And since when is this a new idea? Even in the 1969, Space Odyssey film, the primitive apes are shown smashing bones to eat marrow. This is not a new idea, nor is the fact that fat was also more valued. Ever since I was a kid, anthropologists always emphasized the importance of fat and bone marrow in the early development of humans.
@@Metal0sopher Recent studies of the Y-Chromosomes linage shows NO Genetics from any Ape/Chimpanzee... In fact it only shows Genetics from the Neanderthal which we now know were just a race of human beings... also the recent study by Harvard Graduate Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson indicates the Y-Chromosones "Clock" places the human linage back to about 4500 years or the time of the Biblical flood... before you Poo-Poo it you should watch the 24 part series from this fantastic biologist here: ua-cam.com/video/xP297DOy-Pc/v-deo.html I'm always amazed how some of the Evolutionary Biologist try to link fossils of Ape skulls to human beings, but are later shown to be only another specie of Ape(knuckle draggers) Example: The very first Artist renderings of Neanderthal man were portrayed as -"Ape Like Hairy beings", but now they are known to have been just as intelligent as modern humans.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
@@CosmicComedyLab Trying to twist real science into Biblical stories is a fools errand. If you want to believe in adult fairy stories, by all means refer to the Bible. If you want to seek truth, incomplete though it is, you need to use the scientific method. The fact you were watching this on a computer that was invented using the scientific method illustrates which method is more useful for the development of the human species. All religions are just human constructs, and the Bible is just one example of our ignorance. Science offers us a way to really understand our origins, for us to learn to find solutions to important problems, and a way for us to survive into the deep future.
Goodness… what a satisfying thing to listen to someone for an hour and not hear a single ‘..eehmm… aahh… like… you know… right?… ‘ ! Thank you for the interesting information you share -
Very good lecture, no hints of 'I want to be on TED Talks' at all. Hypothesis, supporting evidence and future directions, without hyperbole, or emoting. SUCH a relief. (NB. I am fine with people having and expressing emotions, but not as an integral part of a science lecture.)
Emotions, within reason, I part of normal people's behavior and, within reason, should be present more and more. For example, it's normal to get excited about new information uncovered that illuminates our origins. Other than that emotion, I can't really imagine and have never seen other researcher's emotions beyond excitement. Basically, I feel like "what on earth do you mean?"
Hammer-stone in your hand aiming at bone on an anvil-stone on the ground. You’d soon notice the sharp flakes that happen when particular stones hit each other. Might get you thinking eh.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Yeah, I think it made a few people think, but it didn’t go very far, most people just pounded bone like they’d been shown. Then came along a Newton, but everyone laughed at him, and before he could convince anyone there was something amazing about striking rocks together, the neighbours killed him for his stuff during a shortage of stuff. Thousands of years later an Einstein worked out how to make a spear point, and everyone was astonished. Thousands of years later, as people marvelled at their slightly better spear heads, along came a Tesla...
@IfWhiningAtProblemsWorks, WhyDoCorporationsLobby? Yep! When my Lord and Savior tasked me to watch out for his 'sheep' - He was being generous. Sheep act in their own self interest, people . . .not so much.
It would have been nice to see all of her slides. She addressed several the camera person never showed but kept her in the picture. Even in some cases, when her body language says "look at this" and turns to the slide display to talk about it.
Dave Franklyn I think this video was made by somebody from the audience, not a designated video pro. If the cameraman is pre assigned, he will have all the access and the cue when a subject needs to be highlighted.
The solution is simple: TWO cameras. And then edit with jumpcuts. Even if you’re on the slide for only a split second, we viewers can pause to see it. It is inexcusable in the 2020s to not do the bare minimum coverage. If this was 1970, then I can understand the excuse of being able to afford only one cam. But not in the age when everyone has one in their pocket.
@@dartfatherthe problem with your thinking is that even when she postures and points to the slide; the camera person will decide to zoom in on her while she is still pointing and looking at the slide. She points and looks at the slide and the camera person says “ok I’ll take the slide out of the shot and zoom in on the speaker for no reason.” The constant and unnecessary transition between the slow and long zooming in and out is distracting. Great lecture. No doubt. Just abysmal camerawork. Zero awareness from the camera person professional or not.
Are you against women or just against her? If the former, your username is apt. She was in the field and is presenting data from, in part, what her work there was. @@cavemancaveman5190
Gorillas ingest no fat, but they digest fat (fat from their gut microbes)... up to 80% of their calories are from saturated, short chain fats. This is true for cows, too. Imagine, if you could just eat fat directly (like from a dead elephant), you could get rid of your giant gut, and use the surplus energy to, say, grow a bigger noodle. Thought she'd talk about this complimentary evidence from nutrition science, but I guess any talk will have time limits.
A successful lion pride has plenty of surplus energy, including from fat, to afford a bigger brain. They didn't need one (one could argue that they could sure use one now to save them from extinction at our hands). We did need one just to survive with lions around. Coming down from the trees was a dangerous gambit. Scavenging big caucasus with hyenas around was even more dangerous. Lucy was brave!
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
@@philipb2134 Amber O'Hearn has a talk where she references the biology. It really doesn't sound unlikely to me when you think about grass and leaves. If she's right that mammals can't break down cellulose (I was taught that in biology class), then how can that sugar be the energy source for the animal? That microbes can break it down (the cell wall, I mean) and use that sugar for energy isn't surprising. That they produce short chain fatty acids as some byproduct doesn't seem odd either. But I'll look for that reference and post it later today. Cheers!
My first ‘meat’ that I ate after about five years of ovo-lacto vegetarianism was some delicious bone marrow. Thank god I am no longer plant-based for my diet. I eat meat, organs, fat, no seed oils, no seeds, dairy, and the least toxic plant foods: fruits and honey. Doing fantastic!
carnivore diet here. ruminant meat, fish, salt and water. doing fantastic. all my non communicable diseases have gone. i was vegan and ill, but now iam cured.
Anyone who eats a whole food diet knows how much one has to eat to get enough calories - a lot! Now imagine trying to find that much food in nature, all year and on a daily basis. Without calorie dense fat and marrow it would be very difficult. That's why nature's junk food, grains, was such a game changer. It messed up our health but gave us access to fast calories.
@hicoteo So true, we fed the masses but at a cost...I've finally broken my chains to the grains...and my health is recovering. Our modern food system makes addiction to carbs almost unavoidable--not to mention every week there's a sugar bomb being served for some occasion--always a holiday or some kiddos birthday--we've tied celebrating life with eating cake--pure junk for our bodies. Give me wild salmon with the skin on and stick a candle in it for my birthday....
@@ravenwolf7128 So, true. I've stopped giving people and kids sugar. I usually give nuts, cocoa nibs, coconut oil, cheese, .... anything but. Food quality is now one of the political campaign issues in the US. More people will open their eyes. Stay healthy 👍
anthropology informs me that the average traditional hunter-gatherer today spends roughly 4hrs a day or 20hrs a week on survival and food collection tasks. Even those in africa It would seem more onerous to us because our knowledge of wildfoods is minimal at best. So we would take longer, it would require for us to work on survival tasks every hour of the day to collect the few foods we know of and be missing the abundance at our feet
@@kim-ys2fsYes, back then people knew their stuff. They had to, to survive. I spend more time than that going to the stores, buying food, cooking and eating. 😊
Presentations like this are what keep me watching UA-cam. It's thoroughly gratifying for this curious layman to be able to observe systematic advances to a field of science as they happen, and Dr. Thompson is an outstanding communicator. I'm somewhat surprised to learn the extent to which hominid paleontology had yet to be contextually systematized, as compared to archaeology.
As a drummer I can totally understand the percussion thing. I can give the smallest child a drumstick and they immediately know the motion, and getting them into a tempo and going faster or slower is easy as well.
50% of the calories in breast milk is saturated fat. The French eat an astronomical amount of butter, but have low incidence of cardiovascular disease, even despite their high rates of smoking. Humans hunted most large animals on earth to the brink of extinction, or beyond, specifically for their fat. We chased whales across the planet on wooden floaty things for their blubber, and the lack of mammoths and giant sloths roaming national parks is likely our fault. The earliest archeological evidence for the most primitive farming is only 10,000 years old; growing anything in intermittent 50,000 year long ice ages would be pretty hard. When you catch the flu or your stomach is upset, you eat bone broth because it's easy on your digestive system. Take a hike on your nearest nature trail and look around at what is edible. You're surrounded by plants, but can't eat any of them. The select few plants we do eat we mostly domesticated in the last few thousand years. Humans are uniquely adapted to consume the majority of our calories from saturated fat. There's no other way we could afford these big fat brains, and that's why we put fat in or on literally everything we eat.
One of my family's favorite foods is bone marrow soup. It's funny how many families think it's gross to eat the marrow from bones (which is healthy as long as it's from a healthy animal) but yet think it's perfectly fine to give their kids sugary cerial and drinks that give them diabetes down the road. People have it so backwards for the most part.
My family love the marrow. It’s getting rare to find meat on the bone in western countries, that’s probably why people think it’s gross. It’s hard to find organ meat in the supermarket.
There is also the fact that one, or the group, could be chased from their prey by a larger predator and return to claim the marrow at a later time when safe
Probably happened more often than not. They knew the carnivores were only there for the meat, their fat was safe inside the bones and it would keep for several days. Hell, they were probably always scavenging marrow off discarded kills, there would be plenty of them. Lots safer than killing something and defending it like those boneheaded lions. ;- )
It seems to me that scavenging the bones from and accessing the marrow that the non human predator could not access would be ‘step one’ in the development process.
This and the shoreline gatherers theory are intriguing. Keep in mind that otters use percussion to open shellfish. Some birds drop bones on rocks to get the marrow fat... not the biggest brains.
