Science #2: Evolution and Hominids Flashcards
What is the timeline for Hominids use of:
Clothing?
Dwellings?
Fire first usage by man?
Mans usage of tools?
Ref: Where did we come from, NOVA.
Hominid timeline.
170,000 Years ago: Clothing
500,000 Years ago: Dwellings
800,000 Years ago: Fire first used by man
3,000,000 Years ago: Use of tools
How did life on Earth start?
EVOLUTION: HOW DID LIFE BEGIN. Now oxygen is a poison gas. In fact our white blood cells in our body use oxygen to kill off harmful infections.
Bacteria found a way to exploit oxygen and grow by using it. Life began on Stromatolites with bacteria starting to make other life forms. First a single cell, then multiple cell life forms in the sea.
Eventually plant life was formed, then ocean life, namely fish were formed. It is the fish that gives us our skeleton system we use today. It was the beginning of the vertebrate life forms. The fish also gave us our circulatory system of blood. Fish gave us mouth, eyes, heart and the fish fins evolved into our arms and legs. We evolved out of a branch of fish, some fish evolved and some remained fish. Some became dolphins, seals and whales, etc.
We went from being a fish to being a reptile, bird, animal, mammal then finally early man, which is the hominid. The hominids are the early cave man.
Why did hominids live in caves?
Did all hominids live in caves?
EVOLUTION : Many hominids lived in caves because it was a natural house. However, many hominids lived where our oceans are today. Back with the early hominids there was a massive ice age. The ice was roughly 100 miles thick on top of the United States. All this ice made the oceans shallower by 300 feet. It was possible to walk between continents on land or ice. Many early hominids lived on land that is covered by ocean today. It is hard to find hominid artifacts that are buried beneath the sand with 300 feet of water of top of it today. This is why they are called cave men, because a lot of hominid dwellings are now buried beneath the ocean floor and the only visible evidence is in the caves with their drawings, thus cave men is our de facto appellation.
The great glaciers over the United States is what gave us our great plains. The ice cleared millions of trees and took the rich top soil from Canada and pushed it into our corn belt. This gave America its fertile farmland.
Because of the tectonic plate movement, the continents drifted. Central America was not there. There was only ocean water between what is now North America and South America. Long ago when North America bumped into South America, one strip of land didn’t let go and this stretched out into Mexico and Central America today. Because Central America is positioned where it is, it cut off the warm ocean currents from the Pacific that used to run up into the Atlantic Ocean and keep it warmer. Since Central America was now blocking this warm water, the Atlantic water got too cold and this is what formed the ice age in the Northern Hemisphere. The Hominids lived during a part of this ice age and the ice is what forced the Hominids to move all over the planet looking for food and shelter. Much later the ice retreated and mankind was separated and cut off from other groups of mankind. This is how man ended up on all the different continents. In summary, the Tectonic plates spread man around the globe and gave America its fertile farm grounds in the Great Plains.
What were some of the popular types of Hominids?
Hominids are early man. There were different types of Hominids. Cro-Magnon man, Neanderthal Man, Hobbit man, Homo Sapiens and a few others. The Homo Sapiens are our closest relatives. They are us, modern man living today.
How did Hominids get here?
Did people used to eat one another for food?
How does the Neanderthal DNA save us from many cancers today?
Well to explain how we got here, first we must explain what we are. We are basically a piece of electric meat that is a survival machine for bacteria. To learn more, read the book, “The Selfish Gene” by Dawkins.
As disgusting as it sounds, cannibalism was rampant in the early days. People ambushed and killed one another for easy food. Animals were fast, skittish, and hard to sneak up on and kill. The early Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals lived at the same time for about 10,000 years. The Neanderthals were here for 500,000 years, but suddenly went extinct within this 10,000 year time period when the earth was shared with Homo Sapiens. It is almost certain that early Homo Sapiens killed Neanderthals for easy food, which eventually lead to the extinction of the Neanderthals. There was also much inbreeding between the Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthals. Today, this inbreeding gives us Neanderthal genes that protect us from dangerous cancers and helps give us such a long life span as an animal being. Typical Neanderthal DNA ranges from 1 to about 4 percent in modern day man.
