What Kinds of Houses Do Chimps Live In?
"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. "My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not to put it too crudely."
posted by Latouche at Large at 11:43 AM
3 Comments:
White Houses.
I must move beyond caustic witicisms, such as what they is, to say that this is of tremendous interest to me - this period in evolution is extremely confusing: 7 million year old mandibles looking more advanced than 4 million old skulls, and through it all we were largely walking chimps, with small brains; evolution within unspeciated but highly distinct populations auggests walkabouts lovin' tree dwellers. This suggests a process where bipedalism and other human traits can flutter in and out of existence in the fossil record: the subpopulation with the trait simply becomes larger and smaller over time.
I tend to fall on the the free love theory of human evolution generally, and believe, for example, that most of the many varieties of australopithicus were broadly varied subpopulations of the same species. Far, far later, I tend to think that Neanderthals were genetically overwhelmed rather than systematically replaced. As a friend of mine once said, pointing to his own beetle brow:
"I mean, c'mon, look at this."
As evidence of loose speciation, I note that only last year, Washington State had to outlaw bestiality, in response to a, um, fatal incident with a horse. People sleep with all kinds of things, like dolls, sheep, devices,
vegetables, Barbara Bush, etcetera. It stretches credulity that ancient Hominids didn't roger anyone or anything handy.
The result: genetic chaos is always set a maximum, which is what this seems to show.
Maybe it is my sophisticated French outlook, but I draw the line at monkey-fucking.
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