Dr. Thompson is one of those humans that seems larger than life somehow. Intelligent, charismatic, well-spoken. Not at all like the average person I see in real life and also different from the movie-star, singer personality. Does anyone else think that?
Silly me, I went to an Ivy League school and never had a professor as engaging or attractive as Dr. Thompson. I like that she is speaking of real science here, the factual record, rather than trying to draw speculative inferences about hominid behaviors from inadequate data as many of her colleagues are doing. Frankly, I thought her central point was already the established view of how tool-making arose from earlier tool-using (rocks and sticks being basic tools), but she does tie it all together neatly. One aspect she glossed over deserves more emphasis: if Lucy was on the open savannah using a rock to get at the bone marrow of a large animal, she was most likely not alone. Angry predators and other scavengers would have abounded, and Lucy alone would have been no match for them. Other members of her clan or tribe went with her, driving scavengers away and using rocks, sticks, and vocalization to intimidate other predators and keep them at bay. There is safety in numbers. Then all members of the clan shared in the marrow extracted from the bones. It was a cooperative effort. We probably scavenged in groups, just as we later hunted in groups. This group behavior was likely the beginning of socialization and the sharing of other resources, which are among our characteristic human behaviors. Along with bigger brains, scavenging on the savannah may have also been vital to the start of our cultural evolution 3.5 million years ago. They all likely evolved together.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Maybe when you went to that Ivy League University, all the professors were primarily men, and a few old out dated women. And now that you are probably older than many of those professors were back then, there are many academic hotties. As for being foragers that scared off other predators... I agree that being in larger groups are what made this possible. I also believe this is how we began our progressive advances in intelligence. We couldn’t exploit every kill, so we learned how to predict other animals behaviour and use that against them. Back in the age of Lucy, the competition made us very diminutive. We were smaller then... not physically adapted for the environment we where in, there was no choice but to wise up, and then group up.
I like your comments, second paragraph, we thought through. What's interesting is that now it looks like you dig up the area look for what you want then return everything back that you dont. To me it just means someone who has a new idea will have to go back and dig up everything again. In this case it's all been mixed up. Every item should be recorded, its location, position, description, depth, etc so that you get a true picture or 3d layout of the dig or find. What they are doing is not very scientific,. They find lots of smashed bone in one area, why. What is near this, you bring bone back home to open and feed others or to keep until needed...
@@brucepad1019 archaeologist don't just "return everything they don't use". The literally have multiple specialist from different areas on digs, To try and get as much information as possible, from the excavation at the time. Most archaeologist will make a sample catalogue that is open and accessable to others, that can research the materials later, to learn more from them.
Very interesting. Not my field, but allow me to throw out a wild hyphothesis: The Afar Triangle, where Lucy was discovered, is one of the most geologically active regions on Earth, known for its unique geological features, including rifting, volcanic activity, and tectonic movements. This area is part of the East African Rift System, which is a major geological fault system that extends across Eastern Africa. Perhaps this is not by chance. Volcanic activity brings a few interesting elements together: The first is nutrient rich soil, which is excellent for plant growth and would have attracted large herbivores. Geothermal energy and hot springs, which hominins could have utilized to cook their food without fire. This could explain how hominins first got the nutrition to develop the brains to make tools and control fire, which in turn allowed them access to more nutriants. Living in a geologically active region would have exposed hominins to varying environmental pressures, such as changing landscapes, the need for mobility, and adaptation to new food sources. These pressures could have accelerated evolutionary changes, including cognitive and social adaptations. Volcanic regions often have a mosaic of different habitats-open grasslands, forests, and water sources-which would require hominins to develop versatile survival strategies, including the use of tools and possibly rudimentary shelters. Cooking food makes it easier to digest, allowing for more efficient nutrient absorption. This would have been especially important for starchy tubers, meats, and other hard-to-digest foods. Cooking can also reduce toxins and pathogens in food, making it safer to eat. This would have reduced the risk of foodborne illness. Just a thought.
The whole rift valley is known to be great for growing things both because the fresher geology has better diversity of minerals and because the hillier topography pulls a more consistent amount of moisture out of the atmosphere.
@@y00t00b3r The point I was trying to make was that hominins without tools would have had a hard time getting access to the energy surplus needed to evolve a large enough brain to develop the tools they needed to produce such a surplus in the first place. This is a chicken and egg problem that could possibly be explained by hominins taking advantage of what nature in the area provided for free, allowing them to cook without fire. Even if they scavenged carcasses left by carnivores, they would have had a much better chance to utilize such resources had they been able to cook these remains. Similar to how Snow Monkeys in Jigokudani Monkey Park in Japan utilize hot springs to stay warm in the winter, early hominins could have used hot springs to cook their food long before they had the ability to control fire.
In a hundred million years maybe your dog's evolved descendants will be able to drive a car.Sorry cars won't exist in a hundred million years or dogs or humans as we know them.
@@alandean6930 They would need to evolve hands first to handle a steering wheel. Also, intelligence would have to have a reproductive advantage for them. It doesn't always. Large brains use up a lot of energy, which the diet has to provide. They also make it more dangerous for females to give birth.
My dog drives. She sits on my lap and pays attn to the road. She puts her paws on the wheel and knows how to honk the horn. I'm just there as the seat warmer and to do the grunt work.
Interesting to hear the clear distinction she draws between what paleontologists are looking for and what archaeologists are looking for in the field. Makes sense that the quest for fatty food sources (brains, marrow, liver, etc) would be drivers of human evolution. I remember watching a UA-cam of some guy who actually went and lived among some hunter-gatherers for short periods. He asked them at one point what they thought the most important thing in life is. He was trying to see if they gave much attention to philosophical questions. Maybe they thought about love, or their familial bonds as being most important? Nah. The response was quick and unanimous: meat. Meat was the most important thing to them. Turns out that being a hunter-gatherer on the African savannah doesn't leave a lot of time for sitting around philosophizing. Planning the next hunt takes priority, apparently.
So if this significantly proves that fat is essential for health and intelligence why do governments/health organisations promote low fat and that fat is dangerous?
@@zachary4376 Agreed. Fit, healthy, happy, balanced people are not addicts capitalism depends on addicts. What's interesting we used to be hunter gatherers and when we started farming they could tithe and tax and dominate us..............
My current trade is fitter/welder and I don't make mistakes often. I stare at the drawings for hours and even days before positioning any part, to make certain I do everything in the proper and easiest order. I joke about how I literally sweat while looking at the drawings. I'm not one of the typical welders who hate and ridicule engineers and intellectuals. I understand the importance of forethought and planning, and critical thinking. Also, my diet is mostly eggs, bacon, grease, cheese, butter, milk, beef and pork, chicken, and maybe potatoes. But mostly diary and animal products. Since I studied nutrition back in high school and became a personal trainer years ago, I recognized the importance of animal products in our human diet. Carbs are generally excessive in most of our modern diets.
Is this true? It kinda makes sense I remember going to take ase mechanics exams at local colleges and being famished when I was done, more than a exercise regimen!
How much fat is thrown out today by people scared of it? How much that could be used for food in fast food fryers now goes into cosmetics and other nonsense.
Brilliant lecture. Finally someone who recognize that hypotheses should be a. Testable AND b. Make sense. The whole scavanging makes sense this way. The first weapons could well be stones too. Throwing stones is basic human skill that can be used to drive hynas jackals and voltures off carcasses
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first, the Scottish commoners complained they had to subsist on Salmon. During the 19th century the people of the island of St Kilda would plunder "mutton bird" (a cliff nesting sea bird) for their eggs and their very fatty meat. Coastal living reduces the competition with predators and provides a lot of Omega 3 fat and Vitamin D. Shellfish are also very high in fats. Hunting and gathering provides a wide variety of food sources.
I have seen a documentary wherein a group of chimpanzees chased down a small monkey and collectively drove it into the reach of the leader which was hiding. The leader killed and ate the monkey and shared it with some of the other chimpanzees.
Chimps do eat meat, primarily from Colobus monkeys they catch. They also hunt an animal we call a Bush Baby where they can find them & eat insects. However, humans eat far more meat. Humans also eat insects, but western culture rejects that.
I spent a big portion of the day interviewing for a technically advanced job and after watching this, I just want to scream "yes! this is who I am looking for!" She is so intelligent and confident. I wish there were more people like her out there.
Great work! Not every ancient human could get into an Elephant size thigh bone. This required the largest hominid males with the most upper body strength. You need to pick up a bowling ball size rock, raise it above your head, and smash it down with all your might up to dozens of times. This job was made much easier by letting the large bones dry for over a week, which means many of the bones were carried back to camp to dry. So, we will find piles of smashed-up large bones near hominid camps. Note that marrow stays edible for a very long time if stored within the bone until needed. The hominid sites will have large round top anvil stones surrounded by bone fragments and large two-hand rock hammers. Any bone piece large enough to pick up was put in the soup pot. It was also fun for two or more hominids to play the game of: let's pick up the large bone and drop it on the anvil stone many times. Look in the Sahara and Siberia for the best bone smashing hominid sites. Smashing bone on a flat anvil rock was easier but dangerous, if the large bone is too fresh the hammer rock is guaranteed to bounce back and kill you. If you must get into a fresh large bone you can take a hand held rock and bang out a ring around the center of the large bone to weaken it at the hit point. The most wonderful sound in our collective memory is the change in tone you hear when you hit a large bone that is finally about to open - the whole tribe cheers.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Wonderful talk. Very interesting but I found it frustrating that she was referencing the board and using a pointer to highlight what she was talking about but the camera remained focused on her on did not show the board.
In the context she mentions it, you don't lose weight by not eating carbs and fat, you lose weight by not eating carbs and eating protein and fat (saturated animal fat is best)...
Makes sense. Those of us who are on the carnivore diet try to get 80%, maybe 85% of our calories from fat. People who are new to it think we're eating giant piles of steaks like pancakes, but we actually don't eat that much meat.
