I would want to take all of the courses Dr. Cofran teaches were I a student. His response to questions was amazingly articulate, kind to non-scientists, and information dense. This is the first RU-vid talk in a long time when I have not increased the speed to 1.25 or 1.5 because thoughts were not concisely conveyed. I wanted to have a backup button to listen again and again to all the new information. Great video!
I am very impressed with Zachary's depth of understanding, and realistic assessment of how realistic the various interpretations of evidence, scant as it is. I have been interested in this subject since I was a child, asking adults questions they could not or were embarrassed to think about. My first notion that we are related to apes was at about age 5 when I had a frightening [not dangerous] interaction with a male gorilla. People were throwing him peanuts, and no one would give me any peanuts to throw to him. So I picked up a cigar butt off the ground [does this date me?] and threw it to him. My aim was a bit off, so he had to drag himself up from his comfortable purch and amble over to it. He looked at me inquisitively, I gave him some indication of encouragement. He ambled over and as he was about to put it in his mouth he gave me a look that sent chills through by whole body, as if I had pissed off an adult man. This incident took place more than 70 years ago and I still remember the feeling. Back then my mother was the only adult who would agree with me that we are related to apes. The next was the subject of evolution came up in school, [a fairly progressive school for those times] and I asked our Catholic priest about it. He was fully in agreement that evolution is the reality, though he effectively cautioned me about divulging his opinion. Subsequently I found Scientific American at the library, and dug into it every month for most of the rest of my life, and of course, evolution was at the top of my reading list. {I subscribed almost my whole adult life until a few years ago when I had to conclude SA had lost it's credibility, having been taken over by a bunch of wokee BA degrees]. If y'all have read this far, thank you, and again I commend Zachary for, what I believe, are very clear insights.
Nice analysis 'doughamb... '; seems I am in a similar {Widely-Read} place as you are. [If you want to REALLY stretch your mind--check out "The 12th Planet".] Those 'Earth Chronicles' take us back to 445,000; 300,000; 200,000--and 100,000BCE...then begin detailing the post-Diluvial "1stCivilizations" beginning around 4500BCE! Dynamic transitions of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens & even Homo sapiens sapiens. : )
Yes, cooking the meat made it more digestable. The brain requires a lot of of the nutrients i. Meat especially creatine and meat is the best source. Because cooking it made it softer, we did not need large canines.
But bigger brains doesn't directly equate to more intelligence. My guess would be that we had to use our brains for survival. And I mean survival in the general sense. We didn't just sit in the trees. Once we became bipedal we could use our hands to find other ways to survive. While worked on that survive thing our brains needed more nutrients than what we could get from leaves, fruits and nuts. The more we used our brains the "smarter" we became. I think using fire was a by product of finding burn things after a natural fire and discovering that was easy, tasted better, easier and faster to disgust and filled us up more, thus we didn't have to use all our time feeding ourselves. Reduced jaw size was a by-product of that discovery. So I guess, in a way, I'm saying the same thing you are.
@alanhyland5697 Fire helped but it came much later in the evolution. In regards to diet, fatty meat is still the biggest factor. The difference between humans and chimps is very obvious. We came from the same last common ancestor, The human line diet is more meaty while the chimp line is more vegetarian. The Homo Erectus "invented" fire which means they were already very intelligent even before we have control of fire.
Fire, beyond diet, changed thinking all the way around. We were able to be more active with more and different activities then we were before fire. Socially and productively.
I haven't actually watched the video yet, so don't know if this is covered, but there's a theory that it was a genetic mutation that resulted in a smaller jaw size. A smaller jaw leads to smaller jaw muscles, which in turn require less, if any, cranial crest to anchor them, weakening the top of the skull. Thus an apparently deleterious mutation actually facilitated an easier increase in brain capacity. A case of evolution being smarter than we are, maybe. It's certainly the case that our bite force is much less than other similarly sized (or even smaller) mammals. Cooking meat, therefore reducing the energy required to digest it is certainly a factor, but that likely came later.