Humans living on Earth today is a random, happy accident. //If we could rewind the tape from the big bang, we would not be here today. Why not?//[MN: The earliest bipedal hominids appearred in Africa 7,000,000 years ago.]//Everything we have on the earth today was predicated by random actions. One thing caused the next important factor, just like in the 80’s movie, “Back to the future”.//Of course, billions of random events took place to bring us where we are today. It is impossible to know and list in a comprehensive listing. This is just a brief synopsis of several key factors. Further research can be done to your own liking.//A good place to begin is with the tectonic plates floating and crashing into each other. We normally only think about the plates when there is an earthquake or volcanic eruption. Nonetheless, the plates continually move to new spaces at the same rate your fingernail grows. Very slowly. But, over billions of years, they travel all over the globe, crashing into each other, and one plate swallowing up another, making entire continents disappear and new continents pop up to the surface giving the earth a new continent in some cases. This is kind of like the story of Atlantis, but it is true.
A few million years ago, the plates were all clumped together in a giant land mass called Pangea. Pangea broke apart and the plates went off in all directions. The major North American Plate crashed with the South American plate, then pulled apart. But it did not separate completely. It formed a thin strip of land connecting North and South America. We call this strip of land the Isthmus of Panama.//The Isthmus blocked the warm Pacific waters from mixing with the colder Atlantic waters. This changed weather patterns for the entire planet. It also changed ocean currents. Now the top and bottom of the planet froze solid. The ice field grew larger and larger, creeping down from the Arctic Circle and covered half of North America with ice that was over 100 miles thick. //This thick ice formed giant glaciers that scrapped and plowed flat everything in their path. This not only caused hominids and animals to flee, but it also plowed down all of the trees, chiseled down mountains and made giant lakes. We got our Great Lakes from the Glaciers carving them out of the ground.The glaciers also removed most of the fertile soil from Canada and the Northwest Territories and deposited the soil in our great plains where millions of years later man would grow crops of corn and wheat. This also is a major factor in the astounding poverty in our third world nations.
If we could rewind the tape would we be here today?
In a nutshell, the answer is no. Why? Because the present and future are predicated by the past and all the variables. Think of it like this. If you hit a golf shot then dropped another ball and tried to duplicate your first shot exactly you would find it to be impossible. Why? Millions of tiny variables. If you hit a thousand shots, each shot would be different. Sometimes close in nature, sometimes very different in nature. Some shots solid and long, other shots you sliced, pulled, topped or chunked.
Do you get the point? Humans are a happy accident. If we rewound the tape and tried to make an exact us again it would never happen.
Also, if somehow space Aliens came to Earth, they would look nothing like us. No eyes, ears, mouth or nose. No head, no arms and legs. They could not breathe our air. They would not see in color. They would be from a different gravity home base, so they probably could not move as quickly as us, or they may move much faster than us.
They could have the tiny body of a spider with legs of an Elephant, depending on the gravity from their home planet.
How did the ice age change the world?
- The encroaching ice drove animals to different lands. Because of this, animals started crossbreeding with species they normally would never have met up with if there was no ice age.
- The hominids came about from the breeding with a Gibbon. This is where man’s genealogy is traced back from DNA. So, no ice age equals no meet up and mating with a Gibbon to start the hominid bloodline. We are talking about the mating of two key species that were close enough DNA match to produce an offspring. [For two species to produce a successful offspring, they must be a close DNA match. For example, you could not mate with a hominid person from 3 million years ago, because your DNA would not be compatible. But say you mated with a hominid from 30,000 years ago, then the DNA has a good chance for a successful match.]
- The ice was so thick, the planet ocean levels were 300 feet lower than they are today. When the ice age went away, the ocean levels rose again to the levels of today. During the ice age hominids and animals lived thousands of years in these low lying lands.
However, when the ice melted away, the ocean covered up most of their artifacts and evidence of their lifestyles. Today it is buried deep beneath the ocean waters. Most hominid evidence is found in caves. This is why they call our ancestors cave men. The hominids lived everywhere, not just in caves. But, the caves are the best visible evidence we have today for early man.
- The ice age is not over. It reoccurs roughly every 100,000 years or so. Man today does not think about it because no historic record was documented that it happened. But, today with ice isotopes from our thick ice on the planet gives us proof that the ice age toggles on and off roughly every 100,000 years.
- With the glaciers carving out the great plains, there were fewer trees. This happened in Africa as well. Our ancestors could no longer live in the trees. They had to venture out on the ground for food. This leaving the trees caused further evolution such as losing our tails, and walking upright.