One signature that would differentiate between eating seeds and eating animals that ate the seeds would be tooth wear, and afarensis tooth wear is incompatible with significant seed eating. I lost half a grade point because I compared walking erect to ground level "soaring" the way vultures do. The earliest flaked stone tools are not "complicated." But you do have to be accurate in placing a blow.
Love this lady, so passionate about her subject you cannot help but get hooked. She made it very easy to understand and her hypothesis is so plausible when explained like this. This lady is set to impact and create great conversations in her field.
You don't have to have a stone tip to make an effective spear. Many tropical humans still use 100% wooden spears. They could have been hunters if they had a decent size stick. Why not mention the obvious.
Because she is talking about fossil proof. There’s probably no evidence of wooden tools left now. Not sure if there are fossil records of the grinding or sharpening stones used to get the sticks sharp. Interesting.
The society of primitive technology postulated in 2001 that there was a bone and wood age before the Stone Age, but there would be nearly no record of it as they don't fossilize.
Here's a ChatGPT summary: - Jess Thompson expresses gratitude for the introduction and mentions her affiliation with ASU and IHO. - She discusses her collaboration with Curtis Marion and her project in Malawi. - The main focus of her talk is the origins of the human predatory pattern, particularly in Ethiopia. - She emphasizes the importance of diet in human evolution, linking it to survival and cognitive development. - Diet is crucial for understanding human evolution, as it influences survival and reproduction. - Major milestones in human evolution, such as cooperation and weaponry, are linked to diet. - Unique human traits like large brains, tool use, and bipedalism are connected to diet. - The traditional narrative of human evolution involving tool making, meat eating, and the emergence of Homo is questioned. - New evidence suggests that these behaviors did not occur simultaneously but have deeper roots in earlier species like Australopithecus. - Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, exhibited flexibility in diet and environment, exploiting new resources. - The geochemistry of Lucy's teeth indicates a varied diet, not limited to trees or open spaces. - The traditional story of sharp tools for meat cutting leading to Homo is challenged. - The cost of a large brain is high, requiring an energy surplus, which could come from diet changes. - The importance of fat in the diet is highlighted, as it provides a concentrated source of calories. - Humans are unique in hunting large prey and using tools, unlike chimpanzees. - The human predatory pattern involves hunting larger animals and consuming fat, not just meat. - Early hominins like Lucy may have used simple tools like hammerstones to access bone marrow. - Systematic fieldwork and new methodologies are needed to test these hypotheses. - Main message: The origins of the human predatory pattern and the role of diet, particularly fat, in human evolution are more complex and rooted in earlier species like Australopithecus, challenging traditional narratives.
In 2013, after I had retired, I took a free class in Paleoanthropology from Arizona State. Maybe it is still available online. It is free, if you don’t need any educational documents anymore.
I wonder why Dr. Jessica didn't mention our other point of difference over other great apes: our cooling system, which involves sweating through furless skin to benefit from evaporation. We might not be able to run as fast as our prey, but we can track them further than they can run. That's a significant point of difference if hunting is your main method of collecting the food that has become species-specific for us.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Your comment is a big turnoff. "The lady" has the right to make a presentation about human evolution without you making it clear that all you care about is whether she would make a good sex partner for you. As if nothing else about her matters at all.
@@robinlillian9471 What right is that? The same right we have to say she's hot? If she has an issue with comments on her own presentation here. she'd let it be known. No need to take offense on her behalf. She's not helpless. Maybe she's actually a woman that appreciates compliments, and is comfortable with her sexuality.
@@robinlillian9471 I found Ms. Thompson's talk to be interesting, enlightening, well thought through, spoken and presented clearly. She does strike me as being very intelligent and, although it went unsaid, she undeniably radiates health, grace, and pulchritude which normal people of all persuasions find attractive. Where did I imply that I wanted to fuck "the lady"? (and why did you add quotes?)?? Your comment says more about you than I care to know.
So, the split that led to us was when one of our common ancestors with the chimps one day cracked open a bone instead of a nut and created a slightly different culture of tool use. Then the change in culture also changed us. Very good insight.
.... eventually tripling our brain size.... and if you want to shrink your offsprings brain size again: just put them back on that largely plant based diet! 😂
Oddly enough humans are closer in genetics to gorillas but social and brain use to chimpanzees, funny enough in genetics we human take most of our burnt victim skin grafts and heart values from .. pigs .. ? Other than the grass lands coming off of Ethiopia highlands holding nearly all the fossil stages of early humans. The coast line of Ethiopia has a lot of different stages proto human fossils. Life is a lot different when your pregnant females are safe out of the way near water, and the males are bring up shell fish to them. Spend winter on the coast line for easy food, and the hot summers in the windy highlands near lava flows/ hot water springs to warm you at night.
@@krispalermo8133 I have never seen a paper claim that gorillas are closer to humans than chimps are..... maybe it's true for some humans? Vegans would love to have that huge gut and seem to be prepared to "buy" it with the reduced brain size.... (they already shy away from working it too hard)
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Very interesting video. It is along the lines of another palaeontologist I saw discussing human evolution who came to the field later in life after a main career in economics. He and his team brought a perspective of “follow the money” that is emphasized in economics and applied it to chemical energy to give new insights into how brain size was selected for. People often think of the “nature” in natural selection as being the mostly climate and other animals as competition or threats but refocusing on energy budgets as a selective pressure can be helpful and seems to be along the lines of missing the “fat” part of the story because we aren’t thinking about it when we look for “meat eating” in our history.
I don't get it. I'm certain I heard about the marrow seeking behavior being key to human development at least 15 years ago. Or is it just that it's being attributed earlier in evolutionary development?
Sort of like how we seek out candies with different filled centers, those strawberry ones, gushers, bonkers, cupcakes, donuts, pinatas, mystery boxes, geodes, eggs, wontons, egg rolls, empanadas, pies, pretty much everything that has some secret inside except for brains and marrow because that's Gross.
The TV series "Alone" has done amazing things to rehabilitate the value of fat in the public's consciousness. In season 7 a contestant kills a Musk Ox with a knife, a small cow! He is obsessed with securing fat from the creature, the brain and the bone broth were pure gold to him, the muscle not so much. I noticed as soon as contestants were comfortable about their future food security their minds would turn to higher values, meaning and intamacy with mate and offspring. Lucy's bigger brain no doubt put a lot of demands on her companions!
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
I really enjoyed the talk. I'd heard of the bone marrow idea sometime ago but it was exciting to hear about the research being done now. What she and her colleagues are doing is super cool.
22 дні тому
The real problem I found is I spent too much time looking at her and forgot listen to what she was saying.. I'll play it again some day as a podcast.
This is a brilliant idea and makes total sense. In addition to fat, I would assume bone marrow contains minerals as well, of which Sodium is the limiting factor. Salt is rare and precious for all terrestrial life, and we need about 2 grams per day. Fruit and edible roots have very little sodium. Another one may be B12, of which bone marrow is also a very good source, while vegetarian diet is not.
Excellent, thank you for this. Eating the brain is not talked about much, but it is an excellent source of Omega 3 fats which are essential for brain development and health, and we don't need to get it from fish.
She somehow reminds me a lot of Jodie Foster in Contact. A scientist who isn't entirely comfortable being in front of a whole group of people presenting on something she's incredibly enthused by and interested in, trying to infect her audience with just a little bit of that enthusiasm. And this is pretty darned interesting, I must say.
Well she infected the hell out of me. As soon as she said "fat" my mind leaped to "easily accessible high quality energy, boom, advantage." Fat is instant energy relatively speaking and would provide a different path to evolve on in comparison to herbivores or other carnivores. They were hauling groceries home and cooking it. These guys were going to McDonald's. I can relate. I ride motorcycle with my riding partner daughter and hitting McD's at mid-day is the best way to acquire sufficient fat and protein to carry me for an afternoon's ride. Of course the ride is always started with a good steak and eggs and coffee breakfast, a good base for a morning's ride. Ask any Aussie. (I'm Canadian) We often cover 600+ km a day so food is an important part of the day. Jerky and coffee from the gas station snack counter will only get you so far. I digressed but the logic follows.
Well, she explains things well, in layman's terms. When scientists do that, ppl get inspired. Most scientists are enthused about their field but its hard to explain to ordinary ppl.
I had the same thought about the Jodie Foster character. Foster went to an Ivy League college - I think Yale - so she was surely acquainted with this type.
Iconic lecture ruined by rubbish videography! The point of video over pure audio is to capture elements of the presentation that will make it easier to understand. So should the camera be trained on the speaker or on the screen? Yeah you all know but this guy didn’t. Ideally you should have two cameras, but if you only have one then it MUST stay on the screen most of the time…this guy got it back to front. But you know he had two cameras (his smartphone) and training that on the screen and camera on the speaker would’ve given a much better result. You can tell by his exposure settings blowing out the screen that he had no idea what his job was all about…so annoying!
Tying fat to brain size is brilliant. Nutrition information on essential lipids in modern diets is creating new theories about the development of modern neurological diseases.
The usage of fire was invented a lot later, Homo Erectus did it about 1 mio years ago. Australopitecus Afarensis lived a lot earlier, about 2.9 - 3.9 million years ago.
@@richardpetek712 Thank you so much Richard for the info. You forgot the meat on a wire, on a 🪁 Kite, in Lightning Storms Hypotheses. And the Earth is, as we all know is only 6 thousand years old.............. HAHAH. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🇬🇧👍 Take Care.
