Ump–Dog of the Pleistocene

Conventional wisdom says dogs weren’t domesticated until the time of Egypt. Think Cleopatra and her cat. But, I’m convinced from the day man became smart enough to realize other animals didn’t always wish him well and survival was more than eating, sleeping and living, he has sought out a companion he could trust without doubt, who believed in him without question and followed him through good and bad.

Ump

Lyta might not have called it ‘dog’, but she found that in Ump. She met him after she became separated from her group by a massive earthquake, precipitated by an asteroid’s collision with her habitat and followed by seering fires that destroyed her homeland. Here’s how Otto showed their first meeting:

Below her lay a Canis, tail flopped to his side, pinned under a tree limb. A gash cut his heaving chest. Lyta dropped to the ground and approached with caution. Never had she been so close to this animal. Even supine, his muscles rippled as though prepared to flee. His great jaw sprouted sharp canines and massive grinding teeth. His fur stuck out from his trapped body in tufts like coarse wild grass. The one exposed eye—dark and small, like Snarling-dog (a coyote-like creature from the Pleistocene)—latched onto hers. The great pink tongue hung loose from his mouth, bobbing up and down in rhythm with his labored pant. The dirty tail gave a tired whomp.

Lyta studied the blood caked into his fur and dried over his ribcage like a big red leaf. Why was he here?  She had seen him as he fled the fires, well ahead of the panicked herds of animals.

“Why, animal?”  She asked, “What brought you back?”

As though he understood, his black lidded eye focused up and over to the side. There, a dead female lay with her pup, both crushed beneath a fallen limb. The canis refused to leave his mate, not understanding she would never again run with him through the fragrant grasslands. His loyalty benefited neither, but common sense had nothing to do with his decision.

Lyta pulled an herb from neck sack and chewed it to a pulp. “You’re going to be OK,” she soothed as she gently removed the branch from Canis’ wounded ribs and pasted a layer of mulched herbs over the wound, followed by long-fibered leaves. She worked slowly and with care, watching his face for pain or discomfort.

Tool Use and Man

I had to post this. It’s not that the impact of tool use on the brain surprises me, it’s the extent:

Tool use alters brain’s map of body

Posted by Elie Dolgin

Researchers claim to have the first direct evidence of a century-old idea that using tools changes the way the human brain perceives the size and configuration of our body parts, according to a study published in the June 23 issue of Current Biology. Holding the tool at an elongated arm’s length Image: Lucilla Cardinali “To be accurate in doing an action with a tool, you need to make the tool become a part of your body,” the study’s first author Lucilla Cardinali of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Bron and Claude Bernard University in Lyon told The Scientist. “Your brain needs to take into account that the action is performed with something added to your body part.” In 1911, British neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes introduced the theory that body image is mutable. Our brains are constantly processing visual and tactile feedback about the position of our bodies to work out where our limbs are at any given moment, they argued. The brain sifts through all this information to create a unified representation of body position and shape called the “body schema.” Although the concept has been widely accepted in the hundred years since it was first proposed, and many researchers have demonstrated adjustments to how we sense our body’s position in space after using a tool, no one had ever shown empirically that the body’s self-framing itself can be directly manipulated. “This is the first time it has been shown in humans that the use of tools can change the pattern of movement because the body schema has changed,” said Angelo Maravita, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy who was not involved in the study. Cardinali, a graduate student with INSERM’s Alessandro Farnè, gave people a mechanical grabber that extended their reach and found that people with the arm-elongating tool took longer to grasp and point to an object after the gizmo was taken away compared to before they held the tool. They then showed that this delayed reaction time is a normal response of people with naturally longer arms, thus indicating that tool users judge their arms to be longer than they truly are. The researchers also asked blindfolded participants to touch specific landmarks on their arm — the elbow, wrist and middle fingertip — and showed that people perceived these spots as further along the limb after having played with the gadget arm. “It’s really suggestive of the fact that your arm is coded as longer,” said Maravita. All these subtle and dynamic mental move-arounds occur at a subconscious level to help us function with our workaday widgets, the authors say. “[Tool users] don’t think, ‘Oh my god, my arm is longer,’” said Cardinali. “They act as if the arm was longer.” In fact, Cardinali added, the long arm of the mind is something we experience every day — for example, when you grasp a toothbrush. “You don’t need to look at yourself in the mirror,” she said. “You are able to do this without bumping into your teeth or hurting yourself, and you don’t need to pay attention because the toothbrush is incorporated” into the body’s perception of the arm. Michael Arbib, a University of Southern California neurobiologist and computer scientist who did not contribute to the research findings, said that the study “has an interesting result, but it doesn’t justify their claim.” He argued that the slowness experienced by tool users could arise because they had just completed an awkward task that involved not just a greater reach but also different angles of rotation of the arm muscles. After ditching the tool, “it’s a less confident motion,” Arbib said, “and the less confident you are the slower you go.” Cardinali, however, said that the movement was fairly straightforward. Participants were pros at it right off the bat without any learning involved, she said. Maravita noted that the study subjects were quite precise and that only the key parameters linked to arm size changed after tool use. “I think it’s quite a robust result,” he said. Arbib also said that the authors’ “bold claim” was unfounded because they might have mistaken cause for effect. For example, in the arm touching experiment, tool users could have pointed to a modified space rather than an altered body representation if they mentally positioned themselves relative to the extended tool and then worked backwards, instead of directly perceiving an elongated body part. These two interpretations are “functionally equivalent,” Arbib said, and so the authors’ findings might only confirm the previous results of the last hundred years. Cardinali disagreed. She argued against a mental frameshift in space because the arm pointing test was performed with bent arms — a posture that had never been encountered before. Thus, tool users could not be orienting themselves relative to any physical object in space, she said.

Homo habilis vs. Homo erectus

Homo erectus–note the width of the skull and the less-protruding snout

My passion is studying early man, specifically how we became who we are. Is our violence an aberration or part and parcel of survival? No other mammal kills their own, but maybe–as the alpha on the planet–our greatest threat to our survival is our own species, so we’re forced to destroy each other.

What was lacking in H. Habilis that led to their extinction, to be replaced by the big-brained, scrawny Homo erectus? Habilis was preyed upon by species with bigger claws, sharper teeth and thicker skin. Habilis (and my friend Lyta) scavenged their left-overs, in between hiding from the imposing mammals that dominated the Plio-Pleistocene African savanna. But, eventually hiding wasn’t enough and H. erectus took over (we don’t know if they fought with each other or if habilis left ‘with a whimper’).

H. erectus, with his longer lower limbs for running and walking efficiency, his bigger brain especially in the areas for planning and forethought (and speech depending upon whose research you’re reading) was tall, thin, and barrel-chested, hardly daunting in a world of sabertooth cats, mammoth and giant sloths. Yet , it is he who spread from Africa to China, India, the Middle East, Java. It is he–not predator cats or alligators–who developed a highly adaptable culture allowing him to survive a wide range of climates and habitats.

That is the first of their firsts. Want more?

• first appearance of systematic hunting.
• first use of fire (though arguably no control of it)
• first indication of extended childhood (thanks to the helplessness of their infants)
• first indication of the ability to lead a more complex life (their Acheulian tools were sophisticated, their hunting was planned)
• first to wear clothing (how else to survive Georgia and China)
• first to create complex tools and weapons

Ump–Dog of the Pleistocene

Conventional wisdom says dogs weren’t domesticated until the time of Egypt. Think Cleopatra and her cat. But, I’m convinced from the day man became smart enough to realize other animals didn’t always wish him well and survival was more than eating, sleeping and living, he has sought out a companion he could trust without doubt, who believed in him without question and followed him through good and bad.