In human development, infants want to be helpful way before they develop the ability to make tools. If you point at an item on the floor, toddlers will try and get if for you. This speaks for intellgence through social interaction, after all our most impressive ability is cooperation: You might be as smart as you want, on your own you are still very limited. Your spear may be pointier and more balanced but that's about it.
Just starting this video, it seems to me that brain growth was driven by stone tool making, and then facilitated more complex social interactions, which may have resulted in a feedback mechanism of social complexity and brain growth. Stone tool making requires one to imagine the structure of the stone and the precise angles to strike it to get what you have envisioned. I have tried my hand at flint tool making and it is tough.
Yes. It's just our best talent. Power projection through TOOLS! Think about it, ten male Australopithecus Afarensis vs a single Lion sized Machairodont cat would mean at least a single doomed Afarensis individual. Ten Homo Habilis all armed with sharp stone tools, able to throw fist sized rocks like a Baseball Pitcher does with a Baseball, well, maybe the Habilis group wins and runs the predator off.
Exactly (that's 100% spot on). Social communication & free hands = competitive leverage to acquire cooperation, mates, and resources. (Communication of ways to use hands to increase social fitness = tool making) (tool making to hunt or gather more efficiently = social status).
@@antonjoubert6980 Chimps eat meat... It's clearly more about the freeing of hands and the feedback loop of social interaction with using hands that renders the differential in this broader form of intelligence.
As our species adapted to learning to utilize tools (wood, fire, stone) as we moved into savanna and adapted our upright posture the requirement of the ability to learn increased.. Protein became more necessary for the stamina required to find chase food. The survivability of offspring depended upon their ability to learn how to use the tools and behaviors of their group. As new tools and concepts arose, our brains needed to keep up... It was necessity of adaptability. As we specialized, we bacame more reliant on our ability to adapt our behavior... we learned the ability to live in our different environments. Nature changes the environment. We succeeded because our brains were good at adapting skills. Nature would make it difficult to revert to full, thick body hair.. no need, we figured out that fur and leather could do that.. It goes on and on.. We are not simple.. nothing is.. Be happy we are rarely not the "top" of the food chain unless we are caught unprepared and alone. Be Well!! 😃
You mean on that giant pane of glass hanging in your environmentally controlled home? The one that receives pictures and sounds from invisible energy in the air?
@31:40 Homo neledi reeks of convergent evolution. Either it is a Homo that returned to partial time in the trees like Australopithicus, or it's another Hominid altogether with convergent features of Homo. But whatever it was, Homo neledi was definitely one of those weird critters evolution throws at us.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Right? Being a tidy, black and white kind of person, I had mapped out the evolution of brain size this way. Skull weight is roughly proportional to the musculature of the neck. The heavier the skull, the more muscular the neck had to be to maintain mobility (think bison or elephant), but when our ancestors spent more time on the ground, sitting upright (without the interference of a long tail), they could balance the weight of a skull more above the spine than in front of the spine, decreasing the need of massive musculature in the neck. The evolution of the great toe into a balancing mechanism furthered our percentage of time standing and becoming truly bipedal. As brain size increased, so did our need for protein enriched foods - meats and, because of the caloric demands, we, of necessity, had to find better ways of obtaining calories. The size of the Neanderthal brain, somewhat larger than our own, bears out the idea, since they lived for several hundred thousand years, primarily, on a meat diet. It looks as if their inventions were primarily practical, but their creativity began to include adornments and the first cave art. Theirs was, so far, the first sign that "Kilroy was here". The cultural stuff Cofran mentions is logical. Trade would have been impossible without some measure of trust in the other's self-control.
Good stuff, thanks. Sea food including shellfish and eggs are a more reliable diet than game. Weaving and cordage are some of the earliest skills, used for nesting, fishing and trapping, making shelters, decoration etc. And for clothing. Chimpanzees roughly weave nests.
Without considering the so called Stoned Ape theory supported by Paul Stamets and originally put forth by Terrence & Dennis McKenna, every presentation that bypasses them are incomplete. It may be true that high calorie intake of meat from the animals that were hunted helped grow the size of the brains of our human ancestors. However that couldn't have happened unless their visual accuity hadn't been enhanced and improved significantly.