Excellent presentation and as a Flint napper, I agree with 99%. However, the weak point is these little creatures must’ve been hanging around the carcasses perhaps with handy River tumbled stones to obtain something before they ever knew about what was in the bone. Risk predators for small chunks of meat, could’ve been seasonal, the dry season and reduced Food sources, and the round stones could’ve been simply to break a joint and run away with the leg to get away from all the other things eat eating on a lion kill. Then the discovery of the marrow and the fat . Great talk.
prehumans were already cutting and eating meat when it was easy to get, but then it stopped being so easy to get so prehumans that managed to adapt to hunting harder-to-acquire animals survived, and that is what created the next evolutionary branch. what was the advantage? running. stamina. a more upright structure. but the bone marrow start makes some sense, and it works well with the start of cooking. because if your species has recently learned that there is food inside of bones, then you are going to start finding places where you can find ample bones (and no competition). well one of those places that you could find large dead animals without any carnivores around for competition, is where a forest fire recently passed. you wander around the ash landscape and you find burned out corpses which you were looking for, and thats when you discover that freshly cooked meat is actually amazing. once you have the idea to use stone tools on animal corpses AND cook them, then you really develop a need to hunt larger animals when you cant easily find corpses
Seems a bit of a stretch that there could have been enough large bones laying about to scavenge that it would have supplied enough nutrition to actually drive the evolution of the brain. It would have taken several such animals being killed in a given area at least several times a week to have fed even a small number of these hominids. It seems more reasonable to speculate that they must have hit upon some means of proactively killing large game themselves long before it might otherwise have seemed possible.
Apparently some of the anthropological evidence points to the main brain growth spurt just after we began to hunt, thereby allowing us to have "first pick", if you like. of the fattiest parts. That would make your speculation correct. Not that I've watched the above video yet tho....
It's a supplement to a diet. Not a main supply for it. Also, yeah. If there's a crap load of carcasses around from multiple predators, it's absolutely possible to get multiple sources of bone marrow in a week.
@@Cbd_7ohm But the question is how occasional of a supplement was it? I'm sure that early hominids would have taken advantage of it when they found it, but what I question is the amount available. It seems to me that you would have needed at least dozens of such kills daily in a relatively small area consistently over hundreds of thousands of years for it to have been the major driving environmental factor in the evolution of the brain. Finding a bone here and there every few months and sharing it with a group of a dozen or so would not seem to be able to provide enough nutrition for that purpose.
Fascinating and very plausible. One question was her statements that large animals (predators?) declined as Lucy's species were scavenging bone marrow, but hyenas were the only ones also able to access... So hyenas should decline but what else? The paper must be well out now so will have a look.
For all you interested in Philosophy of Science (please, not all hands up at once!) Jess Thompson's talk about the connection between brain evolution, tools, and diet - this is an excellent illustration of Michael Streven's idea of the "iron law" of Scientific practice which he talks about in his 2020 book "The Knowledge Machine" The secret to science's success is an ironclad determination to restrict scientific inquiry specifically to the public sharing of the results of observations; it is the results of the pursuit of universally shared data that ultimately makes or breaks scientific theories. We can tell each other more beautiful stories about our origins, but systematically extracting accurate and relevant data is what will eventually lead to scientific consensus. Ultimately the data tells a better story, but it might not be as beautiful a story as what we intuitively feel about the subject.
Yeah, currently I am in a competition with my dog. She has caught and killed 3 rats the old fashioned way, I have caught 6 with traps over the past 3 months.
Fat yields 2x as many calories as carbohydrates when consumed, but requires 4x as much oxygen to do so. It therefore stands to reason that fat is advantageous at low energy expenditure like walking but not when running or other activities which require a lot of oxygen for the system. As the brain consumes about 20% of our energy when we're sleeping, fat would thence also appear to be a good energy source when we're engaged in thislow-exertion state.
I look forward to the day when some archeologist finds my bones and decides that I was really Bigus Dikus Makimus. When that day comes my life will have been justified.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
The Atkins Diet works because it is HIGH fat. The diet that doesnt work is mainstream nutritional advice aka low fat Plant Based. Maybe this is what you meant or more likely a way of discussing this without being targeted by modern nutritionists.
Also you have to factor in, what type of working life style you have. Sit at a desk working a phone or computer all day ? Standing in a factory job with barely nothing to do. Or doing line work in a factory where you hand pack 45,000 hair spray cans in your shift, or a dish washer doing the work load of two or three people.
Atkins is nothing to do with what she’s talking about because a weight loss diet is no good for survival. As for short chain fatty acids they are formed in the gut, when gut flora digests fibre and in 2017 it was discovered the human body is covered in short chain fatty acid receptors so eating a lot of high fibre plants is an important part of human diet and health.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Wow. This reminds me of what TED used to be about; science and technology and intellectual progress. It's nice to know that the concept still survives even if the original idea has been unceremoniously slaughtered.
Excellent and entertaining lecture. No talking down or padding out, just nice confident, concise delivery. Thank you, professor.
I was going to comment, but you said it perfectly. So, I'm not going to comment.
Brilliant! It seems very reasonable that "we" learned to use large stones to smash skulls & femurs long before we learned how to flake stone knives.
Thank you Dr Berry
And since when is this a new idea? Even in the 1969, Space Odyssey film, the primitive apes are shown smashing bones to eat marrow. This is not a new idea, nor is the fact that fat was also more valued. Ever since I was a kid, anthropologists always emphasized the importance of fat and bone marrow in the early development of humans.
@@Metal0sopher Recent studies of the Y-Chromosomes linage shows NO Genetics from any Ape/Chimpanzee... In fact it only shows Genetics from the Neanderthal which we now know were just a race of human beings... also the recent study by Harvard Graduate Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson indicates the Y-Chromosones "Clock" places the human linage back to about 4500 years or the time of the Biblical flood... before you Poo-Poo it you should watch the 24 part series from this fantastic biologist here: ua-cam.com/video/xP297DOy-Pc/v-deo.html I'm always amazed how some of the Evolutionary Biologist try to link fossils of Ape skulls to human beings, but are later shown to be only another specie of Ape(knuckle draggers) Example: The very first Artist renderings of Neanderthal man were portrayed as -"Ape Like Hairy beings", but now they are known to have been just as intelligent as modern humans.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
@@CosmicComedyLab Trying to twist real science into Biblical stories is a fools errand. If you want to believe in adult fairy stories, by all means refer to the Bible. If you want to seek truth, incomplete though it is, you need to use the scientific method. The fact you were watching this on a computer that was invented using the scientific method illustrates which method is more useful for the development of the human species. All religions are just human constructs, and the Bible is just one example of our ignorance. Science offers us a way to really understand our origins, for us to learn to find solutions to important problems, and a way for us to survive into the deep future.
Goodness… what a satisfying thing to listen to someone for an hour and not hear a single ‘..eehmm… aahh… like… you know… right?… ‘ ! Thank you for the interesting information you share -
I’m only 1:40 in and I’ve heard 3 of them. Oh well.
Quite a few, “right?“s, actually.
Very good lecture, no hints of 'I want to be on TED Talks' at all. Hypothesis, supporting evidence and future directions, without hyperbole, or emoting. SUCH a relief. (NB. I am fine with people having and expressing emotions, but not as an integral part of a science lecture.)
Thank goodness this demand is growing; I can't stand TED anymore.
Imagine dropping a Nota Bene in a UA-cam comment.
@@ShadowWizard123 Nota good idea? ;)
@@michaeljames5936 not so bad 😁highly unexpected maybe
Emotions, within reason, I part of normal people's behavior and, within reason, should be present more and more. For example, it's normal to get excited about new information uncovered that illuminates our origins. Other than that emotion, I can't really imagine and have never seen other researcher's emotions beyond excitement. Basically, I feel like "what on earth do you mean?"
Hammer-stone in your hand aiming at bone on an anvil-stone on the ground. You’d soon notice the sharp flakes that happen when particular stones hit each other. Might get you thinking eh.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Yeah, I think it made a few people think, but it didn’t go very far, most people just pounded bone like they’d been shown. Then came along a Newton, but everyone laughed at him, and before he could convince anyone there was something amazing about striking rocks together, the neighbours killed him for his stuff during a shortage of stuff. Thousands of years later an Einstein worked out how to make a spear point, and everyone was astonished. Thousands of years later, as people marvelled at their slightly better spear heads, along came a Tesla...
@@randyhughens5138 I'm not sure what Dr. Tour's work has to do with the content of this video.
@IfWhiningAtProblemsWorks, WhyDoCorporationsLobby? Yep! When my Lord and Savior tasked me to watch out for his 'sheep' - He was being generous. Sheep act in their own self interest, people . . .not so much.
Yup makes sense that they'd notice. Especially if they had accidentally cut themselves with the sharp edge.
It would have been nice to see all of her slides. She addressed several the camera person never showed but kept her in the picture. Even in some cases, when her body language says "look at this" and turns to the slide display to talk about it.
Dave Franklyn I think this video was made by somebody from the audience, not a designated video pro. If the cameraman is pre assigned, he will have all the access and the cue when a subject needs to be highlighted.
That is a fault in a lot of the Tedx talks as well. It can leave the YT audience in the dark.
terrible camera work regarding the subject.
The solution is simple:
TWO cameras.
And then edit with jumpcuts. Even if you’re on the slide for only a split second, we viewers can pause to see it. It is inexcusable in the 2020s to not do the bare minimum coverage. If this was 1970, then I can understand the excuse of being able to afford only one cam. But not in the age when everyone has one in their pocket.
@@dartfatherthe problem with your thinking is that even when she postures and points to the slide; the camera person will decide to zoom in on her while she is still pointing and looking at the slide. She points and looks at the slide and the camera person says “ok I’ll take the slide out of the shot and zoom in on the speaker for no reason.” The constant and unnecessary transition between the slow and long zooming in and out is distracting.
Great lecture. No doubt.
Just abysmal camerawork. Zero awareness from the camera person professional or not.
After watching the passion and excitement with which Dr. Thompson delivered this presentation, I’m rooting for her to have a big impact on her field.
Me too! This was brilliant!
