Random Thought Depository

(Epistemic status: I would like to close all these wikipedia tabs someday)

What's the deal with recent-out-of-Africa anyway? You have the Chimp-Human split and developing bipedalism and all that going on in Sub-Saharan (except when there isn't a sahara?) Africa.

Then (things seem to get very murky and contested for a while here) you get H. erectus spreading across Eurasia, even reaching Britain by 560 kya.

Around 300 kya you get the LCA of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis (notwithstanding later interbreeding), who may have lived in SSA or possibly the Mediterranean.

In any case, you end up with a population of H. sapiens in East Africa giving rise to all extant humans. We see H. sapiens bones sporadically outside of Africa from 200 or so kya but no lasting settlement until a population crosses the Bab-el-Mandeb around 70 kya and becomes ancestral to everybody outside of Africa.

So depending on where the sapiens/neanderthalensis split happened, there were 2 or 3 big out of Africas and a bunch of smaller ones.

Is Africa just a good place to evolve humans? I suppose the only alternative is the bottom half of Eurasia.

There's the Saharan Pump theory going on. And once you're out the other side of the desert, minimum temperatures get fairly cold sometimes unless you have invented some kind of clothing (but maybe fur blankets are easier to make).

Then there's extinction vortices, which maybe explain a lot. An expansion out of Africa has to maintain enough of a gene pool or else they become too inbred to survive. Or you can have kids with someone from another species and suffer strong outbreeding depression. Isolation also contributes to a small effective population size, so "refugia in mountains and forests" are probably not long-term viable. Hell, maybe Neanderthals were just always skirting the edge of the minimum population size ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880983/ )

Idk exactly where I'm going with this but it seems differently arranged continents/climate would produce quite different results to what we do in fact see (haplogroup thunderdome in SSA and radiation elsewhere).

Also the thorny question of what if there were extant groups less related to each other than any two H. sapiens living today are but more than we are to neanderthals.

I guess your fundamental question is "why did modern humans originate in East Africa rather than one of the other regions to which H. erectus, or another human species, had migrated?" I can only guess that it's partly chance. But all the most interesting species were already present in Africa, and human communities outside Africa probably were more precarious and thus more likely to go extinct, especially as the climate fluctuated in northern Asia and Europe (plus the extinction vortices thing you point to).

In a way, it's hard to imagine an arrangement of continents more conducive to modern humans not appearing in Africa than the big Afro-Eurasian supercontinent. Like, I gotta figure India and parts of east Asia are going to be relatively clement throughout the Pleistocene, and there's no reason on paper why H. erectus couldn't have gotten settled there and evolved into modern humans. But idk, maybe our ancestors were especially tasty to tigers or something.

This book by a South African ecologist makes an elaborate argument that Late Cenozoic Africa really was uniquely suited, for geographical and ecological reasons, for the tool-using-scavenger-then-hunter niche that humans seventually occupied:

(from chapter 19) The uplift of Africa and subsequent rifting and volcanics... produced unusually low rainfall for the tropics coupled with soils that remained comparatively fertile, at least for nourishing large herbivores. Had Africa been mostly low-lying, it would have become largely a degraded semi-desert like most of Australia. Had the uplift taken place in the west, tropical regions of Africa would have been as moist and infertile as South America, thronged with huge mega-grazers rather than a rich assemblage of medium–large ruminants. Tropical Asia is mostly too low and wet for savanna vegetation to be extensive and lacks an abundant grazing fauna.

The crucial feature of Africa’s climates is the wide prevalence of seasonal dryness. This underlies the spatial predominance of savanna vegetation, with grasses coexisting between and beneath trees. Ruminants radiating during the Miocene adapted especially to digest the fibrous C4 grasses during the dry seasons. This capability enabled these grazers to attain vastly greater abundances than browsers... A diet of dry grass made the grazers dependent on access to surface water, concentrating their numbers within reach of perennial water sources during the dry months. This opened opportunities for savanna-dwelling ape-men to incorporate animal flesh into their diet...

