CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Australopithecine, Bipedalism, Evolutionary Pressure
25 Jun 2020
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Social cognition and the evolution of intelligence: evolution of cognition, what we know of our ancestors" bodies come from fossils, but there are two problems with this, 1. We don"t know: have to infer by artifacts, 2. It is thought that one bone in a billion becomes fossilzed: that means: for the population of canada at 34 million, six of the human bones around today will end up getting fossilized. That"s bones, not skeletons: and that"s not even to say they"d ever be found. Human fossils are incredibly: how long have humans been around? rare, the oldest fossils of fully-formed humans are only 50k-100k years old. If language is an instinct, like chomsky says it is, then it probably had to have been evolving for longer than humans have been around: australopithecines had hands evolved for manipulation. 75k years ago: this is like finding a car in da vinci"s attic, fossils, most living things leave no record at all.