She will get stuck with doing presentations. The true hotshots are out in the field. He job is super important and very well done. Thanks
Are you against women or just against her? If the former, your username is apt. She was in the field and is presenting data from, in part, what her work there was. @@cavemancaveman5190
Gorillas ingest no fat, but they digest fat (fat from their gut microbes)... up to 80% of their calories are from saturated, short chain fats. This is true for cows, too. Imagine, if you could just eat fat directly (like from a dead elephant), you could get rid of your giant gut, and use the surplus energy to, say, grow a bigger noodle. Thought she'd talk about this complimentary evidence from nutrition science, but I guess any talk will have time limits.
You hit the nail on the head man
A successful lion pride has plenty of surplus energy, including from fat, to afford a bigger brain. They didn't need one (one could argue that they could sure use one now to save them from extinction at our hands). We did need one just to survive with lions around. Coming down from the trees was a dangerous gambit. Scavenging big caucasus with hyenas around was even more dangerous. Lucy was brave!
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
That sounds unlikely. Do you have source material one might verify?
@@philipb2134 Amber O'Hearn has a talk where she references the biology. It really doesn't sound unlikely to me when you think about grass and leaves. If she's right that mammals can't break down cellulose (I was taught that in biology class), then how can that sugar be the energy source for the animal? That microbes can break it down (the cell wall, I mean) and use that sugar for energy isn't surprising. That they produce short chain fatty acids as some byproduct doesn't seem odd either. But I'll look for that reference and post it later today. Cheers!
My first ‘meat’ that I ate after about five years of ovo-lacto vegetarianism was some delicious bone marrow. Thank god I am no longer plant-based for my diet. I eat meat, organs, fat, no seed oils, no seeds, dairy, and the least toxic plant foods: fruits and honey. Doing fantastic!
How do you feel about cheese?
So you are carnivore or lion diet ?
@@williammccartney4833 Neither if they eat fruit and honey.. more Paul Sugarino misinformation.
carnivore diet here. ruminant meat, fish, salt and water. doing fantastic. all my non communicable diseases have gone. i was vegan and ill, but now iam cured.
This isn't your diary.
Anyone who eats a whole food diet knows how much one has to eat to get enough calories - a lot! Now imagine trying to find that much food in nature, all year and on a daily basis. Without calorie dense fat and marrow it would be very difficult. That's why nature's junk food, grains, was such a game changer. It messed up our health but gave us access to fast calories.
Well said
@hicoteo So true, we fed the masses but at a cost...I've finally broken my chains to the grains...and my health is recovering. Our modern food system makes addiction to carbs almost unavoidable--not to mention every week there's a sugar bomb being served for some occasion--always a holiday or some kiddos birthday--we've tied celebrating life with eating cake--pure junk for our bodies. Give me wild salmon with the skin on and stick a candle in it for my birthday....
@@ravenwolf7128 So, true. I've stopped giving people and kids sugar. I usually give nuts, cocoa nibs, coconut oil, cheese, .... anything but. Food quality is now one of the political campaign issues in the US. More people will open their eyes.
Stay healthy 👍
anthropology informs me that the average traditional hunter-gatherer today spends roughly 4hrs a day or 20hrs a week on survival and food collection tasks. Even those in africa
It would seem more onerous to us because our knowledge of wildfoods is minimal at best. So we would take longer, it would require for us to work on survival tasks every hour of the day to collect the few foods we know of and be missing the abundance at our feet
@@kim-ys2fsYes, back then people knew their stuff. They had to, to survive. I spend more time than that going to the stores, buying food, cooking and eating. 😊
Presentations like this are what keep me watching UA-cam. It's thoroughly gratifying for this curious layman to be able to observe systematic advances to a field of science as they happen, and Dr. Thompson is an outstanding communicator. I'm somewhat surprised to learn the extent to which hominid paleontology had yet to be contextually systematized, as compared to archaeology.
@Michael Gerber Your point is well-taken, but the existence of this presentation belies the argument that UA-cam is devoid of worthwhile information.
She’s so impressive in every single way. Amazing lecture and presentation style !
The presenter was well cast and dressed : All evidence of intelligent life evolved on Earth.
She hot boiii
As a drummer I can totally understand the percussion thing. I can give the smallest child a drumstick and they immediately know the motion, and getting them into a tempo and going faster or slower is easy as well.
Hitting things with sticks in new and interesting ways is the story of human dominance
We have the best sticks
@@alexanderofrhodes9622 And we have the unique ability to throw those sticks in deadly fashion for more effective hunting.
@@luddity I am human, make stick go weeeee
Who knew that Ringo Starr was so perfectly cast in Caveman.
Nice point my niece plays drums well
50% of the calories in breast milk is saturated fat. The French eat an astronomical amount of butter, but have low incidence of cardiovascular disease, even despite their high rates of smoking. Humans hunted most large animals on earth to the brink of extinction, or beyond, specifically for their fat. We chased whales across the planet on wooden floaty things for their blubber, and the lack of mammoths and giant sloths roaming national parks is likely our fault. The earliest archeological evidence for the most primitive farming is only 10,000 years old; growing anything in intermittent 50,000 year long ice ages would be pretty hard. When you catch the flu or your stomach is upset, you eat bone broth because it's easy on your digestive system. Take a hike on your nearest nature trail and look around at what is edible. You're surrounded by plants, but can't eat any of them. The select few plants we do eat we mostly domesticated in the last few thousand years. Humans are uniquely adapted to consume the majority of our calories from saturated fat. There's no other way we could afford these big fat brains, and that's why we put fat in or on literally everything we eat.
the french paradox was solved. They kept poor records. They have just as much cardiovascular disease as the US, because meat is unhealthy.
Native cultures did not hunt the megafauna to extinction. Stop w that propaganda.
My family think it gross that I love to bite into bird bones and suck out the marrow - did it since childhood.
Now I have an excuse.
Me too.
One of my family's favorite foods is bone marrow soup. It's funny how many families think it's gross to eat the marrow from bones (which is healthy as long as it's from a healthy animal) but yet think it's perfectly fine to give their kids sugary cerial and drinks that give them diabetes down the road. People have it so backwards for the most part.
@@billygauthier9512 I knew I wasn't alone. Great to hear other people have similar tastes.
My family love the marrow. It’s getting rare to find meat on the bone in western countries, that’s probably why people think it’s gross. It’s hard to find organ meat in the supermarket.
@@sexysilversurfer Can't find organ meat? I think that's offal for you.
Ironic: Vilhjálmur Stefánsson wrote a book called 'Fat of the Land' and it was about how fat was essential to indigenous people he stayed with.
And he noted that men starved if they ate only lean meat with no fat (rabbit meat)
Íslenskur; Icelandic
Note, that the time period Dr Thompson is talking about. Is back when human ancestors were scavengers. Not when they were really capable of hunting.
I don't think that's ironic. I think it's an intentional reference.
why is that ironic?
There is also the fact that one, or the group, could be chased from their prey by a larger predator and return to claim the marrow at a later time when safe
Perhaps thats where the phrase 'I'll come back to marrow' comes from :-)
@@chrisnicholson2609
Quite, maybe 👍
@@chrisnicholson2609
Best comment
Probably happened more often than not. They knew the carnivores were only there for the meat, their fat was safe inside the bones and it would keep for several days. Hell, they were probably always scavenging marrow off discarded kills, there would be plenty of them. Lots safer than killing something and defending it like those boneheaded lions. ;- )
It seems to me that scavenging the bones from and accessing the marrow that the non human predator could not access would be ‘step one’ in the development process.
This and the shoreline gatherers theory are intriguing. Keep in mind that otters use percussion to open shellfish. Some birds drop bones on rocks to get the marrow fat... not the biggest brains.
Yes however they use a lot of neuro calories.
@@Charbenaro usually a smart investment
Maybe the change in flora allowed the abundance of new fauna that made those primitive behaviors become a lot more profitable...
Flying is much more energy expensive. It is not very likely to have really big brains and ability to fly.
Its the brain to body ratio that i hope shes talking about because obviously elephants have bigger brains
Dr. Thompson is a wonderful speaker and clearly a sharp instrument in the toolbox of human achievement.
She crushed it!
Dr. Thompson is one of those humans that seems larger than life somehow. Intelligent, charismatic, well-spoken. Not at all like the average person I see in real life and also different from the movie-star, singer personality. Does anyone else think that?
I definitely agree
I see intelligent well spoken people every day. Maybe you need a better circle of people. Just kidding I actually agree with you!
And beautiful
Silly me, I went to an Ivy League school and never had a professor as engaging or attractive as Dr. Thompson. I like that she is speaking of real science here, the factual record, rather than trying to draw speculative inferences about hominid behaviors from inadequate data as many of her colleagues are doing. Frankly, I thought her central point was already the established view of how tool-making arose from earlier tool-using (rocks and sticks being basic tools), but she does tie it all together neatly.
One aspect she glossed over deserves more emphasis: if Lucy was on the open savannah using a rock to get at the bone marrow of a large animal, she was most likely not alone. Angry predators and other scavengers would have abounded, and Lucy alone would have been no match for them. Other members of her clan or tribe went with her, driving scavengers away and using rocks, sticks, and vocalization to intimidate other predators and keep them at bay. There is safety in numbers. Then all members of the clan shared in the marrow extracted from the bones. It was a cooperative effort. We probably scavenged in groups, just as we later hunted in groups. This group behavior was likely the beginning of socialization and the sharing of other resources, which are among our characteristic human behaviors. Along with bigger brains, scavenging on the savannah may have also been vital to the start of our cultural evolution 3.5 million years ago. They all likely evolved together.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Maybe when you went to that Ivy League University, all the professors were primarily men, and a few old out dated women. And now that you are probably older than many of those professors were back then, there are many academic hotties.
