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| Topic Started: Aug 28 2009, 07:48 PM (1,582 Views) | |
| WallaceGrover | Aug 28 2009, 07:48 PM Post #1 |
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Fetus
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We're most likely the most intelligent species who has ever evolved on this planet, correct? Or is there a possibility that there was a species that had the same mental capacity, but didn't live long enough to actually develop a society? |
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| Giant Blue Anteater | Aug 28 2009, 09:22 PM Post #2 |
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Prime Specimen
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We have those animals today, including the dolphins and the elephants. Dolphins though don't have opposable thumbs, and elephants only have one manipulator, their trunk. |
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| Canis Lupis | Aug 28 2009, 09:28 PM Post #3 |
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.
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I know this may be a bit of a fringe idea, but maybe the dromaeosaurs actually developed civilization. Most people agree that if humans go extinct, all traces of our civilization will also cease to exist. So maybe this is what happened in the Mesozoic. Note: I don't seriously consider this idea, but it's something to think about. |
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| Venatosaurus | Aug 28 2009, 09:30 PM Post #4 |
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HAUS OF SPEC
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The great apes also have this capability, and have been observed using tools and some in rather extraordinary ways, such as a population of gorillas who use sticks to measure the depth of some rivers, lakes and/or streams. It would be something to uncover some sapient extinct animal... Oh wait we did they were called Neanderthals !!! |
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| Canis Lupis | Aug 28 2009, 09:37 PM Post #5 |
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.
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While studies have shown (I think) that they wre actually more intelligent than Cro-Magnons, they didn't develop civilization (some trace of it would still survive after 10,000 years). |
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| Ànraich | Aug 29 2009, 02:39 PM Post #6 |
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L'évolution Spéculative est moi
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Neanderthals were just as intelligent as us, though I doubt they were more intelligent (I mean, if they were, why did they die out instead of us?). They were very limited though, as they were specialized for an ice-age environment and therefore required almost twice as many calories as we do. Because of this combination of food-scare environment and large calorie intake requirements, they had no way to have any kind of surplus of food, which is necessary for civilization to develop. Without surplus food, everyone has to do something to produce food; in our case we became farmers. However we eventually learned new farming techniques that increased our crops yields, and therefore we had a surplus of food. This surplus allowed a class of people that didn't have to be farmers to exist. That new class became the artists, philosophers, builders, scholars, etc. So I doubt that any dinosaurs were ever sophonts, as the only real candidates for sapience in the dinosaur era were (mainly) carnivores, and carnivores can't really have any kind of surplus of food. Unless, of course, they domesticated something... <.< |
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We should all aspire to die surrounded by our dearest friends. Just like Julius Caesar. "The Lord Universe said: 'The same fate I have given to all things from stones to stars, that one day they shall become naught but memories aloft upon the winds of time. From dust all was born, and to dust all shall return.' He then looked upon His greatest creation, life, and pitied them, for unlike stars and stones they would soon learn of this fate and despair in the futility of their own existence. And so the Lord Universe decided to give life two gifts to save them from this despair. The first of these gifts was the soul, that life might more readily accept their fate, and the second was fear, that they might in time learn to avoid it altogether." - Excerpt from a Chanagwan creation myth, Legends and Folklore of the Planet Ghar, collected and published by Yieju Bai'an, explorer from the Celestial Commonwealth of Qonming Tree That Owns Itself
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| Canis Lupis | Aug 29 2009, 03:27 PM Post #7 |
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.
