Sensible Erection | From Ape to Man

Thursday, 9 October 2008

quote [ Teach a parrot swear words in such a way that it gets an idea of their meaning (one of the great amusements of sailors returning from the tropics); tease it and you will soon discover that it knows how to use its swear words just as correctly as a Berlin costermonger. The same is true of begging for titbits. ]

An entertaining and informative short essay from Karl Marx's BFF, Frederick Engels

The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones.

[sci&tech] [by sensible420@2:47pmGMT] [+5 Good]

Comments

k0k0peli said @ 2:59pm GMT on 9th Oct
Funny and rather dated. Rather dated. Rather dated...

sensible420 said @ 3:10pm GMT on 9th Oct
haha, to say the least that is - I'll be sure to date future posts :)

rezties said @ 3:27pm GMT on 9th Oct
Start with a spa instead of dinner and a movie, so you can trade massage techniques after.

Qfwqw said @ 7:35pm GMT on 9th Oct
[Engels note: A leading authority in this respect, Sir William Thomson, has calculated that little more than a hundred million years could have elapsed since the time when the earth had cooled sufficiently for plants and animals to be able to live on it.]

Yes, that was a great time for the airborne Cephalopoids.

The Maxx said @ 7:49am GMT on 10th Oct
Um. You mean airwhales?

endopol said @ 3:39pm GMT on 10th Oct
Airwhales and their kin.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:00pm GMT on 9th Oct

todde said @ 3:03pm GMT on 9th Oct
Engels wasn't a scientist let alone a naturalist, but he was onto something here. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists now believe that freeing the hands was responsible for much of our subsequent evolution. "The hand," as Jacob Bronowski said "drives the brain."

Many apes use tools in the wild from Goodall's Dave Graybeard who made cups, stashed clubs, fashioned termite-pckers and taught others how to do the same to bonobos who have fashioned sex toys. But being able to walk around and carry them wherever they went let evolution favor tool-improving brain devlopments in our ancestors. Labor by itself is just pain. Labor which accomplishes something lasting and useful changed the world.

Hojew said @ 12:58pm GMT on 10th Oct
It's been documented that crows are equally capable of fashioning tools.

Rapscallion said @ 9:10pm GMT on 9th Oct
Oooooooold!

DesertWanderer said @ 10:00pm GMT on 9th Oct [Score:1 Insightful]