As for being foragers that scared off other predators... I agree that being in larger groups are what made this possible. I also believe this is how we began our progressive advances in intelligence. We couldn’t exploit every kill, so we learned how to predict other animals behaviour and use that against them. Back in the age of Lucy, the competition made us very diminutive. We were smaller then... not physically adapted for the environment we where in, there was no choice but to wise up, and then group up.
Me too, and it was at her 'Ivy League" school. Sadly, it was 60 years ago, and women were not faculty OR students then:)
I like your comments, second paragraph, we thought through. What's interesting is that now it looks like you dig up the area look for what you want then return everything back that you dont. To me it just means someone who has a new idea will have to go back and dig up everything again. In this case it's all been mixed up. Every item should be recorded, its location, position, description, depth, etc so that you get a true picture or 3d layout of the dig or find. What they are doing is not very scientific,. They find lots of smashed bone in one area, why. What is near this, you bring bone back home to open and feed others or to keep until needed...
@@brucepad1019 archaeologist don't just "return everything they don't use". The literally have multiple specialist from different areas on digs, To try and get as much information as possible, from the excavation at the time. Most archaeologist will make a sample catalogue that is open and accessable to others, that can research the materials later, to learn more from them.
This is the weirdest episode of “Bones” I’ve seen yet.
She does look like her. 😂
Yes, now that you mention it. 👏🏻
Lol. She does resemble her, and Lucy Lawless .
underrated comment
Very interesting. Not my field, but allow me to throw out a wild hyphothesis:
The Afar Triangle, where Lucy was discovered, is one of the most geologically active regions on Earth, known for its unique geological features, including rifting, volcanic activity, and tectonic movements. This area is part of the East African Rift System, which is a major geological fault system that extends across Eastern Africa.
Perhaps this is not by chance. Volcanic activity brings a few interesting elements together:
The first is nutrient rich soil, which is excellent for plant growth and would have attracted large herbivores.
Geothermal energy and hot springs, which hominins could have utilized to cook their food without fire. This could explain how hominins first got the nutrition to develop the brains to make tools and control fire, which in turn allowed them access to more nutriants.
Living in a geologically active region would have exposed hominins to varying environmental pressures, such as changing landscapes, the need for mobility, and adaptation to new food sources. These pressures could have accelerated evolutionary changes, including cognitive and social adaptations.
Volcanic regions often have a mosaic of different habitats-open grasslands, forests, and water sources-which would require hominins to develop versatile survival strategies, including the use of tools and possibly rudimentary shelters.
Cooking food makes it easier to digest, allowing for more efficient nutrient absorption. This would have been especially important for starchy tubers, meats, and other hard-to-digest foods.
Cooking can also reduce toxins and pathogens in food, making it safer to eat. This would have reduced the risk of foodborne illness.
Just a thought.
Plus it is geologically researched really well. That helps with dating the finds immencely!
The whole rift valley is known to be great for growing things both because the fresher geology has better diversity of minerals and because the hillier topography pulls a more consistent amount of moisture out of the atmosphere.
meat is not hard to digest
@@y00t00b3rcorrect. It is easily digestible due to our highly acidic stomach acid.
@@y00t00b3r The point I was trying to make was that hominins without tools would have had a hard time getting access to the energy surplus needed to evolve a large enough brain to develop the tools they needed to produce such a surplus in the first place. This is a chicken and egg problem that could possibly be explained by hominins taking advantage of what nature in the area provided for free, allowing them to cook without fire. Even if they scavenged carcasses left by carnivores, they would have had a much better chance to utilize such resources had they been able to cook these remains. Similar to how Snow Monkeys in Jigokudani Monkey Park in Japan utilize hot springs to stay warm in the winter, early hominins could have used hot springs to cook their food long before they had the ability to control fire.
Excellent presentation. It all makes total sense to me. Thanks so much for your excellent work!
My dog will only eat McDonalds ... how long will it take him to be able to drive my car?
(this is a joke - the lecture is really interesting)
Homer Simpson's ancestor: "Mmmmm... Marrow fat..."
In a hundred million years maybe your dog's evolved descendants will be able to drive a car.Sorry cars won't exist in a hundred million years or dogs or humans as we know them.
@@alandean6930 They would need to evolve hands first to handle a steering wheel. Also, intelligence would have to have a reproductive advantage for them. It doesn't always. Large brains use up a lot of energy, which the diet has to provide. They also make it more dangerous for females to give birth.
My dog drives. She sits on my lap and pays attn to the road. She puts her paws on the wheel and knows how to honk the horn. I'm just there as the seat warmer and to do the grunt work.
dogs already know how to drive. they pretend not to know how so they can bark out the window while you drive.
Homer Simpson's ancestor: "Mmmmm... Marrow fat..."
Homer Saipan: mmmm marrow fat
bashes his finger while holding down the bone: "D'OH!".
after his spiky-haired son snickers: "Why you little!..."
Mr or Ms camera operator, when she says "look at this" we want to actually look at whatever it is. PAY ATTENTION!
Yes! Very frustrating.
the operator was a lot more interested in her than the presentation.
@@stoyanb.1668 tough job
Ditto!!!!
Wow, you talk in a very entitled way considering that this is a free content
Interesting to hear the clear distinction she draws between what paleontologists are looking for and what archaeologists are looking for in the field. Makes sense that the quest for fatty food sources (brains, marrow, liver, etc) would be drivers of human evolution.
I remember watching a UA-cam of some guy who actually went and lived among some hunter-gatherers for short periods. He asked them at one point what they thought the most important thing in life is. He was trying to see if they gave much attention to philosophical questions. Maybe they thought about love, or their familial bonds as being most important?
Nah. The response was quick and unanimous: meat. Meat was the most important thing to them.
Turns out that being a hunter-gatherer on the African savannah doesn't leave a lot of time for sitting around philosophizing. Planning the next hunt takes priority, apparently.
So if this significantly proves that fat is essential for health and intelligence why do governments/health organisations promote low fat and that fat is dangerous?
I believe it's because there is no control in having us be intelligent and no money in having us be healthy.
@@zachary4376 Agreed. Fit, healthy, happy, balanced people are not addicts capitalism depends on addicts. What's interesting we used to be hunter gatherers and when we started farming they could tithe and tax and dominate us..............
@@velvetindigonight That's the truth, If ever I've heard it.
Blame the sugar industry.
Blame Ancel Keys - godfather of fat is bad for you movement
Professional chess players burn a surprisingly high level of calories in their chess matches.
My current trade is fitter/welder and I don't make mistakes often. I stare at the drawings for hours and even days before positioning any part, to make certain I do everything in the proper and easiest order. I joke about how I literally sweat while looking at the drawings. I'm not one of the typical welders who hate and ridicule engineers and intellectuals. I understand the importance of forethought and planning, and critical thinking. Also, my diet is mostly eggs, bacon, grease, cheese, butter, milk, beef and pork, chicken, and maybe potatoes. But mostly diary and animal products. Since I studied nutrition back in high school and became a personal trainer years ago, I recognized the importance of animal products in our human diet. Carbs are generally excessive in most of our modern diets.
@@c4call I just got my arteries checked for plaque. I would recommend that for you. Also. Good luck to you
Is this true? It kinda makes sense I remember going to take ase mechanics exams at local colleges and being famished when I was done, more than a exercise regimen!
I don't work out, eat like a garbage troll, and study constantly. I weigh 135 pounds
Feed your brain holes!
I may not agree with every premise but the flow of logic was presented very well.
How much fat is thrown out today by people scared of it? How much that could be used for food in fast food fryers now goes into cosmetics and other nonsense.
Probably nothing compared to the amount of produce that is thrown out every day
Some of it goes into animal feed, so they get....Fat.
Brilliant lecture. Finally someone who recognize that hypotheses should be a. Testable AND b. Make sense. The whole scavanging makes sense this way. The first weapons could well be stones too. Throwing stones is basic human skill that can be used to drive hynas jackals and voltures off carcasses
And what about the theory that hominids depended heavily on river's shelfish molusks and crustaceans ?
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first, the Scottish commoners complained they had to subsist on Salmon.
During the 19th century the people of the island of St Kilda would plunder "mutton bird" (a cliff nesting sea bird) for their eggs and their very fatty meat.
Coastal living reduces the competition with predators and provides a lot of Omega 3 fat and Vitamin D. Shellfish are also very high in fats.
Hunting and gathering provides a wide variety of food sources.
I wish they would have done a better job of showing her graphics, but over all a great presentation.
Such a good presenter. I could watch this all day.
I have seen a documentary wherein a group of chimpanzees chased down a small monkey and collectively drove it into the reach of the leader which was hiding. The leader killed and ate the monkey and shared it with some of the other chimpanzees.
Chimps do eat meat, primarily from Colobus monkeys they catch. They also hunt an animal we call a Bush Baby where they can find them & eat insects. However, humans eat far more meat. Humans also eat insects, but western culture rejects that.
Chimps don't need to eat animals but they do. Your tale suggests it might be useful for group dynamics as much as for nutrition.
Beautifully presented, Thankyou for imparting this knowledge to us, I hung on every word.
I spent a big portion of the day interviewing for a technically advanced job and after watching this, I just want to scream "yes! this is who I am looking for!" She is so intelligent and confident. I wish there were more people like her out there.
Great work! Not every ancient human could get into an Elephant size thigh bone. This required the largest hominid males with the most upper body strength. You need to pick up a bowling ball size rock, raise it above your head, and smash it down with all your might up to dozens of times. This job was made much easier by letting the large bones dry for over a week, which means many of the bones were carried back to camp to dry. So, we will find piles of smashed-up large bones near hominid camps. Note that marrow stays edible for a very long time if stored within the bone until needed. The hominid sites will have large round top anvil stones surrounded by bone fragments and large two-hand rock hammers. Any bone piece large enough to pick up was put in the soup pot. It was also fun for two or more hominids to play the game of: let's pick up the large bone and drop it on the anvil stone many times. Look in the Sahara and Siberia for the best bone smashing hominid sites. Smashing bone on a flat anvil rock was easier but dangerous, if the large bone is too fresh the hammer rock is guaranteed to bounce back and kill you. If you must get into a fresh large bone you can take a hand held rock and bang out a ring around the center of the large bone to weaken it at the hit point. The most wonderful sound in our collective memory is the change in tone you hear when you hit a large bone that is finally about to open - the whole tribe cheers.