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I know. I doubt the sapient dinosaur thing as well. But if there were one, it could easily have domesticated a protoceratops or something just as docile. It seems that most intelligent (on par with dolphin and elephant, not human) animals are carnivores, and most scientists agree that these will become sapient more readily than an herbivore. Of course, omnivores beat them both. Still, what would a carnivorous society be like? I wonder: what would it be like if some neandertahls survived in the cold northern regions of the Earth (like Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia, etc)? How would this affect Cro-magnon civilization? I'll start a new topic to about this so as to keep this topic on topic. |
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| WallaceGrover | Aug 29 2009, 08:23 PM Post #8 |
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Fetus
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Another fringe idea here, It may be possible that when Mars used to habitable (if it ever was, which it was very probably not) they visited here. If we found artifacts of dinosaur made tools, what would you think? |
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| Ànraich | Aug 29 2009, 09:43 PM Post #9 |
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L'évolution Spéculative est moi
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It's well known that Mars, at some point in its past, was just as wet and warm as Earth is. Mars, however, has no active core and therefore does not generate a magnetic field, meaning over the centuries the solar winds chipped away at the atmosphere until it was thin like it is today. And of course on Earth where there is water, there is life. There's no doubt in my mind that Mars was once as lush and life-saturated as Earth is today, if not more so due to it's rotation (most planets don't rotate like Earth does, the moon stabilizes our orbit and keeps our axis at a set angle, which doesn't happen on Mars). And I doubt you'll find any kind of artifacts from 65 million+ years ago. Not unless you found something like a dino version of Ice Man, except perhaps caught in a mudslide or tar pit or something, so his tools were fossilized with him. But it wouldn't surprise me if something was found like that. Intelligence is kind of the perfect niche (not that there's such a thing as a perfect niche, it's just a term), it's more likely to guarantee the survival of a species than any other niche, we humans are perfect examples of that. For example there was a volcanic eruption once (the name escapes me at the moment) that plunged the Earth into volcanic winter and the human population dropped to five thousand people. That's about the same a single seating section at an average sports stadium; and that's all the human beings there were on Earth. And yet, today there are six billion of us. Such an amazing leap in only a couple millennia can only be attributed to something as advantageous as intelligence. |
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We should all aspire to die surrounded by our dearest friends. Just like Julius Caesar. "The Lord Universe said: 'The same fate I have given to all things from stones to stars, that one day they shall become naught but memories aloft upon the winds of time. From dust all was born, and to dust all shall return.' He then looked upon His greatest creation, life, and pitied them, for unlike stars and stones they would soon learn of this fate and despair in the futility of their own existence. And so the Lord Universe decided to give life two gifts to save them from this despair. The first of these gifts was the soul, that life might more readily accept their fate, and the second was fear, that they might in time learn to avoid it altogether." - Excerpt from a Chanagwan creation myth, Legends and Folklore of the Planet Ghar, collected and published by Yieju Bai'an, explorer from the Celestial Commonwealth of Qonming Tree That Owns Itself
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| Temporary | Aug 30 2009, 09:28 AM Post #10 |
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Transhuman
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They could have been smarter then us and it still wouldn't have mattered. We mostly likely beat them through reproduction, we were ready to mate sooner (puberty can be thanked for this) and lived in larger family units. They did have more efficent tools then we did, so it's possible they were smarter. Then again, we had a larger variety, so we could have been smarter. BTW, I like to think they comingled. There have been some experiments to show we will accept Neanderthals as normal humans, and frankly, I like the idea of having some Neanderthal blood in me. We do have some of their behaviours. |
I'm here. ![]() Uploaded with ImageShack.us Should we bring back Recon? Click here to share your opinion. | |
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| Canis Lupis | Aug 30 2009, 11:16 AM Post #11 |
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.
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How can experiments be done with neanderthal/cro-magnon interaction when neanderthals are extinct? Not criticizing, just curious. Who knows? If neanderthals survived (and this may be a slightly pessimistic view of cro-magnons), they could have been used as slaves. Think about it: the reasons we used Africans as slaves from the 16th-19th centuries was due to their numbers and strength (with we increased through artificial selection (hence why you've got more African-Americans in sports than you do whites)). Neanderthals were ten times as strong as we were. Basically, they were intelligent brutes. Who's to say that some group of cro-magnons wouldn't have seen their slave potential. Don't get me wrong, I think we would have co-mingled for the most part. Maybe interbred if our genetics would allow it. But some group of cro-magnons would have enslaved them or tried to exterminate them as the "inferior race" (Hitler comes to mind). |
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| lamna | Aug 30 2009, 11:54 AM Post #12 |
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The reasons Africans were used as slaves was because when Europeans started to get rich and powerful enougth that Arab slave traders could not sell white ones, and Islam has some things about freeing slaves who convert to Islam, Middle eastern and European sources dried up and Blacks got the short end of the stick. After that it eventually became tradition. I also doubt that African physical superiority is due to artificial selection, given that it's not just African Americans and people from the Caribbean who are so good at sport, but Africans who never experienced slavery. As for Neanderthals Brains, remember blue whales have massive brains, but they aren't many Nobel Prize winning whales. The were probably had equal or better potential but it was never realised.
