Macaque Monkey Goes Totally Bipedal

Freshly Exhumed writes "Add another bonus point for the Darwinians/evolutionists. A macaque at the Safari Park Zoo in Ramat Gan, Israel has recovered from a near-fatal illness in an unusual way: she has switched exclusively to walking on her hind legs. Given theories of human history that stress the effect of disease on events and changes, as in William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, what if an illness was the cause of the shift to bipedal motion by our evolutionary ancestors, and rote imitation by offspring or another set of circumstances locked it in? No matter, this could be a fascinating study of the macaque's altered brain functions."

Comments

Re:Question to the anthropologist nerds...

[Pantero Blanco]

According to the psychology books I've read, it's automatic. At a certain age, children begin to walk on two legs, unless they are impaired (unlike talking, which must be taught at a certain stage of growth). A parent can try to "help" a child learn to walk, but they won't do it until the instinct kicks in.

Re:A question for evolutionists

[edremy]

Intelligence always adaptive? Nope. Any organism is a trade off between a huge variety of factors- which you spend your energy budget on depends on your overall survival strategy. A perfectly good evolutionary strategy is to simply breed like crazy and not worry much about survival of any one offspring- why bother with brains when your gonads work well?

You only need to be smart enough to survive until you can breed. Look around among your fellow humans- it don't take much to reach that point.

Re:Question to the anthropologist nerds...

[Yaztromo]

Has anyone done a study on whether human bipedalism is due to the behavior learned from surrounding people or if there are practical reasons for why we hardly ever walk on all fours?

If you take a look at how modern human bodies are constructed, the fact that we're bipedial by nature (as opposed to nurture) is pretty obvious.

Quadripeds don't walk on their rear knees, but on either their feet or their toes. Humans can't do this due to the differences in proportion between our arms and legs. Sure we can crawl on all fours -- but that's quite a bit different from being a real quadriped.

Mind you, at one point in time during human evolution things were probably different -- there would have had to have been an intermediate stage. The fossil record would appear to back this up, as there are hominids which have shorter legs and longer arms.

Yaz.

Re:A Theory: Gravity assist for weakend stomach

[LMariachi]

You might be interested to see this. I don't know how long it can walk at a time, but the blood pressure difference would seem to be insignificant. I've heard there are snakes that will die if you hold them vertically, though.

Re:Bigger brains...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Not true.

The part of the brain resposible for balance is the Cerebellum. It really hasn't changed much since we left the trees. Various structural changes in our skull allowed the cerebrum (frontal lobe) of the brain to grow larger.

Neanderthals and many species of proto-humans had flat foreheads, but walked upright.

sweat not bipedalisim

[Random_Goblin]

you missed the point of the demonstation, (it was richard leaky by the way, son of louis and mary leaky, who did a great deal of work in africa on human origins, particuarly Australopithecus)

the fact that he was able to run down the gazelle, was not to do with how much energy the gazelle was using, rather it was to do with the differences in heat dissipation between humans and .. all other mammals.

obviously large amounts of heat are generated by the action of the muscles in running.

the only way other mammals have of dissipating this potentially fatal heat increase is to pant, losing heat through water evaporation from the tongue.

sweating is not an good heat loss solution for most mammals, as it takes very little heat from their bodies due to the dense covering of fur that is typical of mammals (except humans). Humans being largely hairless, are able to dissipate heat much more efficiently through sweating.

it is this ability to lose the heat generated by running that enables hummans to run down pretty much any other mammal, as the animal will have to stop (or else die of heat stroke) long before the human.

Re:sweat not bipedalisim

[Sir_Toejam]

perhaps THAT point was missed (thanks for the history lesson, BTW), but the posters point was about energy consumption of bipedal vs. qudrapedal locomotion, of which Leaky's experiment was not a good test of this. Great examples of experiments looking at energy efficiencies of various modes of locomotion can be found by doing searches on the research done on Kangaroo locomotion.