Ok, I'm a year late but will look further; this is very interesting stuff.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
lol
Wonderful talk. Very interesting but I found it frustrating that she was referencing the board and using a pointer to highlight what she was talking about but the camera remained focused on her on did not show the board.
In the context she mentions it, you don't lose weight by not eating carbs and fat, you lose weight by not eating carbs and eating protein and fat (saturated animal fat is best)...
Makes sense. Those of us who are on the carnivore diet try to get 80%, maybe 85% of our calories from fat. People who are new to it think we're eating giant piles of steaks like pancakes, but we actually don't eat that much meat.
One signature that would differentiate between eating seeds and eating animals that ate the seeds would be tooth wear, and afarensis tooth wear is incompatible with significant seed eating. I lost half a grade point because I compared walking erect to ground level "soaring" the way vultures do. The earliest flaked stone tools are not "complicated." But you do have to be accurate in placing a blow.
Nice presentation, Lara Croft!
The resemblance is uncanny.
This is an extraordinary lecture in form and content. It stuns me how brilliant she is.
Love this lady, so passionate about her subject you cannot help but get hooked. She made it very easy to understand and her hypothesis is so plausible when explained like this. This lady is set to impact and create great conversations in her field.
I must totally agree. This person is really an amazing specimen and a pride of your species.
An exceptional speaker! An exceptional presentation!
Absolutely extraordinary insight.
I'm just 10 mins into this lecture and she is excellent!
Discard
,o
You don't have to have a stone tip to make an effective spear.
Many tropical humans still use 100% wooden spears.
They could have been hunters if they had a decent size stick.
Why not mention the obvious.
Because she is talking about fossil proof. There’s probably no evidence of wooden tools left now. Not sure if there are fossil records of the grinding or sharpening stones used to get the sticks sharp. Interesting.
@@peggycearnach8034 so you think they went straight to stone points and didn't use a wood spear.
I understand it doesn't make a fossil under most conditions.
A long bone sliver makes a good spear point. Or, a very good dagger. Modern primitive technology uses bone spear and arrow tips.
The society of primitive technology postulated in 2001 that there was a bone and wood age before the Stone Age, but there would be nearly no record of it as they don't fossilize.
Here's a ChatGPT summary:
- Jess Thompson expresses gratitude for the introduction and mentions her affiliation with ASU and IHO.
- She discusses her collaboration with Curtis Marion and her project in Malawi.
- The main focus of her talk is the origins of the human predatory pattern, particularly in Ethiopia.
- She emphasizes the importance of diet in human evolution, linking it to survival and cognitive development.
- Diet is crucial for understanding human evolution, as it influences survival and reproduction.
- Major milestones in human evolution, such as cooperation and weaponry, are linked to diet.
- Unique human traits like large brains, tool use, and bipedalism are connected to diet.
- The traditional narrative of human evolution involving tool making, meat eating, and the emergence of Homo is questioned.
- New evidence suggests that these behaviors did not occur simultaneously but have deeper roots in earlier species like Australopithecus.
- Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, exhibited flexibility in diet and environment, exploiting new resources.
- The geochemistry of Lucy's teeth indicates a varied diet, not limited to trees or open spaces.
- The traditional story of sharp tools for meat cutting leading to Homo is challenged.
- The cost of a large brain is high, requiring an energy surplus, which could come from diet changes.
- The importance of fat in the diet is highlighted, as it provides a concentrated source of calories.
- Humans are unique in hunting large prey and using tools, unlike chimpanzees.
- The human predatory pattern involves hunting larger animals and consuming fat, not just meat.
- Early hominins like Lucy may have used simple tools like hammerstones to access bone marrow.
- Systematic fieldwork and new methodologies are needed to test these hypotheses.
- Main message: The origins of the human predatory pattern and the role of diet, particularly fat, in human evolution are more complex and rooted in earlier species like Australopithecus, challenging traditional narratives.
I didn't know ChatGPT could "watch" and summarize videos. I'm assuming that's in the paid version?
I wish I were 18 again! What an intriguing field of study!! A great teacher!!
In 2013, after I had retired, I took a free class in Paleoanthropology from Arizona State. Maybe it is still available online. It is free, if you don’t need any educational documents anymore.
I wonder why Dr. Jessica didn't mention our other point of difference over other great apes: our cooling system, which involves sweating through furless skin to benefit from evaporation. We might not be able to run as fast as our prey, but we can track them further than they can run. That's a significant point of difference if hunting is your main method of collecting the food that has become species-specific for us.
Excellent talk!
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Would love to see her discuss carnivore diet with Dr. Anthony Chaffey.
As a red blooded male, I must say that I find the lady to be very
intelligent.
Smart IS sexy!
Your comment is a big turnoff. "The lady" has the right to make a presentation about human evolution without you making it clear that all you care about is whether she would make a good sex partner for you. As if nothing else about her matters at all.
@@robinlillian9471 What right is that? The same right we have to say she's hot?
If she has an issue with comments on her own presentation here. she'd let it be known.
No need to take offense on her behalf. She's not helpless. Maybe she's actually a woman that appreciates compliments, and is comfortable with her sexuality.
@@robinlillian9471 I found Ms. Thompson's talk to be interesting, enlightening, well thought through, spoken and presented clearly. She does strike me as being very intelligent and, although it went unsaid, she undeniably radiates health, grace, and pulchritude which normal people of all persuasions find attractive.
Where did I imply that I wanted to fuck "the lady"? (and why did you add quotes?)?? Your comment says more about you than I care to know.
So, the split that led to us was when one of our common ancestors with the chimps one day cracked open a bone instead of a nut and created a slightly different culture of tool use. Then the change in culture also changed us. Very good insight.
.... eventually tripling our brain size.... and if you want to shrink your offsprings brain size again: just put them back on that largely plant based diet! 😂
Oddly enough humans are closer in genetics to gorillas but social and brain use to chimpanzees, funny enough in genetics we human take most of our burnt victim skin grafts and heart values from .. pigs .. ?
Other than the grass lands coming off of Ethiopia highlands holding nearly all the fossil stages of early humans. The coast line of Ethiopia has a lot of different stages proto human fossils. Life is a lot different when your pregnant females are safe out of the way near water, and the males are bring up shell fish to them.
Spend winter on the coast line for easy food, and the hot summers in the windy highlands near lava flows/ hot water springs to warm you at night.
@@krispalermo8133 I have never seen a paper claim that gorillas are closer to humans than chimps are..... maybe it's true for some humans? Vegans would love to have that huge gut and seem to be prepared to "buy" it with the reduced brain size.... (they already shy away from working it too hard)
@@TimL1980 Please do not insult gorillas by comparing Vegans to them, it is just rude.
@@krispalermo8133 agreed!
"Whoever gets the most food wins."
Unfortunately, too many believe that still works. 🙂
More food = more healthy = more sex = more better
Ape brain likes simple concepts. Ape brain rejects modern dietary science
It does still work.
@@trackerbuckmann1627
Please see above
Silly talk. Species didnt disappear (unless on small islands) because humans ate their food. That only began in the modern era.
@@casteretpollux
Nobody was saying anything about humans eating their food. Weird comment
Great presentation! Very intuitive
Brilliant theory which makes perfect sence.
Gives new meaning to “fat of the land”.
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Very interesting video. It is along the lines of another palaeontologist I saw discussing human evolution who came to the field later in life after a main career in economics. He and his team brought a perspective of “follow the money” that is emphasized in economics and applied it to chemical energy to give new insights into how brain size was selected for.
People often think of the “nature” in natural selection as being the mostly climate and other animals as competition or threats but refocusing on energy budgets as a selective pressure can be helpful and seems to be along the lines of missing the “fat” part of the story because we aren’t thinking about it when we look for “meat eating” in our history.
I don't get it. I'm certain I heard about the marrow seeking behavior being key to human development at least 15 years ago. Or is it just that it's being attributed earlier in evolutionary development?
you didn't hear it, you watched "Predator"
Sort of like how we seek out candies with different filled centers, those strawberry ones, gushers, bonkers, cupcakes, donuts, pinatas, mystery boxes, geodes, eggs, wontons, egg rolls, empanadas, pies, pretty much everything that has some secret inside except for brains and marrow because that's Gross.
The TV series "Alone" has done amazing things to rehabilitate the value of fat in the public's consciousness.
In season 7 a contestant kills a Musk Ox with a knife, a small cow!
He is obsessed with securing fat from the creature, the brain and the bone broth were pure gold to him, the muscle not so much.
I noticed as soon as contestants were comfortable about their future food security their minds would turn to higher values, meaning and intamacy with mate and offspring.
Lucy's bigger brain no doubt put a lot of demands on her companions!
Fascinating. I will be following Dr. Thompson's research with great interest!
So chess competition have shown the the participants burn alot of calories in 7 hours just sitting and thinking
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
My brother suffers from Parkinson's. Exercise can trigger the symptoms. But he says that just thinking hard has a very similar effect.
I am getting very hungry thinking about what you posted. Keep up the good work. I am kind of fat.
Great talk, logical and testable theory.
I really enjoyed the talk. I'd heard of the bone marrow idea sometime ago but it was exciting to hear about the research being done now. What she and her colleagues are doing is super cool.
The real problem I found is I spent too much time looking at her and forgot listen to what she was saying.. I'll play it again some day as a podcast.
