>> "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.