South America’s large grazers were mostly too big to be exploited sustainably for flesh in tropical climates where meat soon rots. Australia and tropical Asia were both deficient in grazers. Nowhere outside of Africa were large herbivores sufficiently abundant to nurture the seasonal dependency of comparatively puny primates on scrounging from carnivore kills or running down their own prey.

The size structure of Africa’s large herbivore fauna was also crucially important. Carcasses of small antelope get consumed completely by their mammalian carnivore killers. Those of megaherbivores that have died remain attended by carnivores until the meat turns putrid... The unique feature of Africa’s large herbivore fauna is the abundance and diversity of medium–large ruminants, weighing 50–500 kg, which was established by 5 Ma... promoted specifically by the prevalence of dry/eutrophic savannas, or ‘sweetveld’... Tools developed by hominins to extract and pulverise tough plants became deployed to break open the bones and scrape flesh off the ungulate carcasses abandoned by the big fierce killers, exploiting a time window when large carnivores were mostly inactive.

Of course there must be a hefty dose of hindsight bias into any consideration of the sort, but it makes sense to me. Admittedly this is mostly about the earlier phase of human evolution, before the first Out of Africa, but the same conditions might still have driven more cognitive and technical development afterward.

Ooh, interesting hypothesis!

A few other possibilities that occurred to me:

1) During the ice ages much of the Eurasian landmass was chilly steppe and steppe-tundra. In terms of land area that was nice for very low-tech humans and proto-humans (ancestrally warm-weather creatures that lacked natural insulation) Africa might have had more of it for much of the Pleistocene. The warmer climate of Africa would have meant more photosynthetic productivity and hence more available food. Africa might have had the majority of humanity for much of the Pleistocene. Even if Eurasia had more humans total, Africa plausibly had denser human populations at least during the colder eras, and denser populations would have meant easier diffusion of genes and ideas, so plausibly faster evolution, faster accumulation of cultural complexity, and faster technological innovation.

2) Per Bergman's rule, in a colder climate animal biomass tends to be more concentrated into smaller numbers of big animals. Plant foods edible to humans also tend to be less abundant in cold climates (IIRC, the traditional Inuit diet is pretty close to pure carnivory). Edible to humans biomass in the cold ice age Eurasian steppes might have been heavily concentrated in big animals. To exploit the main edible to humans biomass reservoir of the ice age Eurasian cold steppe, humans might have had to learn how to efficiently take down animals substantially bigger and stronger than themselves, many of which moved in herds. This might have been quite challenging and taken a long time to figure out. Before humans learned how to be efficient big game hunters the Eurasian cold steppe's heavy concentration of theoretically edible to humans biomass into big, powerful, formidable herbivores might have seriously constrained the population of ice age Eurasian humanity. By contrast, Africa, being warmer, would have had more fruit, tubers, medium-sized animals, small animals, etc. that humans could eat with less effort and less danger. African humanity being more numerous would plausibly have meant African humanity would have accumulated cultural complexity and useful technologies and beneficial mutations faster.

3) Homo sapiens evolving in Africa might have been downstream of Homo erectus evolving in Africa. The Homo erectus out-of-Africa dispersal would have been a genetic bottleneck for Eurasian Homo erectus, i.e. Eurasian Homo erectus would have had less genetic diversity than African Homo erectus. More genetically diverse African Homo erectus might have evolved faster because more genetic diversity meant more variation for natural selection to act on.

“Secular” Zionism is like saying you believe the Earth is 5,000 years old and the first humans were named Adam and Eve and lived in a place called Eden with talking animals but it’s secular because you don’t explicitly mention God

I mean aside from the age thing this is retrospectively totally true in that you know that if scientists could identify a specific first man and first woman that's what they'd call them and ditto a point of origin

"#mitochondrial eve anyone"

Mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosomal Adam are actually very different concepts from Biblical Adam and Eve, calling them that is basically ramming a square real science peg into a round mythology reference hole.

