Wolfgang Korsus
Dipl.Ing. NT , Astrophysiker
Klingenberg 40
25451 Quickborn
TEL.: +49 4106 69295
Handy: +49 162 5680456
Website : wolfgang.korsus.net
Chapter ???
Now I turn to another, new topic. I’m going to call it HUMAN DIGNITY .
I love talking about this word…..it sounds so enlightening and yet is full of secrets.
Another term for it is :
„hominization“ , it is probably based on three key events:
* Acquisition of the upright gait
* Growth in size and function of the brain
* Transition to cultural evolution
I move my brain back in time to 10 to 20 million years ago….. truly a huge step……. and climate change was in full swing during this time. However, a look at creatures tells us that there are still no signs of hominid creatures, but mammals are doing just fine. They are even well equipped for the drastic environmental changes still to come, why is that?
…I’ll try to explain it simply, they have a „metabolism“ and therefore a „heat balance.“……ist to understand!…right?
Now you could easily and quickly think, of course, living beings are successful because of the characteristics they have developed and which are naturally passed on to their descendants via the genetic material. Yes, that’s true, but it’s not quite enough to explain the mechanism of successful adaptation, because in this way adaptation would be much slower than we actually observe in nature in some cases. It would be far too slow, even deadly slow, for the suddenness of many natural events.
Fortunately, there is epigenetics, what is that? It is a highly successful characteristic of an individual that is passed on from one generation to the next and is gradually reflected in the genetic material of the DNA. Epigenetics determines the way in which gene sequences are read, how proteins are built up and ultimately how our entire body functions.
An apt comparison of our genetic material can be made with a central library. This is where virtually all the information about us is stored. However, this library changes over the course of several generations. If a group of living beings develops new characteristics due to changes in the environment itself – for example due to a change in climate triggered by the „intrusive Indian subcontinent“ – then an entire species may adapt to this and this is exactly what happened with the „primates“. There have therefore been events over the last 25 million years in which the primate family has continued to subdivide further and further.
The next intellectual outpouring follows ↻ ↻ ↻ ↻
Humans, all species of monkeys and prosimians, some may not want to believe it but they must, have one thing in common: they are all descended from the „primordial primates“ that lived around 60 million years ago. For this reason or because of this, they all belong to the order of „primates“. This order includes around „400 different species“ of very different-looking creatures. For example. For example, the dwarf mouse lemur, which weighs only 30 g and lives in Madagascar, and the 200 kg male gorilla, which is widespread in Africa.
The first division, however, is as follows: first of all there were the human-like and the guenon-like. This also split up again: The former divided into Asian and African. The orangutan, for example, belongs to the Asian branch. The African branch includes many families known to us today:
Gorilla, chimpanzee and …
…Watch out, Homo sapiens is coming!
The history of mankind began with the separation of the genus from the chimpanzees, i.e. six million years ago (cum grano salis, i.e. with a tolerance of about one million years up and down). Because the scholars and those who make the finds on the ground in Africa are not yet so sure).
Because listen, here come the Australopithecines, the very early humans. Next………Then or finally comes Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. The following question now seems appropriate :
Why ? and welcome to Africa, why the East African Rift Valley, why was the cradle of man here of all places? Regarding the climate, when the climate changed there!!!, a certain species within this genus of Hominini prevailed, because it was particularly well adapted to the new, changed climate.
Hominini is a tribus (in the systematics of biology a rank between the subfamily and the family of apes (Hominidae). This tribe includes the species of the genus Homo, including modern humans (Homo sapiens) and the extinct ancestors of this genus, but not the common ancestors of chimpanzees and Homomini. It can be said that the only non-extinct species of Hominini is simply man.
Another question, …….what changes when it becomes drier over a large area (continent)?
Then the conditions for vegetation with warmth and moisture were certainly optimal before, now it became colder and drier. In this context, I would like to quote the biologist, zoologist, evolutionary researcher and ecologist Josef Reichholf, who coined the following phrase: the short-sighted ape is not our ancestor. A strong sentence, a statement that almost drives my CPU into a short circuit. It takes a lot of thinking to get a little cooler up there again and then a light came on!
There has been a climate change, from warm, humid and rainforest to less tree growth. To put it more clearly, there were larger gaps in the forest landscape, there could no longer be any talk of rainforest.
