Question about the evolutionary origins of Homo Sapiens

Actually I'm pretty certain one of my books on alternative history which takes a look at the impact potatoes have had said that a human can get ALL the vitamins and minerals they need for good health by eating nothing but potatoes and drinking milk.

It works on Mars.

Yeah, just make sure you don't run out of ketchup.

Before ketchup.


After ketchup.

There's a good reason Watney had to keep taking vitamin supplements (which are fortunately light and easy to store)

Potato - 100 grams (3.5 ounces)

Vitamins
(0%) Vitamin A
(7%) Thiamine (B1)
(3%) Riboflavin (B2)
(7%) Niacin (B3)
(6%) Pantothenic acid (B5)
(23%) Vitamin B6
(4%) Folate (B9)
(0%) Vitamin B12
(24%) Vitamin C
(0%) Vitamin E
(2%) Vitamin K

Minerals
(1%) Calcium
(6%) Iron
(6%) Magnesium
(7%) Manganese
(8%) Phosphorus
(9%) 0Potassium
(0%) Sodium
(3%) Zinc

But potatoes are high in starch, and thus energy. So they're a boon to cultures that already have an agricultural system to can provide the required vitamins and minerals, but as the basis of a diet, in the absence of our other crops, it's essentially the same as sugar cane.

In contrast wheat, and presumably pasta, has more vitamins and minerals

Wheat - 100 grams

Vitamins
(0%) Vitamin A
(33%) Thiamine (B1)
(10%) Riboflavin (B2)
(36%) Niacin (B3)
(19%) Pantothenic acid (B5)
(23%) Vitamin B6
(10%) Folate (B9)
(0%) Vitamin B12
(6%) Choline
(7%) Vitamin E
(2%) Vitamin K

Minerals
(3%) Calcium
(25%) Iron
(35%) Magnesium
(190%) Manganese
(41%) Phosphorus
(9%) 0Potassium
(0%) Sodium
(28%) Zinc

That leaves the wheat cultures with a lot fewer nutritional gaps to fill. To get vitamin B12 from barley or wheat we turn it into beer and the yeast produces the B12. For vitamin A we go with carrots, leafy greens, and fish and liver. The Central American and South American Indians would have gotten it from peppers, squash, tropical fruit, and of course hunting.

But weren't they followed by a stream of successive groups over the years? Adding continually to the breeding population?

Way more than 48 people could walk across Beringia. They lived there during the ice age. It was grassland steppe.



Interestingly, based on DNA, American Indians are pretty much what central Asians were like back then.

Apparently they were stuck on the land bridge for a long time before moving into the North American interior. I don't remember how long.

Too long. Their wives wouldn't shut up about it. "Running Bear, we've been stuck on this goddamn frozen ass land bridge since your great grandfather chased the mammoths here. You said we were going to Miami or Cancun. I am so sick of eating goddamn seal meat! Get your ass in gear!"

I heard there was a cave in South Africa where they fou d 13 complete proto-Human skeltons which were new to science.

That's homo naledi.

BBC article.

Yeah I read about that and I think there was a special about it on Nat Geo.

In a shocking development, another Lucy is discovered in southern Uganda

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net...d_Lucy'.png/revision/latest?cb=20120929213215

Bullshit. I am raising that red bullshit flag high & proud: will you lose weight? Certainly - will you lose muscle along with the fat? Certainly! I suggest the Pepsi challenge - eat potatoes and drink milk while I eat steak and drink water (and exercise) and see who loses more fat and keeps more muscle. See who has the highest strength to weight ratio. Want to lay some money on it?

No.

I would be willing to lay some serious money that I start out with a massive advantage to begin with.....

Who do Cain and Abel have sex with? Eve?

A much better creation myth than the Bible. Also, 30k is plenty. Plus it's implied they crossbreed with the existing population.

They don't show up all at once. Evolution takes a lot of time. Humans didn't just magically appear one week.

Really? Not to take advantage of you while you have medical problems, but assuming you were in your normally healthy state that pound-for-pound you would have any advantage over me? I'm of course including cardio/gas tank in this equation. I will lay some money down on this - actual body weight versus actual output, in about five months (I need time to "peak" of course - I'm 54 years old).

The problem with the potatoes and milk diet is that milk is cheating. It has everything a body needs to grow really fast. It's like it's mammal food.

I've already got the advantage of being 5 years younger.
But you're on pops...

Agree with this. Nothing - and I mean nothing - appears in one week. When you consider the vast time-span involved, the human as we know it underwent many subtle changes as have any complicated species.

I think milk came into the equation due to the situation in Ireland just prior to the potato famine. Lucky Irish could feed their family on the potatoes they grew and have enough extra to feed a cow.

Which of course is why the famine was so utterly devastating.