Mitochondrial Eve was not the first woman, she's just the most recent woman everyone alive today has an unbroken chain of matrilineal descent from (as far as we know, it's not like we've actually given every human alive a mitochondrial DNA test). There were plenty of other women alive at the same time as mitochondrial Eve, and we're almost certainly descended from some of them in the same way you're descended from your paternal grandmother (inherited nuclear DNA from them but not mitochondrial DNA, because mitochondria pass only from mother to daughter).

Ditto, Y chromosomal Adam was not the first man, he's just the most recent man every cis perisex man alive today has an unbroken chain of patrilineal descent from (as far as we know). There were plenty of other men alive at the same time as Y chromosomal Adam, and we're almost certainly descended from some of them in the same way you're descended from your maternal grandfather (inherited DNA from them but not their Y chromosome because the Y chromosome passes only from father to son).

There's no scientific reason to think Y chromosomal Adam was mitochondrial Eve's husband and there's no scientific reason to think they made children together. It's possible, but nothing about what we know of them raises the possibility above the (very low) background plausibility of any other science fiction we might dream up about what their lives might have been like. It's statistically more likely that one lived and died many thousands of years after the other (one of them might have been the other's distant ancestor; that's if anything a lot more likely than a scenario where they had overlapping lifespans and met each other).

Mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosomal Adam were likely completely ordinary people in their lifetimes; their genetic significance to present humanity is likely more-or-less a consequence of random genetic drift.

I think calling mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosomal Adam "Eve" and "Adam" is a pretty clear case of actual cultural Christianity; mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosomal Adam are not particularly similar to the Biblical Adam and Eve, but they get called that because Christian mythology references are a big part of Western society's default way of talking about the past.

There probably was no first man and first woman, because evolution is slow and probably never produced any single mutation change that you could point to as something that decisively separates the first humans from whatever their ancestors before that point were.

Don't know whether this has any applicability to politics, but I felt like it was worth pointing out.

god ok I’ve been reading aella’s public substack. I have a lot of faith in her expertise bc she’s a polyamorous slut who also worked as a camgirl and an escort. she’s also a spreadsheet nerd, and her surveys about kinks and taboos have gone viral, so she has a lot of data to work with. She’s also saying the most bonkers shit

Like??? Ok, to be fair, she specified at the beginning that this series of posts was for straight men who were into women who bottom, so this isn’t supposed to apply to me. But are straight women really out here living like this????

I guess if you have a horrible monkey on your back that works against your own interest in sex, then it’s useful to view seduction as instrumental, a useful tool. I do agree with/enjoy the idea of seduction as collaborative. But fuck dude, have you considered getting rid of the monkey?

Maybe I’m too hot for this post. Actually getting laid is easy. Seduction is just something fun to do while you’re still hanging out at the bar.

I'm torn because this is completely incomprehensible to me, the layers of game-playing and self-sabotage.

I've never had sex with a cishet, but I've been friends and coworkers with a LOT of cishet women, including some incredibly conventionally attractive women, and they all have *a* game even if it is not this specific game.

My only guess after listening to what all of had to say—and then unpacking all of it because they are usually deeply in denial about their own motivations—is something like this:

Sex is theoretically casual and consequence-free for the modern cishet woman, but you still have to make a decision whether to have sex in the first place or not and whether it's worth whatever the consequences might be, such as they are, even if the only consequence is Catching Feelings or changing your phone number.

And cishet men have been figuring out new and exciting ways to figure out what cishet women want to hear to get them to have sex with them, even if it requires extensive deception, which is faster and easier than ever.

So if you can't ask for what you're actually after, and whatever you DO ask for will get a lie in return, what do you do?

Make up a fucking gauntlet challenge and not explain the rules and then blame it on evobio when you definitely made this up yourself, I guess.

I mean, to be 100% fair this particular person left a christian cult in her late teens/early twenties and pretty much immediately fell in with the bay area rationalist community so if I was going to create someone in a lab who had been programmed BOTH with hetropatriarchal attitudes AND needed a complex and pseudo-scientific dance ("evobio me harder daddy, breed me with your alpha cum so my stupid vagina forgets about society") instead of a sword ("hey maybe that's all bullshit and we can just fuck") to cut through that knot of issues, it would be her.

