One bit of info that keeps popping into my head that my undergrad in Antrho didn’t do much to address: when did we have boats? I mean, we were tool-using chimps long before we were humans…I wonder how long it takes us to get the idea to tie a few logs together and float out to sea and stab things with sticks.

They are easly aquacultured, do not take tons of baitfish to grow, and do not polute their waters like fish farming does.

Now if only I liked their flavor..

Or, as an ancient tale has it:

“Rabbi, you must help me! I bought a roast, but when I brought the package home and opened it, I found a ham! Two packages must have gotten switched… We’re really short on cash and this roast was supposed to last us until payday. What can I do?”

“Go ahead and cook the roast.”

“But I just told you, it’s a ham!”

“Don’t worry. God will understand. I promise you, this one time, the traif is kosher!”

I am quite entertained by trying to see how those ancient stories came to be and this article certainly gives some valuable insight.

I’d like to make the point about Neanderthals, who were doing just fine up in Europe at this point.

It’s interesting to think that our lineage came within 2000 people of going extinct, and then, over the next 110,000 years, proceeded to wipe out the competition.

I’d suggest that it’s not that we necessarily got smarter by eating shellfish, it’s that we got lucky that the climatic fluctuations put the neanderthals and other Homo species on the declining population side about the time our ancestors started showing up.

After all, we are weaker and have *smaller* brains than Neanderthals. I’d say that shellfish almost certainly allowed our ancestors to survive in a remote corner of the world. Beyond that, it’s a “just so” story, and it’s hard to argue why it’s obvious that some gracile beach bums in South Africa are necessarily going to have better nutrition than a bunch of big-game hunting Neanderthal jocks up north.

If you want some other hypotheses, try these:
a. Our ancestors were better at long distance running hunts than the Neanderthals, and there are more small animals that can be hunted this way than there are the big ones the Neanderthals apparently went after.

b. The Neanderthals show the same kinds of skeletal injuries that bronco riders do, suggesting that they liked to hunt close in. Perhaps they simply had lousy pitching arms, whereas our ancestors could throw better.

c. The one no one mentions: domestication. Modern humans attempt to domesticate every animal they come across, and our food now comes almost totally from domesticated animals and plants. I wonder if our ancestors were simply more child-like and willing to make friends with wolfie (or whatever). The partnerships with dogs and other species gave us a critical edge. I’ve never seen any evidence of another hominid domesticating anything, although gorillas will play with kittens. To add to this point, I’d point out that the closest thing to an ancestral dog left (dingos and pariah dogs) are found most often along the coasts of Asia, except in Australia and PNG, where humans introduced them. Hmmm. There’s that coast thing again.

Dr. Marean read this before posting and thought I reported his research exactly right. I do tend to fact check my original reporting with the researchers. Just FYI.

It’s also worth noting that there have been other bottlenecks, in other places. Is it possible that you’re sighing because you’re thinking of a different event?

But I’m having a hard time believing that only one single group of individuals in the entire world figured out how to eat something new to survive. Nature is full of examples of animals adapting to changing conditions socially – bears learned to eat trash, Great Lakes animals learned to eat Zebra Mussels, and hell, watch squirrel ingenuity in defeating devices to keep them off of bird feeders. There was just a story yesterday about a crow that used tools and a three stage process to get him some goodies. I’m to believe that some of our ancient relations on the family tree couldn’t figure out how to forage, fish, or hunt for something new?

I have a tough time believing that out of multiple population groups on all seven continents only a single group was capable of adapting to some extreme change. Is there some other possible explanation for the lack of genetic variance?

And it really wouldn’t take a huge brain to notice another creature, like an otter, diving and coming back up with something edible. Even dumb animals can learn how to do things by simply aping (literally) another animal.

It wasn’t 130,000 years ago, the last bottleneck was less than 60,000 years ago, at the time of the Toba eruption on Sumatra. It wasn’t 1000 individuals, it was “possibly as few as 1000 breeding pairs”, which means 2000, but maybe as many as 20,000. That’s damned few people, without need to exaggerate.

It’s not hard at all to look up this sort of thing, these days.

All that talk of “The Shellfish Gene” . . .

Personally I think there is one error above. The last “used” should be “mis-used”. ;-)

(End of today’s dose of pedantry. If I keep reducing the dose I’ll be fit to mix in polite company soon. But I would think a well-honed shellfish shell would have made a good hominid tool all those years ago. Hope someone finds the Life clip of S.African baboons opening shellfish, somewhere on the intertubes.)

Sure we could. In fact, we’d probably do great, statistically. It’s just that an 85% survival rate means a billion people will die.

Also the Aquatic Ape hypothesis is silly, but I love it.

As for the tales themselves, even though I disbelieve them, I cannot say how long they had been passed down for before being written down. I’m sure you can’t either.

case in point;
We are on our second bird feeder because the squirrels keep ripping the lids off of them in order to get to the seeds. The glazed-over, half-crazed-stare of the starving really is the mother of invention.

G’nak-Tek Baby!