Now imagine a monkey trying to jump from one tree to another. Either the arm is too short or the tree is too far away or the monkey is simply short-sighted, in any case it jumps one last time …,,,,,,, ,,,misses. This did not benefit its reproduction.
The family tree of Homo sapiens (enlarged version possible)
I’ll just call my mini-story as follows:
This is practical evolutionary theory packed into a joke.
I draw a conclusion, it says: Increasing aridity leads to expanding savannahs and steppes. This leads to an extreme lack of trees, so our ancestors had to get down on the ground and so a skillful quadruped could become a biped. After all, walking upright in the tall grass had many advantages, especially for spotting enemies and prey. But there were also disadvantages: you couldn’t hide as well in the savannah as you could in the rainforest.
Climate change, there was something else! Yes, the food is also subject to change; if it becomes drier, the food becomes harder. In short:
A strong set of teeth becomes an anatomical advantage, because whoever could crack the hard nut was the winner.
I conclude from this the sentence : ▶ Changes in environmental conditions automatically lead to changes in living beings and „naturally“ the development of the brain was also affected. Incidentally, the human cerebrum is an energy guzzler par excellence: 20 percent of our energy budget is consumed by this 1.4 kilogram cognitive apparatus and, as is always necessary, the heat must be dissipated, otherwise the thinking center would overheat. So the removal of heat is all the easier if it is a little cooler outside; it certainly was. Furthermore, the brains of primates were actually more powerful !!!!
It should be noted that the temperature differences need not have been that great. The question remains, why did only this one primate species develop into a particularly intelligent variant, what was the decisive advantage? I assume that the climate change guaranteed better cooling for all primate brains.
Apparently, there were genetic reasons that distinguished our ancestors. However, such explanations are always difficult, because although we can use the theory of evolution to explain afterwards why an adaptation no longer worked properly, predictions are naturally more difficult for „complex“ creatures. So back to the world of unicellular organisms, bacteria, where the theory of evolution can make predictions about probable development. In bacterial strains that reproduce rapidly, changes can even be observed quickly and directly.
Even with viruses, evolutionary changes can be predicted with some certainty, as we use this today for flu vaccinations. If we look at more complex organisms, however, it is not so easy – it is rather unpredictable. One thing we can say with certainty, however, is that our predecessors, the „australopithecines“, were probably the kind of mammals that, six million years ago in eastern Africa, were able to cope with the changing living conditions not only quite well but in a life-affirming way. For this reason, they spread relatively quickly across the African continent.
Homo habilis (the capable human), Homo erectus and finally Homo sapiens (the modern human) developed.I’ll try to summarize this at this point:
➜ We know that a certain primate species populated certain parts of the world from Africa as early as 14 to 17 million years ago. During this time, there were also often drastic climatic changes, which also destroyed many species in all parts of the world because the creatures there were unable to adapt. In Africa, however, they were able to cope with the climatic changes and started their journey around the world from there. I’m also going to take a stab at numbers:
1.2 million years ago, there were at best just 20,000 of the precursors of the Homo sapiens species on Earth. (frighteningly few, right?)
It is also interesting to know that the number of individuals is calculated from the changes in genetic material.
This yielded a very remarkable result, namely that humans and chimpanzees only differ „genetically“ by a few percent. But this question may follow, where do they differ most in their genetic material? In the genes that are responsible for brain development. When it comes to the liver or blood, there are hardly any differences between chimpanzees and humans worth mentioning.
So this is at least one expected reason for the special reaction of our ancestors‘ primate brains to the falling temperatures in Africa.
Watch out, this happened about six million years ago. I note, however, that after 13.82 billion years of cosmic history and Earth history have passed by, we have finally arrived at this very important stage of natural, real evolution. At last, those who were to become the most successful living creatures of the last millions of years, thanks to their remarkable ability to adapt to constantly changing environmental conditions and their developed cerebrum, are appearing in the history of the earth. They will subdue the earth with their thinking and their thumbs-here I come to that. They stand firmly on their two legs, also have two hands to tackle things, chew with powerful teeth and have other survival strategies that even enable them to change their environment in a way that is mainly advantageous to them.
Now I am tempted to say with serious misgivings :
‼ Man is subduing the earth‼