin was one of the first  to gather data in support of his theory. When Darwin was a young man  he was hired on the HMS Beagle to travel round the world to study the environment.  

              How Evolution has shaped the anatomies and physiologies of animals

a.Darwin’s Finches

Before he knew it, Darwin hit paydirt. In exploring the Galapagos islands off the coast of South America, Darwin noted that the sources of food varied from one island to the next. He also noted that on every island the finches, who were originally one species, seemed to have evolved different types of beaks. The more he studied the birds the more he realized that to avoid the fate Malthus had predicted for larger populations, the species had evolved into different types of birds.

                                                       Darwin's Finches

In some cases, if the birds had chosen to eat the seeds of plants they found on the ground, they had develop robust beaks which could break apart the casings on the seed. In other islands the finches, who had decided to eat insects, had developed pointed and rather sharp beaks which they could used to spear flying insects. Yet other birds had sharp beaks for extracting blood from other fnches.

In place of all the birds eating the same food source, the various birds had evolved different specialties and become 17 different species of finches. 

In place of an immutable Chain of Being, the birds on the Galapagos island had evolved to take advantages of the different kinds of environment in which they lived.  

b. The Appearance of Herbivores and Carnivores

While Darwin’s pioneering work with birds seemed to confirm his theory of evolution, his initial studies were somewhat limited and parochial in nature. After all they merely examined how one species of birds had splintered or evolved into numerous separate species of finches. 

As the theory of evolution became more popular among scientists, biologists started studying larger and more significant developments in the evolution of life on the planet. Whereas Darwin’s studies had merely shown how finches had modified their beaks as food supplies became limited, biologists now wanted to study how our earliest relatives had undertaken even more radical strategies in modifying their appearance in their quest for supplies. In particular they wanted to trace how our earliest diminutive mammalian ancestors had eventually evolved into the large herbivores, carnivores and primates who dominate the planet today 

Before undertaking this endeavor, biologists started identifying all forms of life on earth. As we will find out when we study biological communities, they identified four types of organisms on earth including: 

1) Providers such as grasses and bushes,

2) Consumers such as herbivores who graze on the above plants,

3) Carnivores who attack and eat herbivores and the 

4) Decomposers such as vultures, termites and alga who recycle the earth’s minerals.

In this post we will focus on the second and third form of organisms cataloging the traits which enhanced their ability to flourish in different environment.

Biologists had noted that since herds of herbivores had very different life styles  or eating habits from that of carnivores, the two groups must have evolved very different physical anatomies. 

1.Eyes of Prey, Predators and Primates

For instance, in the process of giving animals the gift of sight, evolution had to select from two distinct options. First it had to decide if it wanted to create a sight system that stressed either field of vision or secondly binocular vision. In binocular vision an animal uses both eyes to create a single clear three dimensional image of an object. This process involves the brain combining the different images received by each eye to create a unified image of the object the eye is trained on. But in achieving a three dimensional view of an object, an organism may have a limited view of objects or creatures on its periphery.

The other option is to develop animals with a much wider field of vision. Besides a central vision or what is directly in front of it, a wider field of visions enables an animal to detect animals on its periphery.  An animals can thus see very early on if any predator is approaching it from either side. 

A.Herbivores as Prey Animals

Generally animals who are usually prey animals or the hunted want to possess a wide field of visions and thus they tend to have their two eyes positioned on opposite sides of their heads. In such animals the eyes often move independently of one another to expand their field of vision. 

Among animals with the widest field of vision we would include the large number of herbivores on the planet including rabbits, buffalo, antelope, zebra and wildebeest. 

                                                Picture of a Herbivore

Since most herbivores are only slightly faster than their predators, the key to their survival is a quick start in eluding their carnivore enemies. To hold their predators at bay, they evolved eyes on the sides of their heads to alert them to possible attacks from different directions.

b. Carnivores as Predators

In contrast, carnivores who wanted to attack herbivores, evolved a very different system of vision. To enhance their ability to hunt herbivores, they have eyes on the front rather than the side of their head which enables them to hone in on their target. They also wanted a three dimensional view of their prey in order to maximize their strategy for attacking a distant target.

c. Primates and Humans

If binocular vision is of benefit to carnivores, then the inevitable question is why do primates including man also have a similar form of vision? After all, since humans survived as a hunted prey on the African savannah for several million years before acquiring the ability to make spears and bow and arrows only 70,000 years ago, why do they have binocularl vision. 