Ump

Lyta might not have called it ‘dog’, but she found that in Ump. She met him after she became separated from her group by a massive earthquake, precipitated by an asteroid’s collision with her habitat and followed by seering fires that destroyed her homeland. Here’s how Otto showed their first meeting:

Below her lay a Canis, tail flopped to his side, pinned under a tree limb. A gash cut his heaving chest. Lyta dropped to the ground and approached with caution. Never had she been so close to this animal. Even supine, his muscles rippled as though prepared to flee. His great jaw sprouted sharp canines and massive grinding teeth. His fur stuck out from his trapped body in tufts like coarse wild grass. The one exposed eye—dark and small, like Snarling-dog (a coyote-like creature from the Pleistocene)—latched onto hers. The great pink tongue hung loose from his mouth, bobbing up and down in rhythm with his labored pant. The dirty tail gave a tired whomp.

Lyta studied the blood caked into his fur and dried over his ribcage like a big red leaf. Why was he here?  She had seen him as he fled the fires, well ahead of the panicked herds of animals.

“Why, animal?”  She asked, “What brought you back?”

As though he understood, his black lidded eye focused up and over to the side. There, a dead female lay with her pup, both crushed beneath a fallen limb. The canis refused to leave his mate, not understanding she would never again run with him through the fragrant grasslands. His loyalty benefited neither, but common sense had nothing to do with his decision.

Lyta pulled an herb from neck sack and chewed it to a pulp. “You’re going to be OK,” she soothed as she gently removed the branch from Canis’ wounded ribs and pasted a layer of mulched herbs over the wound, followed by long-fibered leaves. She worked slowly and with care, watching his face for pain or discomfort.

Lucy: A Biography–Part IV

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 4 (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

Chapter One

Raza

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

—Margaret Mead

There the Creatures squatted, grunting noisily, no further from Raza than a well-thrown stone. Dirty clumps of hair hung to narrow shoulders. Their muscular chests tapered to pinched hips. Nut-brown skin bore only the barest layer of translucent fuzz. Their vaulted foreheads rounded high above thick rounded brows and broad muzzles—like his own, Raza thought, but flat as though Mammoth sat on them.

Raza drooped his eyes and hunkered deeper into the thick reeds across the pond from the Creatures’ camp. They were not what he expected. In fact, the only similarity to the ones he’d seen outside his home base was their movement.

They glided like Crocodile through water, with a grace belied by their over-long legs and truncated arms.

How could these winter-lean, hairless creatures be predators?

He hadn’t set out this morning to actually see them. He’d only wanted to track them. He’d waked early. He covered his body in mud and dung, barked a farewell to his Primary male Hku and set off to hunt. The day couldn’t have been more perfect. An unusual scattering of clouds shaded the parched ground with splotches of shade. Smoking Mountain slept, though Raza knew at any moment it might awaken with a ground-shaking growl, much like Eagle’s cry before her death dive or Cat’s throaty snarl. Today, though, the only indication of Smoking Mountain’s presence was a slight sulfur taste in the air.

His bare feet cut quickly through the talus field that bordered home base, across a dry patch of savanna, following the prints of Man-who-preys’.  This Creature. They were bulbous at the bottom with splayed nubs on top, like his but straighter and narrower. Depth and size varied, but the scent was always sour like spoiled roots.  Dust sprayed by his pounding feet tickled his nose and eyes and turned his dark feet a dinghy white.

When he caught the odor of pond reeds, he froze and let his senses explore what his eyes couldn’t. He ignored the ripening noxious cloud from his melting dung coat and focused on his surroundings. He heard water lapping against the pond’s shoreline and smelled the piquant scent of decayed vegetation crushed by hooves and paws and feet pounding to the water’s edge.

Nothing unusual, so he slid forward like Snake until he could see the watering hole. Its blue surface shimmered with heat like a watery flame. At one end, a herd of long-eared dik-dik and a lone hyaena-cat drank. Wave after wave of gentle ripples rolled from the pond’s edge as prey and predator alike lapped up the crystalline water. Cat’s cousin feasted on a bloated calf. A motley horde of flop-winged vultures squabbled nearby, hopping closer and closer to the cadaver, awaiting their turn. A mammoth family splashed directly in front of him, spraying their huge bodies with long noses. They trumpeted at something, flaring their ears and swaying their giant forefeet before trundling off to give Raza an unobstructed view across the pond.