Over time it was noticed that bands led by older smart guys were more successful than bands led by younger tough guys. There are still people that have not caught on.
But the big, heavy brain raises the center of gravity and makes walking on two legs much more difficult. Compare with the ostrich, which has a small brain and a much lower center of gravity and is a much better runner.
This is Lee Berger's baby. He has studied the cave in detail and postulated evidence of deliberate funereal procedures and engravings on the wall. His detractors have not.
Gonna wing it here so if yall forgive me in advance. Our brains grew larger to save itself from inefficiencies due to a certain defect and not because it wanted to grow smarter, our "God-like" intelligence is a collateral result in trying to adapt to that inefficiency, not a designed end-goal by any mysterious universe although it's a bit tricky to see my claim from said perspective because we have amazing abilities to build rockets n computers n stuff. Our species' lineage is the only line being affected the most, by stunted development: Animals including us are all born with predominantly one-way neurons... one end to receive and the other to transmit - last year's research study found that as animals grew older their brains matured and their neurons could both send and transmit both ways... except for us - we stayed the same; hominid brains do not mature to lock into a final stage as animals do but instead stayed the growing juvenile limbo state it is currently in since birth - which are laden with the one-way neurons (predominantly). Anything with the term "juvenile" will need more of everything to cope - hence why I called this an adaptation to inefficiency. Now pardon me but I don't call stunted maturity (permanently juvenile) an extra feature, instead an "advancing" feature went missing somewhere along evolution, as we were doing fine evolving all the way from a mere tree rat up to... a much agile creature with longer limbs, who suddenly lost its brain maturing capabilities. I recently overheard that even a stand-up comedian understood this theory (unknowingly) as she opens up her gig by saying _"...now I know that animals aren't supposed to be wrong..."_ , so think of the maturing animal brain as something that will always strive to do everything predictably - as opposed to our creative error making obsessions, just like baby animals do, except that we do it for life. Yes, our brain is currently the only known amazing object in the universe able to name and analyze itself (*) and built stuffs, but not for reasons we used to think, we never had "more" and if any, we evolved "less" with this stunted brain maturity. Where animals could physically evolve with wings to fly, grew massive healthy lipids with white furs like the polar bear, or cows turning into whales over millions of years, our lineage are the only ones having the least physical changes at one point in time perhaps due to this neuronal "defect" that kept on needing more energy to feed it. Dunno who ate what or did something they shouldn't a long time ago but those pioneering couples or group deserved both the blame and medal, as it turns out the offspring carrying this defect have permanently juvenile brains that needed an alternative method to survive (and lots of energy to use it, i.e. to think) which made them thrive in kind, in an equally alternative, creative manner as well. The inefficiency in their un-maturing brain had caused these groups to work in the opposite way than the majority of our animal counterparts on this planet - becoming the most dangerous soft and weak creature in a novel way, devoid of fangs claws and wings (To be fair our last few versions did developed the punching fist, a working thumb and able to out-breath most animals in a marathon - but still, you won't even last a round fighting a murderous chimp in a ring). See how animals respond to rhythms? Well, we could take it out of our minds and recreate a physical version of it! How about a stone spear face to face with something tenfold our size? So if anyone claims that we're actually special - they could be right, but only for this single reason: We're not naturally intended, we got smart not because the workings of our brains got extra - but because it got deducted. (*) _The asterix is to argue that actually, the center of our milkyway galaxy is currently the only known object in the universe that births stardusts that could one day evolve to be able to look back at it and gives it a name :)_
Fascinating stuff. I will have to check this out, but if it's true we are the only species with one way neurons, I'm astonished this is the first I've heard of it. It would explain so much. When did this occur? Thanks for the different take on our species...it's why I read the comments. 🙂
@@SharonSnow-k1q Thank you for reading all that omg! Dunno if I can post a link here, but it was from Anton Petrov's read on most recent studies, I asked a question in the comments there too (i.e. "did our ancestors had a gene defect?") , maybe paste this in youtube's search bar to find the exact video: BtHcLM3jBcju7gQj because he made two videos but the link above is the one with the maturing dendritic infos, titled: "Groundbreaking Discoveries About Human Brain and Neuronal Complexity". Apologies in advance if I understood his read in err causing that "long story telling" of mine that you had to went through😅 Have a great week, cheers!