"roleplay as my Fantasy Lover that i invented as a teenager to resolve the cognitive dissonance between my burgeoning sexual desires and the assertion by authority figures and culture that my worth is determined by my sexual purity. it makes it easier for me to enjoy sex when it's modeled after the development of my sexuality during which i was told that domineering, controlling, and fear-worthy Patriarchal Men are the good men i should seek out to give me babies (because sex is for babies). i don't have to process my own desire for kinky/rough sex (or sex at all!) if we're only having it because you're a Big Strong Man who Wants What He Wants and i 'don't have a choice.' 😘😘😘"

I don’t think that’s entirely fair—Aella is a person who’s very interested in interrogating her own desire for rough and kinky sex! She has a whole substack about it! I think a more charitable reading is that you can be aware of your own hangups and still find it difficult to get rid of them.

Additionally, this series on her substack is advice to men who want to fuck women like her, who presumably also haven’t dealt with their hangups. You can’t process someone else’s hangups for them, but if the women you’re pursuing ARE interested in having sex, treating seduction as collaborative is one of the better ways to circumvent the hangups.

yeah, she's definitely processing to a point. but processing her hangups completely would necessitate unpacking her entire conception of masculinity and human sexual dimorphism and unlearning that evopsych instinct.

what I mean by this is it's literally straight up not true that women are attracted to partners who will give them evolutionarily "successful" children. we're a social species, and we marked N/A on the natural evolution bit about 150,000 years ago through things like inventing medicine and loving disabled people whether or not they provided a genetically superior sperm sample. Humans are subject to social evolution, not 'survival of the fittest.' We created the ability to keep people alive when nature would kill them, and now our species collectively decides who gets to live or die. not nature. this is why people born with cerebral palsy are loved by their families and cared for as long as they can be cared for and why people are born blind or deaf or with disfigured limbs and live long and happy lives. because we aren't shoving people into the woods and letting nature take its course.

so, quoted,

She asserts that women et all have some innate and natural attraction to aggressive partners because aggressive partners could fight off a bear in the woods and "Provide" through strenuous circumstances (they can't and survival involving an angry bear means Avoiding A Fight but whatever). it assumes that women are literally genetically physically inferior and have developed an evolutionary instinct to rely on the male members of the species for their physicality as a species trait. None of this is true. Literally none of it. That's not a species trait. That's not the nature of humanity or feminine desire. That's her. That's what she wants as an individual with personal sexual proclivities.

justifying her personal sexual desires through evopsych is a cognitive dissonance. instead of saying "I want this for myself because I enjoy it," she says "all women have a stupid glitch in their brain that makes them want Aggressive Powerful sexual partners for breeding purposes which means I need my partners to playact at being Aggressive and Powerful so I can fuck them." that is not engaging with the reality of her desires. that's creating a myth about the nature of humanity in order to support her preconception that she has no control over her desires and her desires mean nothing about her personally. 'it's just evolution.'

for me, it's just a no. hard stop. that's not what's happening here. I'm not really willing to entertain thoroughly disproven evopsych bullshit based on misogynist stereotypes because a world-class sex-haver is describing her likely-religious-trauma-induced neuroses as an enlightened and considered position on heterosexual sex. it's not.

and what she's doing here is not sex positive conversation about desire, sexual boundaries and safewords, or how to discover and communicate the type of sex you want. first, it's not sex positive because it still asserts that the only purpose for sex is procreation. the gatekeeper apparently exists because Woman Brains are only capable of interpreting sex in terms of the baby it will make. her stated goal is helping men "circumvent the gatekeeper" by showing women they're appropriately aggressive and domineering enough to be impregnate you and protect the offspring.

this is not teaching men how to communicate with their partners, create a space of freedom, vulnerability, and comfort, or even see them as individual women with individual desires to be explored. "circumventing the gatekeeper" is giving men advice on effective sexual coercion. because this is a heterosexual context that is utilizing evopsych (all women secretly but innately desire an Aggressive Man and all men innately and secretly desire to Overpower women), she is telling them how and when to be strategically aggressive so that the night ends in sex. SHE has a high libido and DOES always want sex, so SHE wants to be coerced as a form of play. Totally fine and in fact good as fodder for a private conversation between partners, not as a fieldguide to heterosexual sex and relationships.