Five years is nothing - in September (if we are both healthy) I'll go pound-for-pound using any commonly accepted standard you want to use.

Dayton can't even walk to the store. How's he going to best a career military guy in any kind of physical challenge? I'm almost a decade younger than Oldfella and have participated in world class athletic events, but I don't know that I'd best him in such a contest. Dayton certainly can't.

Why the hell are we talking about potatoes and milk?

For reasons I can't quite fathom, it takes God an entire week to create the universe. Was he using union labor or what? I mean, this is God we're talking about here, a being who can not only create Himself (And when, exactly, did He do this?), but also everything we can see in the universe. These are, putting it mildly, superhuman acts, requiring knowledge and ability beyond our means, and yet it still takes God 6 days to do everything. One would think that if God were so smart, that He'd have figured out how to do it all in an instant, so that He could get back to whatever it was He was doing before He started creating everything. Apparently not.

Of course, the act of creation was a monumental task and something far beyond our present skills, but this is, God we are talking about, and He's supposed to be able to do anything (though how He could create a rock so large that even He couldn't move it is a bit of a mystery) so I'd think that a week was a bit long for Him to be spending on a particular task. Just look at the scale of Creation, and there's lots of things you have to wonder about when it comes to the amount of time God spent creating things. The next time you're in the supermarket, pick up a grapefruit, then find a watermelon that's roughly twice the size of the grapefruit. That is how the Earth compares to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Not only did God create both the Earth and Jupiter on the same day (which is quite a feat, IMHO), but He created millions, if not billions, of other planets, both larger and smaller on the same day.

It's when you get to what happens on the sixth day of Creation, that God really begins to look like a slacker. He spends the entire day creating life on Earth. Why, I have to ask, does it take so long? I mean, in a single day, God creates basically the entire universe, stocks it full of planets and stars at an expanse of some fifteen billion lightyears (or more) across, but then it takes Him another whole day to create life on one measly little planet. I'd think that if a being could create something the size of Jupiter, let alone millions of planet sized objects, putting life on one insignificant speck, in one tiny corner of the cosmos, would take less time than a coffee break and not a whole day, but there you have it.

Now, when God gets around to creating humanity, He really starts to screw things up. First and foremost, there's His choice of materials: dust. Now, God manages to transmute that dust into flesh and bone (which, I presume is some kind of divine parlor trick, used to pick up female deities at parties or impress gullible yokels who've just shown up), but pretty much shafts us in comparison to other animals. Insects get an armored external skeleton with which to protect themselves from attackers, while we're left with an easily pierced bag of skin. This is bad, since lots of other animals have large claws and big fangs, and view humans as a light snack to keep hunger pangs away while they track water buffaloes or whatever they consider to be a meal. Oh, sure, God gave us opposable thumbs and larger brains, but as any animal trainer or hunter can tell you, those things aren't always enough to even the odds. Hell, even chimpanzees are stronger than us and can easily kick our asses. If humans are God's chosen creation, then why did we get such short shrift when compared to the animals?

God then realizes that He's apparently forgotten something and creates woman. Earlier in the Bible, when God's making every other kind of animal, He goes ahead and makes the female of the species, but with woman, she's the afterthought to His (apparent) afterthought of man. Talk about your neglectful parenting! Given that the Bible doesn't mention asexual reproduction, we're left with a bit of a conundrum. After all, one of the arguments against evolution is that it's not mentioned in the Bible, and therefore, can't be true. The bones of extinct animals are, according to this theory, Satan's doing to throw us off the track, so presumably, anything which uses asexual reproduction is also Satan's doing. This means, of course, that the microorganisms necessary for the fermentation of wine are, in fact, Satan's minions. Something to think about the next time you take Communion, no?

Next, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply”, while simultaneously making it incredibly difficult to do so. Oh sure, it only takes one time having sex to get a woman pregnant, but look at how big a pain in the ass it can be to get a woman into the position where she wants to have sex. If God really wanted us to be “fruitful and multiply” you'd think He'd make it so that all women were nymphomaniacs, or that they could get pregnant from something as simple as a handshake, and not a complicated ritual involving things like flowers, booze, and/or a blow to the head.

