Recent research in paleontology and evolution has further determined that evolution driven by environmental change.
Note: my key board is malfunctioning so I cannot do citations. My 'equal' is dead. Getting a new computer
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/...drum-1.9835193
Israeli Archaeologists Resolve Ages-old Evolutionary Conundrum: Enter the Elephant and the Hand Ax
Unified theory of human evolution suggests explanation for the mystery of technological persistency: Why some tools were used for over a million years.
There is a mystery in human evolution. As we progressed from knuckle-walking to striding, from swinging from branches to throwing rocks and then spears, surely our tools developed in parallel. Right?
Put backwards, many assume that inferences can be made about our evolutionary state going by our industry. Right?
Well, there’s a snag. What does it mean that stone choppers, among the earliest tools, persisted for around two million years, and stone “Acheulean” hand axes for over a million years? The upscale Levallois-style tools were also used for hundreds of thousands of years. Did our evolution stagnate in that time?
It did not. Evolution is the nature of all things, but in thrall to neophilia (“love of the new”), and we tend to view human evolution through the prism of physical and mental change. Leaving the trees for the savanna necessitated physical and mental changes. Among other things, we grew: we’re about a third bigger than our australopithecine predecessors. Now, Dr. Meir Finkel and Prof. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University offer a paradigm-changing interpretation, published in Science Direct (Anthropology) of the stasis in these basic tools in the context of our continuing development.
As long as the animal environment remained stable, so did the tools we used to obtain these animals (to eat). If anything, this stability provided “safe ground” for technological and behavioral innovations, Barkai and Finkel write.
“The paradigm says these are problems in innovation, that the hominids didn’t innovate [during that time], for whatever reasons. For instance, that Homo erectus didn’t have sufficiently developed cognition, or that there were difficulties in innovation relating to social aspects. We say the opposite!” Finkel explains to Haaretz. “There wasn’t a problem with innovation: it was conservatism by choice. Innovation has a price.”
The myxozoan and the mosaic
Thinking on evolution in general has been changing. For example, we tended to simplistically perceive evolution as a roughly linear procession from primitive to complex. But evolution is broader than that. Take the delight that is myxozoans: microscopic parasitic jellyfish that evolved backwards, from sublime to slime. They evolved from proper multicellular animals to single-celled ones, or a few cells; and one went so far backwards as to even lose its genes for breathing.
Note: my key board is malfunctioning so I cannot do citations. My 'equal' is dead. Getting a new computer
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/...drum-1.9835193
Israeli Archaeologists Resolve Ages-old Evolutionary Conundrum: Enter the Elephant and the Hand Ax
Unified theory of human evolution suggests explanation for the mystery of technological persistency: Why some tools were used for over a million years.
There is a mystery in human evolution. As we progressed from knuckle-walking to striding, from swinging from branches to throwing rocks and then spears, surely our tools developed in parallel. Right?
Put backwards, many assume that inferences can be made about our evolutionary state going by our industry. Right?
Well, there’s a snag. What does it mean that stone choppers, among the earliest tools, persisted for around two million years, and stone “Acheulean” hand axes for over a million years? The upscale Levallois-style tools were also used for hundreds of thousands of years. Did our evolution stagnate in that time?
It did not. Evolution is the nature of all things, but in thrall to neophilia (“love of the new”), and we tend to view human evolution through the prism of physical and mental change. Leaving the trees for the savanna necessitated physical and mental changes. Among other things, we grew: we’re about a third bigger than our australopithecine predecessors. Now, Dr. Meir Finkel and Prof. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University offer a paradigm-changing interpretation, published in Science Direct (Anthropology) of the stasis in these basic tools in the context of our continuing development.
As long as the animal environment remained stable, so did the tools we used to obtain these animals (to eat). If anything, this stability provided “safe ground” for technological and behavioral innovations, Barkai and Finkel write.
“The paradigm says these are problems in innovation, that the hominids didn’t innovate [during that time], for whatever reasons. For instance, that Homo erectus didn’t have sufficiently developed cognition, or that there were difficulties in innovation relating to social aspects. We say the opposite!” Finkel explains to Haaretz. “There wasn’t a problem with innovation: it was conservatism by choice. Innovation has a price.”
The myxozoan and the mosaic
Thinking on evolution in general has been changing. For example, we tended to simplistically perceive evolution as a roughly linear procession from primitive to complex. But evolution is broader than that. Take the delight that is myxozoans: microscopic parasitic jellyfish that evolved backwards, from sublime to slime. They evolved from proper multicellular animals to single-celled ones, or a few cells; and one went so far backwards as to even lose its genes for breathing.
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