The answer is found in their initial environment. Because our earliest ancestors lived and traveled in the canopy of the rain forest, they needed to have a three dimensional view of their environment to safely move from tree to tree. If you are going to jump from limb to limb on either the same or different trees, a three dimensional picture of the object you want to grab is essential. In addition, by living in the forest canopy, our primate ancestors had little reason to fear an attack from their periphery. Unlike most land herbivores, our earliest relatives lived in a relatively secure environment of the rainforest which held few predators.

In fact today, the only animals that possess binocular vision are carnivores, primates including humans, and carnivore birds commonly knowns as raptors such as hawks, eagles and owls.                

2. Teeth

To acquire their food, the different types on animals on the planet have also evolved separate and specialized types of teeth. Presently all animals have four types of teeth. At the front are incisors used for grabbing food, next are large canines used for tearing apart animals flesh, next are molars for grinding up difficult to digest food and finally sub molars which are something of a cross between incisors and molars.

Because carnivores like lions attack herbivores, they have large incisors and very sharp canines to tear open the flesh of their prey. In contrast, herbivores have smaller incisors, and canines but much larger molars  that help them grind up the tough vascular plants that make up their diet.

                                           Picture of a lion's canine teeth

Even when carnivores and herbivores share the same type of teeth, they have evolved variations of those teeth to accommodate their separate diets. For instance, since carnivores are primarily meat eaters, their molars tended to have a serrated edge like that of a knife to assist in their slicing meat. In contrast the molars of herbivores have a pronounce ridge on their molars which helps them grind up more effectively difficult and tough plant material.

Similarly because herbivores like zebra and elephants eat rough foliage, they had thick layers or enamel to protect their teeth while carnivores have a much thinner layer of enamel on their teeth because their meals are easier to digest.

3. Digestive Track

Since carnivores and herbivores consume different types of food, the have also evolved very different types of digestive systems. Because most herbivores eat low quality food, they have developed elaborate digestive systems to break down tough fibrous plant material. For instance, some herbivores are ruminants which means they have several stomachs which use fermentation to digest their food. That means that they have special microorganisms in a specialized stomach called a rumen to break down the complex carbohydrates in their stomach.

Since many herbivores are not ruminants, they have evolved much larger colons or large intestines, which also rely on fermentation, to help them digest their food. Elephants, in particular, are noted for their reliance on hindgut fermentation to obtain nutrients from their foods. Because this process is very inefficient, elephants are well known for having one of the least efficient and effective digestive systems of any animal on the planet.

To satisfy their metabolic needs, elephants are known to spend anywhere from 60% to 80 % of their awake hours feeding. Because of their large size and inefficient means of obtaining nutrients from their food supply they have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for something to eat.

                                       Pictures of Elephants Constantly Eating

Ironically enough, the poor digestive system of elephants is a bonanza to many other animals on the African plains. Because elephant droppings are rich in partly digested food, many other animals search out their droppings to feed themselves. For many insects like dung beetles, as well as butterflies, birds, baboons and even some larger mammals, have come to rely on elephant dung as a major source of food. In this case the ineffective elephant digestive system works to the benefits of many other animals on the African savannah.

                                                Animals Eating Elephant Dung

In contrast lions and other carnivores have a smaller digestive system with a smaller colon and a proportionately larger small intestine. Since they eat high quality meat, they do not need to elaborate kind of digestive systems found in the various species of herbivores. Finally, in the case of humans, they also have a relatively large small intestine which absorbs nutrients because they eat a higher quality of diet than herbivores. In contrast their large colon is primarily used to get rid of water and stool rather than to further ferment plant material.

4. The Size of the Animals

Finally we have to realize that the largest animals on the planet are herbivores. There seem to be three reason why that is the case. First, since the greatest source of food consists of the grasses, plants and trees that characterize our planet, herbivores have a greater source of food than carnivores. There is more plant material on earth than there are cadavers of dead herbivores. 

