The case for Homo Erectus

[norseman]

22 minutes ago, guyzonthropus said:

I would think that if a significant degree of their evolution took place on this continent, then they have been here a lot longer than that... They could have been here during the oligocene period, along with a large number of other really big mammals and birds. It could well have been the periods of glaciation that lead to their greater size, perhaps along with the advantages size lends when dealing with big predators such as the short faced bears, smilodons, and terror birds, just to list a few. I'd bet they were here long before the(we) hairless dwarves arrived, developing in accord with the shifting environmemts, thereby becoming adaptive generalist, using what brainpower they have to better navigate the hazards as well as regional seasonal abundances.

at least it's one possibility......

 

33-23 million years ago?

 

We have no evidence of great Apes existing then, anywhere on planet Earth. Let alone a fully evolved bipedal ape ready to make the trip to North America.

 

While all of our theories are stretches? I think yours is a pretty good leap.

12 minutes ago, MIB said:

^^^^ Not necessarily.   Read up on punctuated equilibrium.    The idea is that genetic shifts occur rather rapidly with long periods of little to no change in between.    It contrasts Darwin's idea of slow, steady change.   Generally the changes are pushed by changes in conditions that drive natural selection ... abrupt temperature or moisture changes in particular.   As we are learning, glacial epochs sometimes set in within a decade rather than across centuries as previously believed.    The megafauna died out because they could not adapt to new conditions ... perhaps changing the food sources as much as it affected the animals directly.   (Human arrival didn't help much, either.)    One of my best guesses is that sasquatch, as a megafauna human form, survived is because they were able to do so by conscious behavioral adaptation (hey George, it's gettin' too hot, lets walk up to Canada) rather than relying on much slower biological adaptation ... adaptation that other species found too slow to cope with change in temperature thus change in plant communities that underlie the animals portion of the food web.

 

Unproven, but biologically sound. 

 

MIB

 

It took 100,000 years for the hobbit to shrink to its size we find it to be 50,000 years ago. That’s not a lot of time.

[guyzonthropus]

Well I've always been known as a leaper...used to live in a leaper colony

Maybe it's a ground sloth after all...but yeah, that is a ways back...lol 

Not sure how to account for that, musta been the coffee or the spellchecker, unless, aliens transported the good ones back in time so as to better evolve in preparations for our arrival....no, that doesn't work either

What I was trying to impart was that they could have been here far longer than we and therefore had adapted to dealing with the cold of the glaciation by increase in size, with its side benefits of a better edge when it comes to engagement with the megapredators of the time.

Oligocene? I never said that!   Hahaha.   My bad!

[norseman]

10 minutes ago, guyzonthropus said:

Well I've always been known as a leaper...used to live in a leaper colony

Maybe it's a ground sloth after all...but yeah, that is a ways back...lol 

Not sure how to account for that, musta been the coffee or the spellchecker, unless, aliens transported the good ones back in time so as to better evolve in preparations for our arrival....no, that doesn't work either

What I was trying to impart was that they could have been here far longer than we and therefore had adapted to dealing with the cold of the glaciation by increase in size, with its side benefits of a better edge when it comes to engagement with the megapredators of the time.

Oligocene? I never said that!   Hahaha.   My bad!

 

Well. No worries. Your theory is not entirely misplaced.

 

 

[guyzonthropus]

Interesting clip! Thanks!

[Franco]

On 3/27/2019 at 3:54 PM, hiflier said:

Camels originated in North America. A lot of the megafauna that was here did too. The "dumb" ones fell prey to not only to a cataclysmic event but also the Humans who took them down for food and hides. The "smart" ones (or the lucky) managed to avoid both. My question would be then are we barking up the wrong tree by speculating that BF came here from elsewhere? Why couldn't it be that BF originated in North America? A hypothesis like that would sure settle a lot of ancestral dialogue regarding where it came from and how it got here. IOW, maybe it was always here? Sure, no bones in the North American record (yet?) but that hasn't stopped believers so far since the preferred habitats don't appear to be conducive to bone preservation anyway. Lots of rain, acid soils, remote places and lots of organic debris constantly creating layer after layer of material make finding any remains highly unlikely.

 

I know this doesn't fit the record very well but hey, since when have I walk the straight and narrow around here?  

Well with us finding new human species, it appears there were many types of humans living along side each other, In many many parts of the world. Why wouldnt there be many different types of BF in Different parts of the World, To.

 

[hiflier]

Interesting that you bring that up actually. I haven't seen any investigations into those recent discoveries that say much more than 'hominid'. The Red Deer cave People, Denisovans, The Naledi, Florensis, and the now new discovery in the Philippines. They are all branches of Homo yes, but are not Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Instead they are all new species and two of them have modern Human-like feet but not Human -like hands which look to be more for climbing. So lots of Homo types but not Sapiens Sapiens. Bigfoot could be a Homo type but also not modern Human.

 

The hominid world is opening up wide but how many of the species both new and old were hair covered from head to toe like our primate cousins in the Great Apes and Chimpanzees remains open to speculation. For all we know everything discovered so far could BE BF's and we modern Humans are the only the newest relatively hairless mutants of the bunch. Will another line of new Humans come out of Africa after us? It's anyone's guess whether Nature is actually finished with the process. Of course we are led to think that we Humans are the last of the breed but nothing really says that we are.

