Homo-Erectus to Homo Sapiens Brain size

by truthseeker1 3 Replies latest jw friends

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  truthseeker1

  Ok, well I've been outa school but I've done a little math problem here to see the human brain grew from Homo-erectus to homo-sapien.

  "it has been said" that there is a 2 Million span between Erectus and Sapien, and it has been guessed that a new generation would be produced every 10 years. that leaves you with 200,000 generations. Humans have 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) brain cells and Erectus is said to have half the size of a brain, so 50 billion cells it is. How do we effectivally double the brain size in just 200,000 generations? Thats 250,000 neurons per generation, seems amazing, huh? Well, if you look at it as a percentage of a whole, it isn't that much. if you had 50 billion bucks, whats 250,000 bucks to you?

  My math might be wrong here, but hey, thats why I'm posting here, for you guys to critic me :)

  X^200,000 = 2, meaning we have 200,000 changes to X to equal 2, where X is the percent change needed per generation to double the brain size, in other words, how big of a change is needed per generation to double in 200,000 generations.

  X = 1.0000034657

  relativally, thats about a half an inch compared to a mile! Not that big of a change at all!

  What do you think?

  http://www.howstuffworks.com/evolution.htm

  Edited to add the link

  Edited by - truthseeker1 on 12 July 2002 15:13:49
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  gsx1138

  Considering all the stupid people I see on the freeway everyday I'd say your math is off. There is no way some people have evolved that far from homo-erectus.
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  joannadandy

  Fossil skull alters notions of human origins

  By Tim Friend, USA TODAY

  A 6-million to 7-million-year-old skull has been unearthed in central Africa, a discovery that will change scientific thought about human origins and force paleontologists finally to abandon the notion of a so-called missing link, experts say.

  	AP photo
  	The Toumai skull along with fragments of a jaw and several teeth were found last summer in the Chad desert in central Africa.

  Paleontologists are hailing the discovery, reported in today's Nature, as the most significant in 75 years. The "Toumai" skull, found by a team led by Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France is the oldest ever found and the first found outside of eastern or southern Africa. It suggests that human evolution was taking place all across Africa and that Earth once truly was a planet of the apes on which nature was experimenting with many humanlike creatures.

  "It is a paradox of a creature with a skull about the size of a chimp but with features more like you find on human ancestors that are only a couple of million years old at the outside," says Bernard Wood, Henry Luce professor of human origins at George Washington University.

  "If it is a direct human ancestor, it competely sidelines everything else that has been found that is older than a million and half years," he says.

  Since 1925, when the first humanlike fossil was discovered, known as the Taung skull, it has been widely believed that human evolution progressed in a straight line from a knuckle-walking primitive ape to a fully erect human.

  Ever since, paleontologists have been searching for a missing link to represent the bridge between apes and humans. Lucy, a 3.5-million-year-old fossil found in the 1970s, was one of the first candidates for that link. But many more fossils have been discovered since, with many combinations of features that show human evolution was not so simple.

  Wood says people should view the human family tree as a bush with so many branches that it is almost impossible to trace a single one from the roots to the top. Toumai becomes the oldest branch found so far, but whether it leads directly to humans will be hard to determine.

  

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  Just thought I would share this, I think it's kinda cool
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  SYN

  Have you guys heard about the Aquatic Ape Theory?

  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=aquatic+ape