Secondly, as mentioned above, once herbivores start to get big, they need a large digestive system to process their food which only adds to their overall size. 

Thirdly, it is a simple rule of ecology that many herbivores get big as a way of limiting predators from attacking them. For example, elephants are one of the few animals that continue to grow throughout their lives, a process which has significantly improved their safety on the African savannah. 

The benefits to elephants are clearly evident in their main feeding grounds. As we shall see when we discuss the notion of community, large herbivores like the elephants and giraffes on the African savannah are rarely attacked by carnivores. In most cases carnivores primarily attack animals that are comparable or slightly smaller than themselves. The main reasons carnivores do not become too big, is that the bigger they get, the slower they become. To maximize speed and strength most carnivores are of medium size.

                                                                     (4) 

                                                  The Limits of Evolution I

                            How Rapid Changes in the Nature Affects Evolution

Despite the successful track record of evolution in modifying plants and animals to better survive and prosperous in their environment, there are times when evolutionary pressures fail. First, there are often times in which evolutionary change cannot keep up with rapid changes in the environment.

a. Death of Dinosaurs

If there are very rapid developments in nature, animals often lack enough time to modify their anatomy or diet to cope with a changing environment.

For example, when a meteorite hit the earth around 66 million years ago, the debris from the explosion blocked the sunlight hitting the earth for years. As a result, large dinosaurs who had to constantly consume large amount of plant material to sustain their massive size, quickly died out. There was not enough time for dinosaurs to downsize to survive in this more hostile environment. 

The reasons our ancestors, the early mammals survived, is that our earliest ancestors were shrew like creatures not bigger than a few centimeters. Given their small size they could survive on the few plants that survived the initial impact of the meteorite while their larger counterparts perished. When the earth finally recovered our small mammalian ancestors evolved into the large carnivores, herbivores and primates that dominate the planet today.

             Our earliest mammalian ancestors who survived the meteorite attack on earth

                                                                 (5) 

                                               The Limits of Evolution II

                                     Non Functional By Products of Evolution

 A second case in which evolution fails, occurs when it creates non functional body parts for either animals or plants. In contrast to the above case, when an organism lacks time to cope with a major challenge, this second failure is generally neither fatal nor even harmful to the organism. In this situation the failure of evolution is rather minor and certainly not life threatening. However the recognition of this point has been a relatively recent development in history of biology.

Among biologists there has been a recent school of thought which insists that that while Darwinism thought is an important development, it does not explain all aspects of evolutionary history. The advocates of this approach, which are part of the Punctuated Theory of Descent insist that factors beyond what Darwin called natural selection often shaped the evolutionary process.  For example they insist that not all changes in the makeup of plants and animals actually helps an organisms better survive and adjust to its environment. They argue that many changes are neutral or have little or no impact on the evolutionary fitness of plants or animals.

a.How Closely related Genes sometime Produce Non Functional Body Parts.

A classic case of this phenomenon is the existence of tits in human males. While such human features are functional for women who choose to breast feed their children, the same anatomy serves no functional role in males. However, because the gene that creates breasts and tits in females is closely linked to the genes shaping the male anatomy, evolution sometimes creates non useful or functional body parts. Male tits are thus a byproduct of larger trends in the nature of human evolution.

b. Spandrels

Finally in other cases evolution fails because of some unintended consequence of a desirable evolutionary change. This process which is called a spandrel is the development of a particular trait that is the byproduct of another functional change in the anatomy of an animal or plant. The term comes from the field of architecture and is the byproduct of architects creating a certain kind of window.  To be more exact, when architects create arch windows, which serve a functional purpose, they have to fill in the space between the windows. 

 If you look at the following post, you will see that the area between the arches, which is called a spandrel, serves no major architectural purpose. While the arch is functional, the spandrel is not. It is just an architectural side effect of spaces that result from creating two important functional arches.