This is a brilliant idea and makes total sense. In addition to fat, I would assume bone marrow contains minerals as well, of which Sodium is the limiting factor. Salt is rare and precious for all terrestrial life, and we need about 2 grams per day. Fruit and edible roots have very little sodium. Another one may be B12, of which bone marrow is also a very good source, while vegetarian diet is not.
Excellent, thank you for this. Eating the brain is not talked about much, but it is an excellent source of Omega 3 fats which are essential for brain development and health, and we don't need to get it from fish.
She somehow reminds me a lot of Jodie Foster in Contact. A scientist who isn't entirely comfortable being in front of a whole group of people presenting on something she's incredibly enthused by and interested in, trying to infect her audience with just a little bit of that enthusiasm.
And this is pretty darned interesting, I must say.
Well she infected the hell out of me. As soon as she said "fat" my mind leaped to "easily accessible high quality energy, boom, advantage."
Fat is instant energy relatively speaking and would provide a different path to evolve on in comparison to herbivores or other carnivores. They were hauling groceries home and cooking it. These guys were going to McDonald's.
I can relate. I ride motorcycle with my riding partner daughter and hitting McD's at mid-day is the best way to acquire sufficient fat and protein to carry me for an afternoon's ride.
Of course the ride is always started with a good steak and eggs and coffee breakfast, a good base for a morning's ride. Ask any Aussie. (I'm Canadian) We often cover 600+ km a day so food is an important part of the day. Jerky and coffee from the gas station snack counter will only get you so far. I digressed but the logic follows.
I think her style is very engaging without being too colloquial. Very enjoyable and accessible.
@@pattismithurs9023 Total agreement here.
Well, she explains things well, in layman's terms. When scientists do that, ppl get inspired. Most scientists are enthused about their field but its hard to explain to ordinary ppl.
I had the same thought about the Jodie Foster character. Foster went to an Ivy League college - I think Yale - so she was surely acquainted with this type.
Fantastic presentation...
Iconic lecture ruined by rubbish videography! The point of video over pure audio is to capture elements of the presentation that will make it easier to understand. So should the camera be trained on the speaker or on the screen? Yeah you all know but this guy didn’t.
Ideally you should have two cameras, but if you only have one then it MUST stay on the screen most of the time…this guy got it back to front.
But you know he had two cameras (his smartphone) and training that on the screen and camera on the speaker would’ve given a much better result.
You can tell by his exposure settings blowing out the screen that he had no idea what his job was all about…so annoying!
Tying fat to brain size is brilliant. Nutrition information on essential lipids in modern diets is creating new theories about the development of modern neurological diseases.
Cooking was really important as well.
The usage of fire was invented a lot later, Homo Erectus did it about 1 mio years ago.
Australopitecus Afarensis lived a lot earlier, about 2.9 - 3.9 million years ago.
@@richardpetek712 Thank you so much Richard for the info. You forgot the meat on a wire, on a 🪁 Kite, in Lightning Storms Hypotheses. And the Earth is, as we all know is only 6 thousand years old.............. HAHAH. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🇬🇧👍 Take Care.
@@bobgrant-beer3020 You missed the last memo.
It's 10 thousand years old.
But let's not quarrel over details :)
@@richardpetek712 nice one mate. I fucking love you. ❤️
Maybe the first form of cooking was dried out meat by the Sun
Excellent presentation!
Who doesn’t like fat.
Inuit get their vitamin C and other vitamins from their high fat diet. Also far is energy.
Very nice talk. Someone needs to make a new Indiana Jones movie with a main character like this ;-).
She'd fit.
Very interesting thanks. This is a fascinating subject.
To this day, bone marrow is an amazing food.
Excellent presentation and as a Flint napper, I agree with 99%. However, the weak point is these little creatures must’ve been hanging around the carcasses perhaps with handy River tumbled stones to obtain something before they ever knew about what was in the bone. Risk predators for small chunks of meat, could’ve been seasonal, the dry season and reduced Food sources, and the round stones could’ve been simply to break a joint and run away with the leg to get away from all the other things eat eating on a lion kill. Then the discovery of the marrow and the fat . Great talk.
prehumans were already cutting and eating meat when it was easy to get, but then it stopped being so easy to get so prehumans that managed to adapt to hunting harder-to-acquire animals survived, and that is what created the next evolutionary branch. what was the advantage? running. stamina. a more upright structure.
but the bone marrow start makes some sense, and it works well with the start of cooking.
because if your species has recently learned that there is food inside of bones, then you are going to start finding places where you can find ample bones (and no competition). well one of those places that you could find large dead animals without any carnivores around for competition, is where a forest fire recently passed. you wander around the ash landscape and you find burned out corpses which you were looking for, and thats when you discover that freshly cooked meat is actually amazing.
once you have the idea to use stone tools on animal corpses AND cook them, then you really develop a need to hunt larger animals when you cant easily find corpses
U can always look at an auricle to promote the complete food group
Seems a bit of a stretch that there could have been enough large bones laying about to scavenge that it would have supplied enough nutrition to actually drive the evolution of the brain. It would have taken several such animals being killed in a given area at least several times a week to have fed even a small number of these hominids. It seems more reasonable to speculate that they must have hit upon some means of proactively killing large game themselves long before it might otherwise have seemed possible.
Apparently some of the anthropological evidence points to the main brain growth spurt just after we began to hunt, thereby allowing us to have "first pick", if you like. of the fattiest parts. That would make your speculation correct. Not that I've watched the above video yet tho....
It's a supplement to a diet. Not a main supply for it. Also, yeah. If there's a crap load of carcasses around from multiple predators, it's absolutely possible to get multiple sources of bone marrow in a week.
@@supernotfunnyman No, animal foods were a staple in most parts until the agricultural revolution even still in some places after that.
There wasn't 7 billion people on the earth.
@@Cbd_7ohm But the question is how occasional of a supplement was it? I'm sure that early hominids would have taken advantage of it when they found it, but what I question is the amount available.
It seems to me that you would have needed at least dozens of such kills daily in a relatively small area consistently over hundreds of thousands of years for it to have been the major driving environmental factor in the evolution of the brain.
Finding a bone here and there every few months and sharing it with a group of a dozen or so would not seem to be able to provide enough nutrition for that purpose.
Fascinating and very plausible. One question was her statements that large animals (predators?) declined as Lucy's species were scavenging bone marrow, but hyenas were the only ones also able to access... So hyenas should decline but what else?
The paper must be well out now so will have a look.
Very interesting talk!
For all you interested in Philosophy of Science (please, not all hands up at once!) Jess Thompson's talk about the connection between brain evolution, tools, and diet - this is an excellent illustration of Michael Streven's idea of the "iron law" of Scientific practice which he talks about in his 2020 book "The Knowledge Machine" The secret to science's success is an ironclad determination to restrict scientific inquiry specifically to the public sharing of the results of observations; it is the results of the pursuit of universally shared data that ultimately makes or breaks scientific theories. We can tell each other more beautiful stories about our origins, but systematically extracting accurate and relevant data is what will eventually lead to scientific consensus. Ultimately the data tells a better story, but it might not be as beautiful a story as what we intuitively feel about the subject.
If you think your a great hunter try to hunt down a mouse in your house
Yeah, currently I am in a competition with my dog. She has caught and killed 3 rats the old fashioned way, I have caught 6 with traps over the past 3 months.
The pounding tool would eventually be used for shaping cutting tools.
Fat yields 2x as many calories as carbohydrates when consumed, but requires 4x as much oxygen to do so. It therefore stands to reason that fat is advantageous at low energy expenditure like walking but not when running or other activities which require a lot of oxygen for the system. As the brain consumes about 20% of our energy when we're sleeping, fat would thence also appear to be a good energy source when we're engaged in thislow-exertion state.
I look forward to the day when some archeologist finds my bones and decides that I was really Bigus Dikus Makimus. When that day comes my life will have been justified.
except that doesn't fossilise, normally, so no-one will know. ...unless you wear a ceramic cover for it at all times just in case of accidents.
Wouldn't you rather have venom or claws? Imagine if you could spit in someone's face and they drop dead right there.
How fascinating... Great subject... Great presentation...
PHX reppin! I love hearing people out of ASU making big research!!
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
I'm glad I found your channel. Time to binge watch all your content.
The Atkins Diet works because it is HIGH fat. The diet that doesnt work is mainstream nutritional advice aka low fat Plant Based. Maybe this is what you meant or more likely a way of discussing this without being targeted by modern nutritionists.
Also you have to factor in, what type of working life style you have.
Sit at a desk working a phone or computer all day ?
Standing in a factory job with barely nothing to do.
Or doing line work in a factory where you hand pack 45,000 hair spray cans in your shift, or a dish washer doing the work load of two or three people.
Yet there are many today who thrive on a mostly vegan diet. With the right gut flora, foliage is converted into short-chain fatty acids.
Atkins is nothing to do with what she’s talking about because a weight loss diet is no good for survival. As for short chain fatty acids they are formed in the gut, when gut flora digests fibre and in 2017 it was discovered the human body is covered in short chain fatty acid receptors so eating a lot of high fibre plants is an important part of human diet and health.
I Didn't see marrow for packaged against spoilage or critical for brain selection and nutrition. Lot of light from this presenter.
But I did. It is (was?) common in Russia.
Great prezo however yhe Atkins diet does not prohibit fat in fact it ENCOURAGES IT!!!
Scientist of the year (R&D Journal) professor James Tour, Rice University. 4 PhD's / 700+ published works / 130+ patents / over a dozen companies founded from the medical field to the oil field. Too many accomplishments to list, but his resume is public. Here's a link to his channel. ua-cam.com/channels/oldwL6T062LNo65OHngXAQ.html
Atkins diet wasn't around two millions years ago.
Wow. This reminds me of what TED used to be about; science and technology and intellectual progress. It's nice to know that the concept still survives even if the original idea has been unceremoniously slaughtered.