At the face of the Creature. Man-who-preys. So much for his plan.

Lucy: A Biography–Part III

Who was Lucy?

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 3 (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

Prologue

In the Beginning… 

…it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.

—Charles Darwin 

 Billions of years whooshed by in such a rush, it made Sun dizzy. Planetary systems formed and life evolved and still Sun couldn’t decide. This Machiavellian monstrosity who called herself ‘Nature’ cared nothing for Earth. She collided vast landmasses with such brutality that the ground buckled into crenulated piles of lofty mountains and deep valleys, or splintered into ragged continents that floated away on infinite oceans. Molten hotspots blew liquid rock through the fragile crust and splattered volcanic archipelagos like multi-layered onions. The erratic climate melted glaciers and rainforests with equal ease.

Sun sighed. Nature’s life forms were no better. They came and went, crushed by Earth’s ever-changing habitat. The survivors, like the desultory horsetail ferns or the annoying chirruping insects, were boring. The first had no flexibility and the second, no mental strength. Sun turned her attention to other planets in her system, until the day a muscular, slope-shouldered hominid named Orrorin appeared. Though his head was no larger than what Nature called a ‘chimpanzee’, a human soul radiated through his eyes. Who was he? He fingered his food as though wondering at its texture. Hostility intrigued rather than frightened him. Had Nature finally done something spectacular?

Lucy: A Biography–Part II

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a

female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start? Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 2 of the Preface. If you missed Part 1, click here (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

This is her story. She is a scientist, forever seeking new approaches to problems. She was the first primate to use tools to make tools, to control her environment and select among choices rather than submit to instinct when making decisions about her future. She uses her capacious brain, requiring 20% of her caloric intake to maintain, to survive and multiply in the most dangerous habitat known to mammals. She spends considerable time foraging for anything edible (evolving from a plant-eating herbivore to a decidedly-unchoosey omnivore was a brilliantly adaptive move for early man), sleeping, caring for her young, and avoiding predators. Because she is so much more efficient at these jobs than any other primate, she possesses surplus time and uses it inventing tools to enhance her quality of life and communicating with her band. This is the first time in history a mammal surpassed Maslow’s broadest Hierarchy of Needs.

Lucy: A Biography–Part I

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start? Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight over the limited resources of Plio-Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself  when her family is trampled by an enraged herd of mammoth and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, two deadly predators track them: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient spirit who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though a chemistry experiment. The geography, biosphere and climate are carefully researched to represent what Lucy would have faced in a world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion unimaginable today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story. Here’s Part 1 of the Preface:

PREFACE

“Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is

fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”

Henry Gee, Nature 2001

Like a favonian breeze, life arrived on Planet Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. Our story begins much later, a brief two million years before present, during the waning days of the Pliocene Epoch, itself part of the 65-million-year-long Cenozoic Era. The primordial continent of Gondwana has splintered into chunks and warm-blooded, furry mammals have replaced the dinosaurs. The climate is cooling and the growing glaciers have locked billions of gallons of Earth’s water into icy prisons. South America has moved to its present position contiguous to North America and the land bridge connecting Asia with Alaska still exists.

If you telescope in, you’ll see we are in Africa.

Understanding Early Man

Some twenty years ago, I began a quest to understand man. Why are we the way we are? Can we be a kind and caring species that voluntarily takes care of our brother without asking for

anything in exchange, or is that contrary to our nature, to survival? Were those traits bread in to us so we as the small creature on the savanna without thick skin, without claws and tearing fangs, without the speed of a leopard, could work as a group to out-size, out-muscle the predators that controlled our environ? Did it require the violence that has dogged our existence since modern man emerged, our seemed inability to be kind just for the sake of kindness?