Concorde was much faster than any passenger plane today. Fittest does not mean best. Some people think Homo sapians was just more fuel efficient. |
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Living Fossils Fósseis Vibos: Reserva Natural 34 MYH, 4 tonne dinosaur. [flash=500,450] Video Magic! [/flash] | |
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| Canis Lupis | Aug 30 2009, 12:17 PM Post #13 |
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.
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I read somewhere about that sports superiority thing. Can't remember where. It's probably been proven false by now. But we did artificially select the strongest and fittest slaves. Well, I read that in the Americas, the Native Americans were used as slaves at first. But they started to parish under the Spanish, English, and Portuguese diseases. So an Englishman (John Cabot) brought up the idea of using Africans as slaves to the English king and queen (don't remember their names), who welcomed the idea. So Africans (having built up immunity to the Old World diseases and being more physically fit) were brought over to the Americas to be used for work on sugar cane plantations. Blue whales never made tools, nor can they make tools. That's pretty much a prerequisite for developing civilization. Elephants use tools (mud, water, and their trunks), dolphins use tools (sound and sponges), chimps use tools (sticks and stones), gorillas use tools (leaves), parrots use tools (stone), vultures use tools (again, stone), humans use tools (you know what they are), etc. While they have a shot at starting civilization and outcompeting us, they also have an equal chance of not. |
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| lamna | Aug 30 2009, 12:54 PM Post #14 |
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Any American history that makes the Kings of England look like fantasy baddies is most likely revisionist propaganda. And besides, John Cabot was the first person to discover America proper. Why would he suggest something like that about as settlers that were non-existent. You are right about Native Americans being the first slaves and then being replaced, though part of it was that Europeans were in direct contact with the Native Americans and it was a bad idea to piss of your neighbours. Neanderthals made tools, but they changed very little. Perhaps we got lucky, and they never "clicked". |
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Living Fossils Fósseis Vibos: Reserva Natural 34 MYH, 4 tonne dinosaur. [flash=500,450] Video Magic! [/flash] | |
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| Ànraich | Aug 30 2009, 01:50 PM Post #15 |
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L'évolution Spéculative est moi
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Well I personally don't think Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals could successfully interbreed. Neanderthals were a separate species of human, and most of the time separate species can't interbreed (with the obvious exception of things like dogs). I'm not going to say it was impossible though, because we don't really know. Red hair, blue eyes, and negative blood types were all traits common to Neanderthals, which suggests that they could have bred. But then again they could have been recessive genes from our last common ancestor that just happened to express itself more often in Neanderthals. Not only that, but I doubt there was a whole lot of sex going on between them. Our minds are programmed to accept the Golden Ratio (1.6 units by 1 unit) as the concept of "beautiful," and the whole large brow and nose kind of ruins that ratio. That is why we think Neanderthals are pretty ugly looking (though the media has really exaggerated the brow). There may have been an occasional romance and probably quite a bit of rape, but really we've compared both modern human DNA and Neanderthal DNA and see no evidence that we modern humans are in any way related to Neanderthals (except for the whole both being a species of human thing). But on that note, are we still considered Cro-Magnons? |
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We should all aspire to die surrounded by our dearest friends. Just like Julius Caesar. "The Lord Universe said: 'The same fate I have given to all things from stones to stars, that one day they shall become naught but memories aloft upon the winds of time. From dust all was born, and to dust all shall return.' He then looked upon His greatest creation, life, and pitied them, for unlike stars and stones they would soon learn of this fate and despair in the futility of their own existence. And so the Lord Universe decided to give life two gifts to save them from this despair. The first of these gifts was the soul, that life might more readily accept their fate, and the second was fear, that they might in time learn to avoid it altogether." - Excerpt from a Chanagwan creation myth, Legends and Folklore of the Planet Ghar, collected and published by Yieju Bai'an, explorer from the Celestial Commonwealth of Qonming Tree That Owns Itself
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