I hope I don't have to say this, but you need consent and a safeword before beginning play involving aggression. aggression is not a hat trick to force a Woman Brain into Sex Mode, and it's actively dangerous to tell men that One Secret Trick (Being an Alpha) will drop panties. Her inability to differentiate between her own personal desire for rough sex and to be dominated from the rest of the entire female gender is going to get women assaulted when some fucking dude reads that blog and literally believes that glitchy woman brains can be tricked into wanting sex if you're aggressive enough.

Yeah, I think this is a reasonable and well-articulated criticism. Big agree about evopsych. Not only is it bullshit, and it’s annoying bullshit.

I forget if I said this in this post or just talking about it to someone irl, but despite talking a lot about evopsych (therefore implying her experiences are universal), Aella consistently expresses in her substack that she’s not describing all women, that you should not lie about commitment to trick someone into bed, that you should talk to a lady about how she likes to have sex before you try any of her advice in bed.

None of that was in the section I quoted tho, and it’s reasonable for you to assume she is making universal claims. Because of, like, the universal claim (“eons of evolution.”)

Overall the vibe of her “Good at Sex” series on her substack is introducing a more even-handed and respectful attitude into pickup artistry. The fact that she’s still endorsing pickup artistry as a strategy is baffling to me, and worthy of derision for the reasons you list above.

At the end of the day tho, I don’t think that you can actually trick someone into sleeping with you via seduction techniques. Everyone knows what negging is. You don’t have to let it work on you. Pickup artistry generally recommends r-selection actually, where if a woman isn’t interested, you move on quickly. I find Aella’s advice deeply unrelatable, and potentially it will increase the number of rude or unpleasant men I encounter in the Bay Area, but I don’t think her column will lead to a woman being assaulted.

no, her discourse on heterosexual sex is dangerous. i looked through it and she's advancing the "men are werewolves" concept (part 3 of the series), which asserts that men are like werewolves and "change" under a full moon (during sex) at which point they lose all reason and self-control. They "can't stop." This is a genuinely dangerous concept that contributes to rape culture and purity culture.

First and foremost, men are human. They possess their reasoning capabilities during sex and they can stop at any time. There is no point during sex or otherwise where a heterosexual man "changes" and "loses control."

It contributes to rape culture and purity culture because if men are inherently dangerous sexual beasts, a women is on the hook for her own assault if she "teases him" or "leads him too far." It denies women the right to revoke consent once penetration has begun (everyone has the right to revoke consent at all times.) If men are werewolves, it's logically a woman's responsibility to acknowledge that reality and cater to it. Dress modestly, only consent to sexual acts if you're okay with penetrative sex, etc. Do Not Provoke The Beast (to avoid assault). This type of sexual understanding and instruction is extremely common in religious fundamentalist communities like Mormonism, the Amish, Conservative Mennonnites, etc. All of which feature extraordinarily high rates of sexual abuse. qu'elle suprisé that she was raised in a fundamentalist community.

This is all extremely obvious fundamentalist ideologies of gender and sexual relations. They are not an accurate account of heterosexual sexuality, this is christian fundamentalism.

If a woman had this problem, I’d expect her to be strongly attracted to men who have lots of compassion and empathy, a nurturing personality type, a strong moral compass, a strong work ethic, and other pro-social traits. Sure, she might be attracted to the kind of man who might stand against between her daughter and a hungry lioness, but she’d be most attracted to men who are like that in a protective altruistic papa bear “Get away from her you bitch!” kind of way (that particular scene has a woman in the protector role, but I think you get the point). And sure, she might be attracted to high-status men, but she’d be most attracted to men who are high-status in a highly pro-social (or at least highly pro-social toward the in-group) “pillar of the community” kind of way.