                                       An area that is a byproduct of a functional arch

An example of a biological spandrel would be the human chin. Our human chin may not have evolved for any functional or evolutionary reason. Rather it may exist due to changes in our modern human face and diet. As we modern humans began to cook our meat and eat softer diets, we got a reduction in our jaw size and teeth. As a byproduct of these changes in the makeup of our jaws we also acquired a chin. Since this process of cooking was more pronounced among modern humans than early version of ourselves such as Neanderthal, our earliest ancestors has much smaller or even insignificant chins. If you look below at a skull of a Neanderthal face, you will see that they lack the large chin that characterizes the face of modern Homo Sapiens.

                                             A Neanderthal man with little or no Chin

                                                                 (6) 

                                          Evolution: A Controversial Topic

While today evolution is a controversial topic in American life, and many people reject it, they may nonetheless find the doctrine appealing because of its interesting and provocative insights into the appearance of animals and humans alike. 

To appreciate this point of evolution, we shall look at how evolution has also shaped the makeup of our plant kingdom in the next post on evolution. As we shall soon see, many of the same principles that have shaped the ways animals and humans look, have also affected the development of our trees and bushes. 

a.Are human races and the shape of Christmas Trees and oak Trees related.

While we often tend to think that appearance of humans and plants may be unconnected, we will see that the impact of natural elements such as sunshine, heat and cold which shaped the creation of different races in humans, also shaped the design and makeup of trees. For instance have you ever wondered why a Christmas tree with its pyramid shape and its major branches at its base, looks so different from a tall oak tree with a rounded canopy and a naked wooden trunk.  Perhaps the factors that explain why one human race differs from another, also explains why we have different looking trees with unique shapes. But this is a topic we will explore in the next section on biology and evolutionary change.

                                          Introduction to Evolution

                                                           (1)

                                      Pre Darwinian Views of Evolution

                                              Every day Views of Life

                                         Greek and Christian Ideas of Life

                                                             (2)

                                     Darwinian Views of Evolution

                                                 Two Key Ideas

                                                            a.

                                           Factors Producing Change

                                         Competition between Species

                                   Reaction to Deficiencies in the Environment

                                                             b.

                                     Descent from a Common Ancestor

                                                             (3)

                                           The Search for Evidence

                                                             (4)

                                          Two Limitations of Evolution

                                  Rapid Environmental Change and Spandrels

Bill Kelso

          Is Music a Spandrel or an Evolutionary Useful Adaptation

An often perennial question evolutionary biologists debate is whether music 1) evolved as a byproduct or spandrel of human’s acquiring the ability to speak or 2) whether music evolved for some other more useful evolutionary purpose.

In an earlier post I took the latter approach and argued that music in general and singing in particular may have preceded our ability to speak. If that is the case, music served a very important functional role in creating modern man.

But even if you reject the above theory of how humans learned to speak, music may have played an important role in enabling humans to just express their joy in being alive. If you look again at the following video by Aretha, notice the sense of happiness and excitement of the crowd as they sway to the rhythm of her song.                               

                                             Aretha Franklin and a Joyful song

Secondly, as probably every teenager know, music may be a way of expressing you love for another human being. Perhaps the king of love songs is none other than Barry White.

                                       Barry White: The King of Love Songs

                                    Be sure to watch the video to the very end

                                           (Great Drummers and Daners)

Finally if music may be a way of expressing your affection for another person, it may also be a way for individuals to gain solace if they have gone through a bad emotional breakup.  The one genre of music that specializes in expressing this kind of music is naturally country music. Country music can be described as the white equivalent of African blues music. Whereas as country music is the music of the white working class and Scotch Irish of Appalachia, African blues music is the music of African American sharecroppers in the cotton fields of northwest Mississippi from the 1920s to 1950s. In both cases the two forms of music expressed the hardships low income people often endured in their efforts to build relationships while creating a decent life for themselves.

                                           Patsy Cline: When Love Goes Wrong

While many insist that music is just a spandrel, I think at the very least it has provided humans with a rich emotional language to express both their joy as well as their hardships in being alive.