I have no answers, but my curiosity drives me to study our earliest ancestors, starting with the first creatures we considered to be predecessor–Australopithecines. To date, I’ve reached Homo erectus. Along the way, I’ve read a slew of wonderful books by brilliant scientists:

• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey (actually, all of Johanson’s books)
• The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey (and all of all of the Leakeys’ books)
• Java Man: How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution by Carl Swisher III, Garniss Curtis and Roger Lewin
• Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-age Saga of Homo erectus by Noel T. Boaz and Russell Ciochon
• Evolution of Homo erectus by G. Philip Rightmire
• Meeting Pre-historic Man by G.H.R. von Koenigswald
• Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims
• The Acheulian Site of Gesher Beno Ya-aqov by Naama Goren-Inbar et al

What Everyone Ought to Know about PhD Research

You don’t always get what you want. ‘Research’ is the ‘systematic investigation to establish facts’. You don’t know them when you start. You pick them up like breadcrumbs along the path to the Dissertation.

Because mine involves an AI I seem to have lost control over, mankind’s past which is poorly documented by million-year-old artificacts, and a prodigious lack of money, I have often ended up places I had no intent to be, but must some how be connected to my thesis. How do I know they’re connected? Because that’s what Otto does. He takes a collection of facts and finds connections. Here’s an example Otto found and played for me. Why I don’t know. We know man’s past is violent, dangerous. What’s Otto’s point in throwing this into Lyta‘s search for her family?

What I do know is it’s connected to my research, because that’s how I programmed Otto.

Ump–Dog of the Pleistocene

Conventional wisdom says dogs weren’t domesticated until the time of Egypt. Think Cleopatra and her cat. But, I’m convinced from the day man became smart enough to realize other animals didn’t always wish him well and survival was more than eating, sleeping and living, he has sought out a companion he could trust without doubt, who believed in him without question and followed him through good and bad.

Ump

Lyta might not have called it ‘dog’, but she found that in Ump. She met him after she became separated from her group by a massive earthquake, precipitated by an asteroid’s collision with her habitat and followed by seering fires that destroyed her homeland. Here’s how Otto showed their first meeting:

Below her lay a Canis, tail flopped to his side, pinned under a tree limb. A gash cut his heaving chest. Lyta dropped to the ground and approached with caution. Never had she been so close to this animal. Even supine, his muscles rippled as though prepared to flee. His great jaw sprouted sharp canines and massive grinding teeth. His fur stuck out from his trapped body in tufts like coarse wild grass. The one exposed eye—dark and small, like Snarling-dog (a coyote-like creature from the Pleistocene)—latched onto hers. The great pink tongue hung loose from his mouth, bobbing up and down in rhythm with his labored pant. The dirty tail gave a tired whomp.

Lyta studied the blood caked into his fur and dried over his ribcage like a big red leaf. Why was he here?  She had seen him as he fled the fires, well ahead of the panicked herds of animals.

“Why, animal?”  She asked, “What brought you back?”

As though he understood, his black lidded eye focused up and over to the side. There, a dead female lay with her pup, both crushed beneath a fallen limb. The canis refused to leave his mate, not understanding she would never again run with him through the fragrant grasslands. His loyalty benefited neither, but common sense had nothing to do with his decision.

Lyta pulled an herb from neck sack and chewed it to a pulp. “You’re going to be OK,” she soothed as she gently removed the branch from Canis’ wounded ribs and pasted a layer of mulched herbs over the wound, followed by long-fibered leaves. She worked slowly and with care, watching his face for pain or discomfort.

“This will make you feel better,” and she plastered mud over the leaves. That done, she groomed the animal with her fingers until the caste dried and stiffened.

“Get up,” she whispered as gently as possible. “You must leave. I must leave.”

He stumbled to his feet, wobbled over to his dead mate and plopped to the ground. He nuzzled his great head into the female’s neck while one paw reached out for the pup, barely old enough to have known the rich life of Pliocene Africa. A pained sigh escaped the Canis’ ragged jaw.