Why do we walk upright?
Walking upright came about because it gave us advantages we could not have living in the trees. We needed food. The trees were scarce and picked clean. We had to venture out on all fours. This was very awkward for walking and trying to carry a child or any object. Eventually we learned to walk upright. Standing upright also gave us a taller line of sight for prey to kill, low hanging fruit and an early warning system to spot predators.
The point of this is to realize because of plate tectonics, we have man on earth and America enjoyed great prosperity up even until today. So if we rewound the tape, the plates would go off in a different pattern crashing and separating entirely randomly like last time, but like a snowflake, it would never repeat all the exact same circumstances it did the first time. Thus no ice age if the Isthmus did not form. Thus no fertile ground in America because the glaciers didn’t occur and bring us Canada’s fertile soil and clear out billions of trees in our great plains. The DNA hominid match with a Gibbon and the other animal would not have met to breed, thus no hominids, thus no modern man.
Why did the Neanderthals perish after living on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years?
Source, Netflix, Neanderthals.
About 800,000 years ago, Neanderthals were driven to Europe. About 40,000 years ago, homo sapiens [Wise Man] went to Europe. The thing that caused extinction of this long surviving Neanderthal species is some fighting between the sapiens and Neanderthals for very limited resources. But the majority of the end of Neanderthals was interbreeding with the sapiens. There was so much interbreeding that the Neanderthals simply vanished due to evolution of the sapiens.
Even today we all have some Neanderthal DNA. African Americans typically have 1.5%, and white people have about 3% Neanderthal DNA. The Chinese have the least amount of about 1% or less.
This small amount of DNA is the basis of our strong immune system for deadly diseases and infections. It mainly prevents us from deadly cancers.
How far back has the lineage of the Rhino and the Octopus been traced back?
ANCESTRY: Rhino—Lineage traced back 55 million years—NBC news 4/2015.
Octopus—Lineage 90 million years.
Notharctus [No Thork Tus] – Lineage of monkey us. Lived 50 Million years ago. Gave us the design of our hand.
Animals have been walking the earth for 365 million years now, but most of that time it was four legged walking.
Misc. notes on Evolution and Science. Ref: Magic of Reality.//NOTE: The colors we see inside our heads are really just labels made up by the brain to identify light of different wavelengths. They are simply logical constructs that make it handy for humans to communicate the idea of what the color [wavelength] looks like. If you are wondering what makes a bus red in the first place, the answer is that the molecules of the dye or paint absorb most of the light of all colors except red. P170// NOTE: The cause of earthquakes according to ancient New Zealanders is that mother earth was pregnant with her child, the god Ru. Whenever baby Ru kicked inside his mother’s womb, there was an earthquake. In Siberian tribes, they believed the earth sat on a dogsled. When the dogs scratched their fleas, there was an earthquake. [All these ancient stories have the source of the mystery as something they know, like a pregnant mother or a dog scratching fleas. So it is completely normal they figured that gods were anthropomorphic.] p203//NOTE: Poisons that kill bacterial cells but not our own cells are called antibiotics. P234//NOTE: Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” P255// EOF Magic of reality. [Remember these are themed tidbits for this journal and not complete BR’s by themselves.
Epic of Gilgamesh, 6,000 years ago. The chief God, Enlil, suggested that they should send a great flood to destroy everybody. Utnapashtim is told to build a very big boat to house all the living creatures. He releases a Dove to find dry land, just like the retold story is in the Bible. The boat comes to rest on a mountaintop just like the retold story in the Bible. //Another God, Ishtar, created the first rainbow, as a token of the Gods’ promise to send no more terrible floods. P147.//The Vikings believed the rainbow was the bridge from heaven to the earth. About 350 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton was greatly hated and disdained because his proving that a rainbow was only a display of light refraction through a prism and nothing supernatural, made everyone hate him because he destroyed their precious image of God making the rainbow after Noah’s flood.//NOTE: The Earth’s orbit around the sun has a diameter of 186 million miles. P166//NOTE: Written history goes back only about 5,000 years. Diseases and superstition. People resorted to superstition when they desperately were trying to understand disease. In many African tribes, until quite recently, anybody who got ill, or had a sick child, would automatically look around for an evil magician or witch to blame. P217
