Thoughts on the military and military activities of a diverse nature. Free-ranging and eclectic.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Weapons

Weapons and Human Evolution

Weapons are very important to human evolution. Recent DNA findings prove the point.

MTDNA - DNA that passes from mother to child, indicates that every human alive is descended from one woman who lived about 150,000 years ago in Africa. But the Y Chromosome, that passes from father to son, indicates that every human alive descended from one man who lived about 60,000 years ago in Africa.

Sounds kind of kinky. But if the research is correct, it points out the difference in breeding options of males versus females. One male can father numerous offspring with numerous females, provided that other males let him. Other males are of course not all that fond of that outcome, which leads to conflicts among males of most species. The biggest toughest male gets the most offspring.

This is true for most species, including humans.

Enter weapons. The clever, smarter guys conceived better weapons, and with these weapons knocked off the other guys, and go their women. Hence a convergent date of our ancestral GGG Grandfather of 60,000 years ago versus our GGGGGrandmother of 150,000 years ago.

In a normal state, human males are in more or less constant conflict with other males over hunting areas and females. When things are equal, it is difficult for one band of males to knock off another band.

But each time a new superior weapon was created that gave one band of humans an advantage over the others, male on male genocide was the likely outcome, while preserving and breeding with the attractive females.

This scenario would have played out over and over again each time a superior weapon was developed. The first men and/or hominids that figured out how to property use a club or throw stones effectively would have had a field day. Ditto the first guys who developed the spear, the first who developed stone hatchets, slings, spear throwers, bows and arrows, guns, etc.

And each group who invented the new weapon was probably a little more clever and smarter then the guys who did not create the invention. Over time, conflict with weapons made humans more intelligent.

I think the above is correct, but who knows? I was not there,

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home