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Where Does Natural Selection And The Tool Divide?


ErlyRisa

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How is it that natural selection, as based on "perturberances", become a romeved system, based on "littered" tools?

What is "romeved"? That word doesn't appear in any English language dictionary I can find, and is treated by most spellchecker as a misspelling of "removed".

 

What do you mean by a "rovemend system" or "removed system"? Can you provide a link to any literature about this concept?

 

We can't understand or reply to your questions if you don't use known words and terms!

 

Does the Chimp understand that the hammer is provide? Or did it imagine the need to use a hammer for it's nut cracker suite?

I’ve never heard of chimps being provided with artificial hammers.

 

About 8 years ago, researchers found convincing evidence that chimpanzees in western Africa have been using stone hammer and anvils for at least 4300 years, 2000 years before they would have encountered humans in that area, an important find, because prior to this evidence, many primatologists believe that chimpanzees didn’t invent rock hammering, but learned it from humans. (source: “The Chimpanzee Stone Age” Science magazine 12 February 2007)

 

This seems compelling evidence to me that ancient chimpanzees discovered how to use stone hammers and anvils to crack nuts. Whether the first to do so “imagined” doing this, then acted out his imagined activity, or discovered it accidentally (perhaps while playing with stones and nuts) seems to me a difficult question, either for ancient chimps or humans.

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Maybe the chimp that likes to throw feces, found a rock in its stool? - and knocked out a fellow chimp?

ErlyRisa, rather than being flippant and qualifying silly speculation with “maybe”, you should research before posting. :thumbs_do

 

The only way an animal can have a rock in its stool is to first eat the rock. Eating rocks isn’t a normal behavior of human or non-human apes. It’s maladaptive, because eaten rocks can lacerate the intestines, causing infection and even death. In humans, habitual eating rocks and other non-nutritive things is considered symptomatic of a mental illness, pica. It’s been observed in chimpanzees.

 

An animal can’t eat any solid object larger than its esophagus will pass. For humans (and, I suspect, chimps also), this diameter is about 40 cm. This is large pebble, not stone size, too small, I think, to be thrown and knock out a human or other ape.

 

Not only couldn’t a human or chimp eat then excrete a stone large enough to be an effective throwing stone, chimps can’t throw very well. They’ve been observed throwing stones at viewers in zoos and monkeys (which they hunt and eat) in the wild, but this is believed to be an aggressive display, not an effective attack. Rather than talk about differences in human and chimp anatomy (though much stronger than us, chimps have much less range of motion in their shoulder joints) and proprioception, you can get a faster, intuitive grasp of how poorly chimps throw by watching videos of it online.

 

Finally, why conclude that anyone would make a connection between hurting something with a thrown rock, and using a pair of rocks to crack nuts, which chimpanzees in the wild do?

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LOL

 

 

 

 

and I'm still laughing.

 

What you never heard of "pushing a rock".

 

Maybe it was the Binobos that found something crunchy inside, slowly learnt the principle of pain via texture and put two and two together, and started using rocks.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Did anyone else go through this and read wondering if the chimp just left the sample over a bed of rocks? I guess I am really thinking outside the box or the fact that Monday blues has really kicked in.

 

What if the chimp just managed to find a rock, realized it was harder than anything else around and starting to "play" with it, similar to most do when we see them out in a natural habitat?

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Did anyone else go through this and read wondering if the chimp just left the sample over a bed of rocks? I guess I am really thinking outside the box or the fact that Monday blues has really kicked in.

 

What if the chimp just managed to find a rock, realized it was harder than anything else around and starting to "play" with it, similar to most do when we see them out in a natural habitat?

 

LOL ...anthropopolgy, eat your heart out.

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