Carol Berg (Turner)

It is with great sadness that I let you know that another of our dear classmates has passed away - Diane Cornelius McDaniel. Diney, and I have been friends since we met in Mr. Dangerfield's class at Cal Jr. High. She lived not too far up the street from the school. She got pretty wild and crazy at times, but we sure had a lot of fun together. We maintained our friendship thru marriages, babies, divorces, and more. When she moved to Portland I visited several times. Sadly,  one thing she was never able to do was quit smoking and it eventually was the cause of her demise. I'll miss you my friend 😢

CLICK HERE  to visit Diane's "In Memory" page.

Bill Kelso

                       What will the Future of Mankind Look Like?

In several earlier posts, we talked about how humans havie evolved over the last 5 million years. While the earliest version of man was called Ardi, he was quickly followed by Lucy who in turn was followed by the development of our Homo genius around 2 million years ago. The most well known versions of our particular genus include Homo Habilis, Neanderthal Man as well as ourselves or Homo sapiens.

Whie studying the past provides us with fascinating insights about our human origins and the nature of man, that process pales in comparison with speculating about the future. If we look at recent technological developments in computer hardware and software, we may have to confront some profound question about what it will mean to be a human in the future. Amng the theories being debated today are questions whether the future will be dominated by androids or cyborgs.

Androids

In books of science fiction written during the 20^th century, a common fear of most writers was that androids would come to rule the world. What is an android? It is a robot designed to resemble a human both in appearance and behavior but it will naturally be much smarter and stronger than a real human being. If this scenario ever occurred, modern humans would play only a minor role in shaping or even ruling an increasingly technological driven world. Because androids would be so superior to the average human, they would have an easy time gaining the upper hand in running the government or major corporations. Humans would become second class citizens in society and perhaps would become pets of their superior androids.

Cyborgs

An alternative to an android world is the creation of a cyborg world in which humans become part organic human beings and part mechanical or electronic parts. In place of androids replacing us, we humans would become part AI guided robots ourselves thus maintaining our intellectual ability to dominate any android that happened to be built.

Spectrum of Cyborgs

However, the term cyborg can entail a wide spectrum of possibilities from producing individuals with minor technological capabilities like i phones to glasses, human bracelets or hearing aids to individuals with computer chips embedded in their brains.

The Contest between Mark Zuckerburg and Tim Cook

While this debate may seem premature at the moment, the conflict between Mark Zuckerburg of Meta and Tim Cook of Apple may accelerate the development of a new species of humans within the next couple of centuries or perhaps decades. In the post following this one, I have downloaded a recent article from the Wall Street Journal about how Zuckerburg wants to replace the i phone with smart glasses which will enable AI (Artificial Intelligence) to assist the average individual in his daily life. If Meta’s new smart glasses catch on they will facilitate the growth of super intelligence among average humans. Among other tasks, they will help people to become better organized as their smart glasses will make lists of things to do and suggest superior ways of organizing their work. If job promotions depend on generating new ideas, the smart glasses  of humans will suggest novel ways of conducting business.

Our success as human beings in life will no longer depend on our innate ability, drive or insight as it will be augmented by AI which will refine and supplement our natural inclinations. While initially our AI assisted Meta glasses may lack the financial wisdom of a Waren Buffett, our AI assisted brains will have insights into financial matters that we normally would never have thought of.

If you read the following article you will see that Amazon is also developing yet another device which they call a bracelet that will go around your wrist that they hope will also augment your natural abilities.

A Natural Inflection Point

The reason I am bringing up this point is that before all of us pass away we should realize that we may be living through what historians call an inflection point. An inflection point in history is a point in which the direction of history veers off in a totally different direction. While roughly 200,000 years ago modern Homo Sapiens appeared on the savannah of Africa, it is possible that in the next couple of decades we will see the development of a ninth version of modern humans which will perhaps be called Homo Cyborgs. They will naturally be much smarter than we are and better organized. But it is unclear what their personalities will be. If we rely on AI to help us make decisions, it is an interesting question as to whether all humans will have the same personality or same outlook on life. Perhaps another possibility is that there will be competing version of AI which will produce different  kinds of human cyborgs.