Even if you accept all that as somehow being necessary for the propagation of the species, you have to wonder about the whole design and placement of the various reproduction organs. Males, for instance, have rather delicate parts of their anatomy, which in order to function properly must be allowed to flop about in the breeze, as it were. By doing so, however, their reproductive capability is put at great risk even by the gentlest of blows. I'd think that if you were designing a creature to have the highest chance of being able to reproduce, you'd want those organs to be well protected, and not hanging out where they could be easy prey for small children or the snout of an affectionate dog, to name but a few. Then, of course, if a male somehow does manage to keep his “goody bits” intact until he's old enough to reproduce (And why do we have to wait till physical maturity to be able to reproduce? Seems to me, that if you wanted a species to really multiply, they'd be born pregnant, like aphids, and would start cranking out young almost immediately, and not have to wait a decade or more to be able to do it.) and he survives the exhausting task of seduction, he's got to be able to develop enough “hydraulic power” to get his anatomy in the proper state to release his seed, then perform a series of strenuous physical acts necessary to convince his sperm that it really is safe to come out now. Afterwards, if he's unable to drop off to sleep, he's forced to endure endless prattling from the female about how they're going to be spending the rest of their lives together, during which, she'll endeavor to prevent him from doing those things that he enjoys most, and not allow him to complete the act of reproduction with any other females, even though the male is biologically compelled to do so.

Mind you, when it comes to reproduction, the male anatomy is exceedingly wasteful. Not only does it take a tremendous effort to get sperm out of males, but most of that which is excreted is simply wasted. It only takes one sperm to fertilize an egg, but the male organ blithely squirts out millions of the little buggers at a time, letting the vast majority of them to go to waste. Not to mention, if a male doesn't ejaculate on a fairly regular basis, his anatomy will seek it's own means of disposal, rather than saving them for those rare opportunities when a female is securely wrapped around it.

Female anatomy isn't much better. Females are only capable of becoming pregnant a few days out of the month, and there's no handy indicator to let the male know that the female is fertile, so he may find that all his exertions were in vain. Then, instead of, locating the female organs in a readily accessible place like the hand, they're tucked up out of sight, making it difficult for males to find. Females also “suffer” from being limited to being pregnant once every nine months. Not only is that a long gestation time, but while a female's pregnant, she cannot (except in exceedingly rare circumstances) get pregnant again, until she's rid herself of the first pregnancy.

Both sets of anatomy suffer from having the “snack bar” uncomfortably close to the shithole. As anyone who's spent time fumbling about in a confined space while trying to commit the act of reproduction can tell you, this can some times lead to an unpleasant surprise when something ends up where it shouldn't. Of course, some people like that sort of thing, and while it might be entertaining, it generally doesn't lead to reproduction. God, it seems, enjoys leaving an awful lot of things to chance. You kind of have to wonder why God didn't just wire things up so that they only work in the way He intended.

Another problem with the location of the reproductive organs being stuffed up next to the excretory organs, is that if things get really going, one or both members could lose control of the excretory organs and you have one hell of a big mess to clean up, not to mention it can kill one's mood right quick. Admittedly, there are individuals who enjoy getting sprayed with excrement during the sex act, but let's face it, they're perverts and probably aren't going to be all that interested reproducing anyway.

One thing you have to wonder about, if the Bible's account of Creation is literally correct, is DNA. Why is it so easy to manipulate? Heck, even on it's own, parts of it can randomly rearrange itself in undesirable ways. If God wants the form of man to not evolve (it being perfect at the moment of Creation), then why use something like DNA which can be so easily scrambled by things like sunlight, chemicals, and a host of other things? Seems to me, that God, in His infinite wisdom, could have thought of a better system.

Then there's this whole business of growing old and wearing out. I realize that God did that to us because of something our remote ancestors did, but talk about holding a grudge! Sheesh. God makes the perfect design, and then later on, realizes that He's got to go back and modify it in such a manner, not only to punish the wrong doers, but also everyone who comes after them. Leaving aside God's wrathful nature for a moment, this sounds like a design defect. Obviously God's never worked the Japanese, who won't put up with that kind of crap.

So it seems to me that if God did create everything exactly the way it's laid out in the Bible, He's a moron. Not only that, but we humans had better stay here on Earth and not go any where, since given how piss-poor we're slapped together (and we are God's “chosen creation"), the rest of the cosmos must be positively falling apart at the seams.

The link Garamet posted has a good summary of one bottleneck event that happened and I would advise checking it out.

The few thousand individuals that you refer to weren't the first humans, they are simply the few thousand that all modern humans are descended from. Anatomically modern humans had existed for a hundred thousand years prior to that particular bottleneck event. Asking what the odds are of those particular individuals existing at the same time is a little like questioning what the odds are of all your grandparents having been around at the same time to produce you.

I'll tell you what pisses me off. Recent research suggests that the greater the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in your genome (and Caucasians have anywhere from 1-7%), the greater the likelihood of allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Gee, thanks, Grandpa Grog. Like I need to be sneezing from February through June.

I haven't done the Neanderthal test yet, but the mitochondrial DNA held some surprises, as did the ethnicity estimate. I'd recommend both to anyone who's curious about which really ancient trees their ancestors climbed down from.

Seconded. 23andMe was worth every cent, and they still send me new information every other month or so when they introduce new tests.

Once again, that is what she said.