| Re: Hunting in dangerous water |
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Group: sci.anthropology.paleo · Group Profile
Author: Day BrownDay Brown Date: Apr 21, 2008 17:53
On Apr 21, 6:11 pm, Lee Olsen hotmail.com> wrote:> "Here's a point to consider when evaluating AAT. I did not learn this
> point from some academic overlord with an anti-AAT agenda; I learned
> it while trying to avoid becoming crocodile food in Africa. When I
> spent several months with a team at Lake Turkana, Kenya, investigating
> some of the most important early hominid sites in the world, one of
> our overriding concerns -- while swimming, bathing, or catching fish
> with a net -- was to watch out for crocodiles in the shallows. A croc
> can be on you, crush your legs in its jaws, and drag you under to
> drown before you have time to screech for help.
>
> The fact that crocodiles co-existed in time and space with early
> hominids is a colossal blow to AAT, which does not explain what
> advantages early humans would have gained by spending time in
> crocodile-populated waters; an environment where they could not make
> fires, throw stones or sticks, use other tools, or have any hope
> whatever of escaping the most common predator. A troop of early
> hominids wading in a lakeshore or swampy forest would best be
> described as a crocodile banquet. The cute, feel-good images of babies
> swimming freely in a pool, shown in the AAT video, have nothing to do
> with the real situation of predator avoidance in Africa. Ask the
> Dasenich or Turkana people who live around Lake Turkana: only visiting
> maniacs swim in that lake." Cameron M. Smith
As usual, this characterization ignores the widely varied adaptability
of hominids.
There is the point where the waterhole water is only inches deep, and
then its the turn of the hominids to stab the crocks with their
digging sticks for dinner. I never suggested that a mother would want
to throw a baby into the water, but if by doing so she feeds a crock
rather than a lion, she'd do better to deny the lion the reward for
hominid predation. the big cats have been much better at it than
crocks.
I fail to see why aquatic adaptations required hominids to *only* rely
on that ecosystem, It makes more sense that the hominids which could
exploit BOTH savannah and water courses would do better. And this is
egzactly what we find associated with the oldest hominid skull yet
found, at Chad, which at the time was a varied seasonal riverine
floodplain like the Okavango.
Depending on what time of year, it was either dry grassland with
stagnant bayous, or wet season lushness with raging torrents dividing
up the resource bases. The hominids that could swim got to eat the
fruit on the other side, while those that couldnt are no longer in the
gene pool.
Crocks in the channel would be a concern, but herd animals are locked
into habit, and will try to cross the water at the same point every
year. That's where the crocks will be. The hominids are smart enuf to
figure this out, and dont go there.
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