[norseman]

6 hours ago, hiflier said:

Interesting that you bring that up actually. I haven't seen any investigations into those recent discoveries that say much more than 'hominid'. The Red Deer cave People, Denisovans, The Naledi, Florensis, and the now new discovery in the Philippines. They are all branches of Homo yes, but are not Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Instead they are all new species and two of them have modern Human-like feet but not Human -like hands which look to be more for climbing. So lots of Homo types but not Sapiens Sapiens. Bigfoot could be a Homo type but also not modern Human.

 

The hominid world is opening up wide but how many of the species both new and old were hair covered from head to toe like our primate cousins in the Great Apes and Chimpanzees remains open to speculation. For all we know everything discovered so far could BE BF's and we modern Humans are the only the newest relatively hairless mutants of the bunch. Will another line of new Humans come out of Africa after us? It's anyone's guess whether Nature is actually finished with the process. Of course we are led to think that we Humans are the last of the breed but nothing really says that we are.

 

Here is where myth meets reality. The Ebu Gogo on the island of Flores matches the Hobbit fossils found on the island except native accounts describes them alive. Ebu Gogo means “grandmother who eats anything”. They were described as hairy.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo

[norseman]

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/ghosts-hobbits-or-cannibals-legend-ebu-gogo-secret-tribe-wild-grandmother-flesheaters-007772

[Huntster]

1 hour ago, norseman said:

Here is where myth meets reality. The Ebu Gogo on the island of Flores matches the Hobbit fossils found on the island except native accounts describes them alive. Ebu Gogo means “grandmother who eats anything”. They were described as hairy........

 

So where are all those forward-looking scientists beating the bush for "grandmother"?

 

Or are they out there, and just keeping it quiet..........like they might be doing here in the US?

[norseman]

3 minutes ago, Huntster said:

 

So where are all those forward-looking scientists beating the bush for "grandmother"?

 

Or are they out there, and just keeping it quiet..........like they might be doing here in the US?

 

They found the hobbit as a fossil. But the recent supposed extinction of it I bet has raised a few eyebrows. I bet some old pasty codgers are running up and down some muddy rivers in dug out canoes with a set of binos.

[Pteronarcyd]

Homo erectus doesn't come close to accounting for reported sightings of bigfoot.  All known species of Homo are far too small, for one.

[norseman]

1 hour ago, Pteronarcyd said:

Homo erectus doesn't come close to accounting for reported sightings of bigfoot.  All known species of Homo are far too small, for one.

 

That’s not true, although I once thought this as well. The tallest human was 8 ft 2 inches tall. And we have evidence of others in the fossil record.

 

http://greaterancestors.com/femur-of-8-foot-giant-heidelberg-man-south-africa/

 

Homo Erectus is the first hominid species to have left Africa on two feet and seriously traveled. He then morphed into a bunch of different sub species all over the globe. Some short and some tall. Everything from the hobbit to hedelbergensis.

 

If they made it to North America 150,000 years ago? It’s not impossible they morphed into giants on a giant continent competing with mega fauna. The Hobbit shrunk by Island dwarfism in the span of 50,000 years.

[MIB]

2 hours ago, norseman said:

If they made it to North America 150,000 years ago? It’s not impossible they morphed into giants on a giant continent competing with mega fauna.

 

Also driven, in extreme cold climate, by the laws of thermodynamics.     As you grow bigger, surface area grows with the square of the increase but volume grows with the cube.   What this means is that larger individuals retain heat more efficiently ... essentially the physics behind Bergmann's Rule.    If climate is so harsh that large individuals have a much greater opportunity to survive to reproduce, then this gain in size can occur quite rapidly.

 

MIB

[norseman]

54 minutes ago, MIB said:

 

Also driven, in extreme cold climate, by the laws of thermodynamics.     As you grow bigger, surface area grows with the square of the increase but volume grows with the cube.   What this means is that larger individuals retain heat more efficiently ... essentially the physics behind Bergmann's Rule.    If climate is so harsh that large individuals have a much greater opportunity to survive to reproduce, then this gain in size can occur quite rapidly.

 

MIB

 

Very true.

 

Look at the variations found within our own species let alone a full genus or maybe a dozen or more species.

 

 

[Pteronarcyd]

4 hours ago, norseman said:

 

That’s not true, although I once thought this as well. The tallest human was 8 ft 2 inches tall. And we have evidence of others in the fossil record.

 

http://greaterancestors.com/femur-of-8-foot-giant-heidelberg-man-south-africa/

 

An extreme example of an 8-ft Homo sapiens (a species that has existed for only about 200,000 years, and only departed the Sub-Sahara about 70,000 years ago, ignoring earlier departures that died out) says little about an apparent hominid that seems to be about 9-ft tall on average.  Your point may provide fuel to an argument for possibility, but provides little fuel for high probability.I

 

The Homo heidelbergensis you link to are a limited temporal and spatial exception to the average height for this species, which is below 6-ft.  Besides, H. heidelbergensis is not H. erectus.

 

I doubt bigfoot would be a species of Homo, simply because all known species of Homo made and used complex tools and fire, while I know of no seemingly reliable reports of bigfoot doing either.