A Brave New World

In any case the future of mankind will be very different from the lifestyles our generation knew growing up in Sacramento in in the 60s. Just as people today study the fossils and behavior of Ardi, Lucy and Neanderthal who historically lived before us, in the future people may study our generation as an example of yet another primitive and simple human being who lacked the sophistication of AI. At present we know that Neanderthals dominated the world for about 400,000 years or from 450,000 to 40,000 years ago. In contrast, at present modern humans have only been around for about 200.000 years.

If we are eventually going to be replaced, we can at least find some solace in the fact that our generation represented the pinnacle of those Homo sapiens who first appeared on the planet 200,000 years ago. But we have to realize that the future of mankind may constitute a brave new world that we at present can’t even imagine. 

Bill Kelso

Mark Zuckerberg Just Declared War on the iPhone

 everyone was fixated on earnings from Meta and its Big Tech rivals.

Zuckerberg is clearly betting that advanced artificial intelligence’s near emergence will finally open the door to a post-smartphone world. “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices,” he wrote Wednesday in an online post detailing how Meta will bring AI to users.

He’s long dreamed of unseating Apple as his users’ primary computing device—whether through his own smartphone, VR goggles or augmented-reality glasses—but failed to do so. Now, he is spending big, offering $100 million pay packages to land top AI talent in an arms race to develop and commercialize AI.

It is an area where Apple is seen as a surprising laggard. The company has delayed features, and investors worry about the lack of investment compared with the likes of Meta, OpenAI and others.

The Facebook co-founder called his vision “personal superintelligence” and drew a path for finally achieving his desire to have an Apple-like experience that combines software and hardware. What has been a cold war with the bigger rival, becomes much hotter if Zuckerberg is really able to pull off what he’s suggesting, infusing his smartglasses—which he has been touting as the perfect device for AI assistants—with much more capability than they currently offer.

“Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg isn’t alone in believing that the time is ripe for a new pecking order 

about the form factor. They see it as a third core device after a computer and smartphone.

“If you have this incredible new technology, you can maybe get much closer to the kind of computer that exists in sci-fi,” Altman said during a podcast appearance in June. 

Zuckerberg thinks the winning form factor will be glasses. Already, Meta is selling so-called smartglasses. These look like regular eyeglasses but have a tiny camera, microphone and speaker included to allow for snapping photos and videos and collecting audio recordings—all pieces of data useful in the AI world. Meta’s product road map envisions screens built into the lens to allow for a visual user interface as well.

“Once you get a display in there…that’s also going to unlock a lot of value where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day in this multimodal way,” Zuckerberg told analysts during a call Wednesday. “It can see the content around you, it can generate a UI for you, show you information and be helpful.”

For now, Meta’s glasses are used in conjunction with a smartphone. One can imagine a world where that won’t always be the case.

The power of the technology holds the promise of enabling use through voice, removing the need for a keyboard and touch screen.

On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried to assure Wall Street about Apple’s pace of investment. And he pushed back on the suggestion that AI could usher in a world where dependence on screen-based devices diminishes.

“When you think about all of the things an iPhone can do—from connecting people to bringing app and game experiences to life, to taking photos and videos, to helping users explore the world, and conduct their financial lives and pay for things so much more—it’s difficult to see a world where iPhone is not living in it,” he said.

Still, Cook added, “That doesn’t mean that we are not thinking about other things as well, but I think that the devices are likely to be complementary devices, not 

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he sees a future that continues to rely on screen-based devices. PHOTO: LAURE ANDRILLON/REUTERS

Facebook was born just ahead of the rise of the mobile-computing era made popular by the iPhone. In the span of a few short years, Zuckerberg was left scrambling to adapt his website to the app economy. 

He would toy with a Facebook phone. But by then it was clear the world had already been split up between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. Those platforms, in turn, could command revenue shares of as much as 30% of in-app sales. 

Since then, Zuckerberg has chafed at the power that Apple, in particular, holds over his company and access to his billions of active daily users. Many of them go to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp through their iPhones.

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For a time, virtual reality and the so-called metaverse held the promise of ushering in a new digital realm that would give Zuckerberg an edge. So far, that technology bet has failed to capture mainstream adoption.