“I understand, Canis. I too lost a pairmate. I lived. You will, too.”

Lyta spoke with calm assurance. She knew he couldn’t understand her words, so why did he look at her as though he appreciated what she said? She rose and crossed over to a tiny waterhole, not much more than a seasonal puddle. She slurped her fill, wiped an arm across her mouth and trudged to the edge of the ‘camp’. She shouted, not because she expected an answer, but to hear her echo. There was none. She turned to her left and shouted again. Still nothing. She repeated this a third time, and her voice came back.

“I must go that way. If I find Smoking Mountain, I find my way home.”

The Canis watched her and then snorted out a baleful sigh. He seemed to have arrived at a decision. He limped toward Lyta, sat on his injured haunch and huffed his thanks. His one good eye filled with warmth and trust: He lost his family and she would be the replacement.

“We must go. You to your kind,” and she motioned toward the burnt remnants of the savanna, “and I to mine,” pointing down toward the lost world of yesterday. Lyta gestured toward the fires and the gash in the land, and signaled the immediacy of their need to depart. Canis wagged his dirty tail like a branch sweeping against the ground.

Lyta waited a few moments and tried again. “We must go.”

Canis bobbed his head in agreement and plodded over to the waterhole. The smell of sulfur overwhelmed every other scent. She had little faith that even the Canis’ strong sense of smell could pick out the damp, fresh aroma water gave off. His oversized head dipped into the tepid water, and he slurped up wet and mud in equal parts. He paused, glanced back at his family and took another drink.

Lyta set out on her journey home. If Raza no longer wanted her, she would take Voi… maybe stick-that-kills… and return to her brother. She glanced back to assure herself the Canis would go his way. He  crouched, head nestled between his muddy paws, and stared after her. She ignored him as she marched homeward. when she again peeked back, he remained unmoving, gaze fixed on her.

“Canis. You must go. You aren’t safe alone.”

A mewl escaped his grinning snout.

He’d probably stay at his mate’s side and die unless Lyta did something. She jerked her head. In an instant, he trotted at her side, tail brushing happily against her thigh, his steady breathing setting a rhythm to their movements.

“So you want to join my pack. See if you can keep up.”

Moving On

I can’t find Lyta anymore. I log into Otto’s Lyta Scenario, but she doesn’t appear. I’ve plugged her algorithm and her DNA signature into his search functions, but he doesn’t find her. I don’t know what that means. Has she died? Last time I saw her she was walking north, away from her group, with her mate Garv and their son, her adopted son Boah and their ‘dog’ (a loose term for a Plio-Pleisticene version of dogs) Ump.

I miss her. She’s curious, friendly, with a sophisticated style of communication I wouldn’t have dreamt existed when mankind was new. At first I thought Otto intended to answer my research thesis–why did Homo habilis prosper and prior hominids like Australopithecus became extinct. But when I couldn’t get my grant renewed (they wanted me in the field, not talking to an AI), I applied for a DARPA grant. That got sticky and off the track, but into the real world where realpeople were affected by my work.

It’s how I met Zeke. More on him later.

I know Otto could find her. His programming allows me to enter a DNA profile into a space-time location. Maybe he doesn’t want to expose her. Maybe she’s hiding.

I miss her.

Tool Use and Man

I had to post this. It’s not that the impact of tool use on the brain surprises me, it’s the extent:

Tool use alters brain’s map of body

Posted by Elie Dolgin

[Entry posted at 22nd June 2009 05:06 PM GMT]

