Publiziert auf FaceBook Jaap van der Wal
At the end some recognition??. It is one of the main messages I present in my courses The Embryo in Us. i.e. that humans are not specialized relatives of apes or primates but that we are a product or outcome of evolution but that we appear through evolution. In the last decade more and more comes available about genetic and epigenetic features that are related to typical human features that discriminators from apes and privates.
For example this article: Ethnography and ethnohistory support the efficiency of hunting through endurance running in humans. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01876-x.epdf…
DISCLAIMER: The cartoon is multi-interpretable and not meant ‚anti-Darwinist‘. I am not an ‚anti-Darwinist‘: Darwin is right, but „“ not enough“
I present this hypothesis/idea already for more than 30 years during my lectures and courses about the human being as embryo. It has to do with the fact that humans have a lot of features that make us essentially different from the other primates. One very important feature in this respect is our so-called nakedness that even Desmond Morris had to recognize as an essential exception amongst apes to whom, so he states, we are related (The Naked Ape is coined by him). Combined with being equipped with the strongest density of sweat glands of all mammals, that enables us to transpire our metabolic heat instead of using for that perspiration through lungs and tongues. Also, we are not simply bipedal, we are very special in this respect that we actually balance (so to say „incorporate“ the gravity center of our body) so that we are able to balancing upright while we stand and walk. Therefor running on two feet requires a minimum of energy. Our bipedality in combination with going upright is very energy-saving. Moreover, the fact that we no longer, so to say, need our lungs and tongues for perspiration, combined with having the largest so-called dead space of all mammals (which again has to do with our standing and walking upright) enabled us to develop speech. This is the other feature that Desmond Morris recognizes as absolutely essential difference between humans and apes. What I’m missing in the hypothesis of the article in Nature is that the human being apparently ( probably) was so efficient in hunting by EP (endurance pursuit) because he did it in groups and for that you need a high level of planning and coordination. So speech also became important. When food in the trees was no longer accessible, this complex of features enabled us to run, walk, chase and hunt over the savanna. The interesting thing also is that nearly all those features (nakedness, upright balancing, bipedality, and many more) are not so-called specializations but features of neotony and so-called ‚retardation‘. Or, like I present it in my course, we are „the embryo of the world“. We are in a way „becoming embryos“.
If you would like to know more about this surprising hypothesis about the human being as the „firstborn of evolution“, you are invited to attend one of my courses or to go for relevant literature on my website www.embryo.nl.