What’s really strange is that human beings have had basically the same brains for maybe 200,000 years and yet all the really advanced technology, especially in the areas of transportation and communication have come in the last 125 years. Cars, airplanes, rockets that allowed us to go to the moon, radio, television, computers, the Internet, and cellphones are all huge leaps forward but no one could come up with them before 125 years ago? What was holding our ancestors back from coming up with some or all of these?
@@andrewbuswell6010 I have heard that hypothesis and I think it may be spot on. Hopefully, the world will continue to move away from religion and towards greater cooperation.
@@casteretpollux Your answer doesn't really answer why our ancestors couldn't have come up with using fossil fuels for energy to create some of these technologies (mainly the transportation ones). I'd say harnessing electricity helped create the communication technologies but why couldn't our ancestors figure out how to harness electricity a long time ago?
Success is living a longer life. This can be luck and or being a bit more smart. This is passed on more frequently when the older successful males mate with many younger, fertile partners.
Love the Channel, one comment though, when talking about gibbons around the 6-7 min mark, the monkey on the tree had a tail, so not a gibbon maybe a spider monkey? Cheers
I still waiting for the missing link. No one agrees on the topic. Neanderthals are bi-pedal primate animals. Neanderthals are too different from Humans. Neanderthals lived at the same time as Humans. Neanderthals had no tear ducts, very large sinuses, large barrel shaped chest, short arms, heavy bones, different braincase, different ear bones, and more. Neanderthals technology did not change over there whole time span. There is no “missing link” to humans from bipedal primates. The large brain evolution hypothesis has been falsified after the discovery of early hominin with larger brains than later hominin fossils.
Apes are smart, they were smart, and - presumably - will continue to be so. Indeed, more than 'smart' (clever, or even clear thinkers) their intellect also contains wisdom (an ability to learn by mistakes, through observations, and in abstract applications aka 'common sense'). What they do not have, never have had, nor .. in all likelihood - ever shall have .. is : moral reason, therefore, they are not usually set before a court of inquiry to investigate their criminal behaviour, even though they do have a sense of 'right' and 'wrong' not only a distinction between 'left' and 'right', nor so far as I am aware do they seek recourse to a court of appeal if they are condemned to death by a court of justice. We, whether we like it or not - or accept the burden or not, have a degree of responsibility for them - though not responsible to them. In short, we are moral agents .. among our fellow animals (anima/ psychai = souls). Yey! ;o)
If tool making or sociall interactions were the cause - then why the same brain evolution didn't happen to beavers or ants ,termites, monkeys, and so on.. I don't think it's a good explanation
He did not know much, did he? Since we don't have a clue anyway. Why not consider the Aquatic ape hypothesis. Gives an explanation for just about every human trait. Also, so politically correct. Fruit??? As a contributor to our brain??? Well yes, he did say meat somewhere, although the most obvious explanation, yes he did stumble upon that word.
How about how we got hairless? Here's my GUESS, which might be genius. Josh Parker said it first. Fire made us hairless. As a man who has made very few campfires, and is rarely around open flame. I have burned the hair off my arms, hands/fingers/etc. I imagine if I were a monkey covered in hair, and I were trying to carry fire around all of the time, but not really good at understanding fire, after a short amount of time, all of those monkeys using fire, their hair would be singed off. Probably from the time it's a baby, it never grows hair because it's always around the flame? Look at how modern day tribal people still dance and jump through fire. and I don't mean to be labeling, but it sure seems like natives and tribal people don't have a lot of body hair compared to Europeans? Just a pothead thought. Thanks for the video!