View comments(3) | Comment on this news story

Researchers claim to have the first direct evidence of a century-old idea that using tools changes the way the human brain perceives the size and configuration of our body parts, according to a study published in the June 23 issue of Current Biology. Holding the tool at an elongated arm’s length Image: Lucilla Cardinali “To be accurate in doing an action with a tool, you need to make the tool become a part of your body,” the study’s first author Lucilla Cardinali of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Bron and Claude Bernard University in Lyon told The Scientist. “Your brain needs to take into account that the action is performed with something added to your body part.” In 1911, British neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes introduced the theory that body image is mutable. Our brains are constantly processing visual and tactile feedback about the position of our bodies to work out where our limbs are at any given moment, they argued. The brain sifts through all this information to create a unified representation of body position and shape called the “body schema.” Although the concept has been widely accepted in the hundred years since it was first proposed, and many researchers have demonstrated adjustments to how we sense our body’s position in space after using a tool, no one had ever shown empirically that the body’s self-framing itself can be directly manipulated. “This is the first time it has been shown in humans that the use of tools can change the pattern of movement because the body schema has changed,” said Angelo Maravita, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy who was not involved in the study. Cardinali, a graduate student with INSERM’s Alessandro Farnè, gave people a mechanical grabber that extended their reach and found that people with the arm-elongating tool took longer to grasp and point to an object after the gizmo was taken away compared to before they held the tool. They then showed that this delayed reaction time is a normal response of people with naturally longer arms, thus indicating that tool users judge their arms to be longer than they truly are. The researchers also asked blindfolded participants to touch specific landmarks on their arm — the elbow, wrist and middle fingertip — and showed that people perceived these spots as further along the limb after having played with the gadget arm. “It’s really suggestive of the fact that your arm is coded as longer,” said Maravita. All these subtle and dynamic mental move-arounds occur at a subconscious level to help us function with our workaday widgets, the authors say. “[Tool users] don’t think, ‘Oh my god, my arm is longer,’” said Cardinali. “They act as if the arm was longer.” In fact, Cardinali added, the long arm of the mind is something we experience every day — for example, when you grasp a toothbrush. “You don’t need to look at yourself in the mirror,” she said. “You are able to do this without bumping into your teeth or hurting yourself, and you don’t need to pay attention because the toothbrush is incorporated” into the body’s perception of the arm. Michael Arbib, a University of Southern California neurobiologist and computer scientist who did not contribute to the research findings, said that the study “has an interesting result, but it doesn’t justify their claim.” He argued that the slowness experienced by tool users could arise because they had just completed an awkward task that involved not just a greater reach but also different angles of rotation of the arm muscles. After ditching the tool, “it’s a less confident motion,” Arbib said, “and the less confident you are the slower you go.” Cardinali, however, said that the movement was fairly straightforward. Participants were pros at it right off the bat without any learning involved, she said. Maravita noted that the study subjects were quite precise and that only the key parameters linked to arm size changed after tool use. “I think it’s quite a robust result,” he said. Arbib also said that the authors’ “bold claim” was unfounded because they might have mistaken cause for effect. For example, in the arm touching experiment, tool users could have pointed to a modified space rather than an altered body representation if they mentally positioned themselves relative to the extended tool and then worked backwards, instead of directly perceiving an elongated body part. These two interpretations are “functionally equivalent,” Arbib said, and so the authors’ findings might only confirm the previous results of the last hundred years. Cardinali disagreed. She argued against a mental frameshift in space because the arm pointing test was performed with bent arms — a posture that had never been encountered before. Thus, tool users could not be orienting themselves relative to any physical object in space, she said.

Homo habilis vs. Homo erectus

My passion is studying early man, specifically how we became who we are. Is our violence an aberration or part and parcel of survival? No other mammal kills their own, but maybe–as the alpha on the planet–our greatest threat to our survival is our own species, so we’re forced to destroy each other.

What was lacking in H. Habilis that led to their extinction, to be replaced by the big-brained, scrawny Homo erectus? Habilis was preyed upon by species with bigger claws, sharper teeth and thicker skin. Habilis (and my friend Lyta) scavenged their left-overs, in between hiding from the imposing mammals that dominated the Plio-Pleistocene African savanna. But, eventually hiding wasn’t enough and H. erectus took over (we don’t know if they fought with each other or if habilis left ‘with a whimper’).