Re:Score another one for creationists

[Hungus]

Not if you can't come up with a name other than AC :) Post as as yourself, or contact me off-line ( email is legit). In the mean time here is a very short overview of some of the frauds that have been perpetuated over time and while later shown false still appear in texts and in the minds of people (note not my work but rather part of a written work of a researcher by the name of H. Hanegraaff)

At one time it was thought that we came from the Neanderthal. Neanderthals were discovered from 1848 to 1856 and for years they were considered to be apemen. But now we know, there's no argument here, that they're just plain ordinary people.

And then, of course, the apeman that I introduced to you early on, Java man. Java man was discovered by a Dutchman. I'm a little embarrassed by that because I'm a Dutchman myself. His name was Eugene Dubois. The bones were found in 1891-1892 on the Indonesian Island of Java in Southeast Asia along the banks of the Solo River. And there was an interesting assortment. He found a leg bone, a skullcap, a jaw fragment and three teeth. And that's what he concocted Java man from. Interestingly enough some of the teeth were old and some young. The bones belonged to ape, female and male.

It was an interesting conglomeration and the reason that people didn't catch on to it is because the find of Dubois was kept from scholars for about 30 years. He also, of course, withheld the discovery of modern human remains, which were found in the same stratum as Java man. Of course that would have ruined his claims that Java man was the ancestor of modern day humans. Finally, enough pressure was placed on him that the actual bones were allowed to be examined and the discrepancies were found. And eventually, enlightened America as well as the world found out that this was a hoax.

Unfortunately hoaxes die hard. Time Magazine ran a cover story entitled "How Man Became Man". Richard Leaky is on the cover. It starts off ridiculing Christians and Creationists and then goes on to present Java man as though it were fact.

Then, of course, there's Piltdown man. This was a discovery by Dawson in 1912. It was shown to be a hoax in 1953. This is a deliberate fraud. There were obvious file marks on the teeth. Stone tools, supposedly used by Piltdown man were actually shaped by steel instruments. That should have been a dead giveaway. The bone fragments were stained to make them look older and yet despite this in 1915 Doctors Arthur Woodward and Arthur Keeth, who were the two most eminent Paleoanthropologists in England declared that Eoanthropous, another name for Piltdown man, represents "more closely than any human form yet discovered the common ancestor from which the Neanderthal and modern types have been derived".

This was just 1915. Now they had a motive. They were later charged with perpetrating the fraud in the first place. Yet this fraud was used for over 40 years to prove to school children that evolution was a fact and all kinds of doctrinal dissertations were based on Piltdown man.

And then of course there's Nebraska man. One tooth found on a farm in Nebraska ... one tooth. But, with a little imagination, the tooth was imagined to be part of a jawbone. The jaw bone part of a skull. The skull part of a skeleton and by the time the story hit the London newspaper, we not only had a picture of Nebraska man but we had a picture of Nebraska mom complete with fur; All from one tooth. Imagine what they could have done had they found a skeleton; my they might have printed a yearbook.

And then there was Peking man. The skulls found in caves outside of Peking, China. To wit Peking man before World War II. There's nothing human about them but they were in good shape. The skulls in the back were bashed in just a hair. Other than that, great shape. Tools were buried in the same area and the deduction was made. Ah-Ha! This must be a tool-using ape. Hence, an apeman. Great logic, right. No one stopped to consider tha

Re:Theory of evolution scientific?

[riprjak]

umm, didn't UC San Diego discover genetic evidence of macro evolution in 2000/2001 (relating, IIRC, to leg pairs on insects or some such) when they demonstrated a protein which caused the organism to develop one less pair of legs.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as Scientific Fact. Everything, EVERYTHING, is a theory; even though many (gravity, thermodynamics) are discussed as fact. No theory stands longer than its disproof; dont yabber about it you fscking christian psycopath; disprove it and it will go away.

Just my $0.02
err!
jak

Disclaimer: My disparaging remark about christians should not lead you to conclude I am anti-christian. I spread my dislike of religion equally.