Bill Kelso

      How the Android World May be Closer than We Realize

In a recent post we discussed the difference between an android and a cyborg dominated world. While robots dominate the world in an android universe, humans maintain power in a cyborg world by becoming part robots themselves.

In our earlier discussion of this topic, you might have felt that this topic was so far removed from everyday life, that it was not worth discussing it. But I want to suggest that the conflict between an android and cyborg world may occur quicker than you realize.

The Drone War in Ukraine and Russia.

The best way to appreciate how rapidly the world is changing is to look at the current war between Russia and Ukraine. Because of Russia’s overwhelming size, population and history of military conflict, Ukraine was initially at a disadvantage when war broke out in 2022. 

FPV Drones

To compensate for the weakness of their army and air force, Ukraine decided to reinvent military warfare by building drones. In the initial years of the war, their efforts to quickly build drones proved very successful. While initially they had only several thousand drones in their inventory, they are now on track to build 5 million drones by the end of 2025.

Their efforts to reinvent warfare was so successful that their drones quickly become famous. Today anyone who follows the war is aware that their most popular drones are known as first person drones or more commonly FPV (First Person View) drones. They got that name because the operator of the drone was able to view what the drone was seeing through their on board camera. A live video feed to the operator of the drone enabled the drone operator to fly the drone as if he were actually its onboard pilot. In all cases the operator controlled the drone through radio signals.

The Problem of Jamming

While initially the Ukrainians were successful in attacking Russian forces with their drones, the Russians soon started employing jammers to disrupt the signal between the operator and the FPV. Once the Russians employed jammers, the success rate of drone attacks began to plummet. 

Ukraine’s counter Measures: The Growth of AI Drones

To counters the disruptive efforts of their Russians, the Ukrainians have evolved several counter measures. Their most notable and successful efforts have involved establishing AI (Artificial Intelligence) in their drones.  

The reliance of AI has dramatically enhanced the lethality of their drones in several ways. First by installing algorithms that enable the drone to recognize topographical features, the drone can proceed to its target even if the Russians block the radio signals the drone is receiving from its operators. Besides recognizing the geographical features of the area they wish to hit, Ukraine’s drones have also been trained to recognize military targets as opposed to civilian targets.

And most recently the Ukrainians’ have trained their drones to work together. Whereas initially a solo drone would attack a Russian oil depot or airbase, today they have learned to work together. Increasingly Ukraine’s drones are attacking Russians targets as swarms of drones, dramatically increasing their destructive power. 

Today over 10% of all Ukrainian drones are AI guided but they hope to increase the figure to 30% by early 2026. That means that once Ukraine sends drones into Russia, the drones are on their own, capable of picking out military targets and synchronizing their attack strategies.

A Partially Android World Currently Exists.

While the above account of the Ukraine war may be of interest to war buffs, you might be wondering what bearing it has on the rise of an android or cyborg world?

A Cyborg War

It is very clear that if and when a Ukrainian operator directs a drone attack on a Russian based, we are living in a cyborg world. Wars are being fought by humans who are using cyber technology to defeat their enemy.

An Android War

However, once drones acquire AI and have the capability to pick both their targets as well as the tactics they use to attack a Russian objective, we are witnessing the rise of android warfare. If you are appalled by the destructive behavior of the Russians in Ukraine, you undoubtedly would applaud the creativity of the Ukrainian army.  But perhaps sometimes in the future we would have to worry that AI driven drones might decide to strike targets that the Ukrainians wanted to avoid. As AI becomes more and more sophisticated, the danger arises that the drones might acquire a mind of their own. In the worse case scenario, the drones might develop goals separate from their makers, perhaps even turning on their original creators.

An example of a robot having its own agenda was depicted in the movie a Space Odyssey 2001. If you never saw the movie, below is a clip of the dangers a  possible android world might create.

                                          The Rebellion of the Robot Hal

The Rapid Pace of Change in the World

Because we live in a rapidly changing world, it is hard to predict what the future will bring. But the question as to whether our world will become an android or cyborg world may be answered sooner than we ever anticipated. While the Ukrainian war is rarely mentioned in the news these days, Ukraine’s war with Russia may may provide a hint of what the AI driven world of the future may look like.