I believe the leading theory is due to the way our ancestors hunted. They weren't fast but they had endurance. One of the reasons our endurance is so good is due to how we perspirate, and that would be more efficient without a lot of hair/fur.
While Dr. Cochran has interesting information for us, his habits distract from the delivery. He says "sorta" and "kinda" too much and his inability to keep facing the camera also distracts. He also tends to ramble.
Whoa! The reason we have large brains is that God blessed us with large brains. Let’s be honest, in just 6000 years since we were created, we have not had time to develop big brains so it must be God’s work! 😉😉
Who exactly got smart? Being "smart" with respect to varies animals and our ancestors, is relative. Please define it. It is even relative within our own family depending on where you are born and raised, which continent you are from and which country you come from. In Western countries alone testing people's abstract reasoning provides a very wide range of out comes, with the average intellegence quotient around 105. Other people's in the broader human, racial and ethnic family produce more variability and in some cases, huge disparities. The south Sudanese being the best example with an average intelligence quotient of 70, after decades of war famine and deprivations. Smart is a useless and intellectually lazy term (for heavens sake, some smart person decided to refer to a phone as smart), used to create a sense of the intelligence differential present within the human family tree - brain volume does not cut it, while brain structure might. So, endocasts and calculated volumes are useless when determining intelligence, let alone how smart paleoanthropologists are. In every 1000 people most can use technology, but not invent it. Most can use language but not to the extent that qualifies as articulate speech used when elucidating complex ideas( hell a number of that 1000 can't write, or read adequately). Most have a low working appreciation of some of the most crutial ideas underpinning western culture: philosophy, science, rational thought, deductive reasoning, morality, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, the expressive arts and music, to name a few. Most are religious so consequently infantile, while very few are spiritually aware. When did we get smart? Name the people who did please.
La supuesta evolución yo ya lo refuté. La evolución ya no tiene participación alguna en la biología. Se acabó para siempre conmigo. www.youtube.com/@carlosgaleano1212
@@D.o.athere’s been some rumors that the hearths may have dated earlier than the fossils. As of now, the consensus is there isn’t enough evidence to conclude Naledi controlled fire.
@@D.o.aHe's another armchair expert who is certain he knows better. Unfortunately you always see them in comments sections of channels like this, Eons, Stefan Milo, etc.
@@D.o.a I'm not claiming to understand the research better than the expert. Shows like this attract that kind of person -- unfortunately. Anyway, was referring to Dan not you.
Look in to the European middle Paleolithic time yes there is evidence of that behavior so I don't know where your info is coming from. ALSO it's Neandertal so you know.
@@D.o.a I am an independent scholar designated as such by top researchers. Although I am not a known figure, I have been invited to Universities like Harvard to present my finding. I can explain why symbology began and can identify how modern humans are responsible for the evidence discussed. My book to be published soon is being edited by scientific editors. It covers the entirety of human evolution back to the origin of mammals.
It would have been interesting to hear his take on the Homo Sapiens' mutation in the gene controlling protein TKTL-1, coding for the amino acid lysine rather than arginine, and thereby producing vastly more neurons in the frontal lobe than apes and earlier hominins like the Neanderthals. Or didn't he know that? Maybe he isn't that smart? Despite the title.
So supposedly there's some kind of evidence that humans evolved into existence. I will keep my eyes peeled for that. Maybe this video of a stupid person who can't figure out that humans were created will provide some evidence.
It's astounding the amount of information that has been gleaned from endocast comparisons. Fascinating. On a side note, there are many myths of little people the world over, even places as isolated as Hawaii. I feel like finds like H. Naledi and H. Floresiensis are the kernel of truth to those.... a link to long forgotten social memories. Still, as interesting as the finds are, I think Berger et al. should have gone the more traditional peer review route.
Don’t remember where but I read that since ancient omnivore hominid were following herds & hungry, they started eating psicotropic mushrooms witch led to increase in brain size, increase in synapse’s & intelligence, what do 19:23 you think about that ?
I really enjoy learning about this subject. The audio quality was too poor to keep my interest. They make very affordable clip on microphones with great audio fidelity nowadays. Just a thought.