H. erectus, with his longer lower limbs for running and walking efficiency, his bigger brain especially in the areas for planning and forethought (and speech depending upon whose research you’re reading) was tall, thin, and barrel-chested, hardly daunting in a world of sabertooth cats, mammoth and giant sloths. Yet , it is he who spread from Africa to China, India, the Middle East, Java. It is he–not predator cats or alligators–who developed a highly adaptable culture allowing him to survive a wide range of climates and habitats.

That is the first of their firsts. Want more?

• first appearance of systematic hunting.
• first use of fire (though arguably no control of it)
• first indication of extended childhood (thanks to the helplessness of their infants)
• first indication of the ability to lead a more complex life (their Acheulian tools were sophisticated, their hunting was planned)
• first to wear clothing (how else to survive Georgia and China)
• first to create complex tools and weapons

Their faces were short but wide and the nose projected forward, hinting at the typical human external nose. They had a pronounced brow ridge. Their cranium was long and low and somewhat flattened at the front and back. The cranial bone was thicker than earlier hominids. Remnants show damage from being hit in the head by something like clubs or heavy rocks. Their arms and legs were also robust, with thicker bones and clear evidence of being heavily muscled. The suspicion is they were a more violent species than habilis. Is that why habilis disappeared? The tougher group survived and bred offspring with their thicker, more protective skulls.

You probably remember my friend Lyta is a Homo habilis (see her page). I’ve lived her life through Otto‘s ability to ‘see’ into the past. Where other primates rest when they have enough to eat, she thinks and shares information with her band. Where most mammals sleep when they aren’t hunting, playing or resting, Lyta worked–knapped tools, collected food for a cache, planned. I have come to believe that her survival depended not so much on her physique (which was sorely lacking in that physical time) as what was inside of her: her courage, ability to plan ahead, strength of her convictions, what we call ‘morals’. These are very human traits that can’t be preserved in bones and teeth. I wouldn’t know they existed if not for Otto. I’ve posted an excerpt from that research on Scribd.com (Born in a Treacherous Time).

Homo erectus--note the width of the skull and the less-protruding snout

Homo habilis skull--note the size of the skull cap (from brow to top)

My next project is to determine how man migrated throughout the world. Where did he get the courage? Was he forced out because he couldn’t defend his territory? Or was it wanderlust? Was he a seeker, wanting more for his life? Did he get bored and need to challenge his constantly-growing brain?

Lyta

If I’m to be completely open with you–albeit virtually (and anonymously)–you must meet Lyta. Lyta above all others is my best friend and mentor. When I met Lyta over a year ago, she was an unwed pregnant teen, with no means of supporting herself, rejected by those who should have cared for her. She has little to recommend her except a passion for her unborn son and a stubborn refusal to capitulate to problems.

Like too many of today’s troubled teens, single moms, and restless youth, you’re probably thinking.  Except Lyta is 1.8 million years old.

How do I know this? Otto. As part of my PhD thesis, I asked him to research man’s roots–paleoanthropology is my passion–and he found Lyta. (That’s right–I asked him. We are well past the point where I am master and Otto the submissive AI. With his protracted abilities to notice detail, follow clues and draw conclusions, he’s as clever as most people I know).

He collected data from throughout the metaverse, extrapolated conclusions and drew a picture of Lyta and her world. To experience one of Otto’s ‘reports’ is to watch a movie in four dimensions with all five senses. I had to add a multitude of sensory ports when I realized he not only collected text and pictures on his subjects, but sounds, smells, even tactile factors. I don’t know why Otto latched onto Lyta. I programmed him to provide the big picture, not track an individual, but to my surprise, he continued her tale as though reading the future. Now, it’s like having a close friend you see every day, want to stay up to date on, seek out for advice.

I’ll close this entry with a picture I captured of her. She was digging for roots and tubers with her band. This is just before a paleo-wolf attacked the group and killed her friend’s child. From what I could tell, the other female never recovered from the grief.