Cause, y'know, those are the traits that would make a man a good husband for her and a good father for her children and that would make a man more likely to respond to her getting pregnant with “this kid is my responsibility as much as yours, I will try to be a good dad for them!” instead of trying to leave her social group or deny paternity or otherwise evade responsibility for the kid. Also, if we’re going to assume personality type is heritable (to some extent it probably is) those are the traits that would make her children more likely to be good caretakers for her in old age and would be likely to make them thrive in small-scale relatively egalitarian societies like the ones most humans probably lived in for most of our species’s existence.

When people talk about some human men being “alpha” they usually seem to be using the term to indicate traits that would actually likely make a man a bad husband, a bad father, a bad son, and socially unsuccessful in the kind of communities that most humans probably lived in for most of the existence of our species.

"The imperative of protecting the vulnerable young in a predator-rich environment no doubt played a major role in shaping human sex differences and sexuality. La difference - the sexual dimorphism characteristic of humans and many other animals - is now believed to reflect, in large part, the greater role of males in actual combat with predators. Hunting, too, if it were a male-only activity, would have favored bigger, stronger males. But long before the male hunting band, males were probably deployed as baboon males are: to guard the periphery of the group." - Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites.

Some years back I read a post about how war is basically an exercise in sending barely adult young men to kill each other, but this is made more palatable by honoring the young men used so. Blood Rites seems like basically an attempt to offer a theoretical model of the origins of that behavior; not so much the origins of the war part as the origins of the honoring part.

I've only read the parts I could find for free on the internet cause my local library doesn't seem to have the book and my financial situation is not great so I'm reluctant to buy it, I'm wondering if she talks more about how her theory relates to gender, especially masculinity, cause, like...

... Yeah, let's talk about those hypothetical proto-humans making their camp in the Pleistocene savanna, deploying in that gendered defensive formation, the fighting age adult males deployed in a ring at the periphery of the camp, clutching their sharpened sticks and stone hand axes (the mightiest human weapons of this era), deployed out there to watch for and defend against and absorb the violence of the savanna's predators, while the more vulnerable immature young and more demographically valuable females and the few elders who've managed to live long enough to become enfeebled get the relative safety of the camp's center.

If the masculine gender role originally emerged from that situation, I think that would explain a lot about what it looks like! In the context of that defensive formation might emerge association of maleness with combat and an idea that able-bodied adult males should participate in group violence, masculine protectiveness toward women and children and division of humanity into fighting men and protected ones (women, children, the old and disabled), valuing and honoring of courage in combat especially in males, shaming and ostracism and punishment of young males who very understandably show noticeable reluctance to leave the relative safety of the group's core and take a place in the peripheral defensive ring when they reach maturity, females using gifts, affection, and sex as ways to reward males who show willingness to put themselves at risk for the sake of the group, honoring of heroes (the male who drove a sharpened stick into the lioness's side), honoring of the memory of martyrs (the male who threw little stones at the dinofelis and drew its hunger and rage down upon him so it would kill him instead of a woman or a child).

There's a paragraph, like, right after that quote that speculates that human playful/social non-reproductive sexuality may have evolved in that context, which, yeah, if we're going to talk about the gendered aspect of this we should talk about some of the stuff I talked about here. When I first conceptualized the first sentence of my response to that quote the phrasing that bubbled into my mind was "barely legal adult," which, lol, "barely legal" is a porn category, usually meaning an 18 year old young actress IIRC, but actually I think there might be something in noticing that parallel, pulling on that thread! Also, I see a possible intersection with the Sex At Dawn kind of monogamy as a relatively recent innovation hypothesis in this. In this gendered anti-predator defense formation males would work together to defend the females and immature young of the group as a collectivity. If you're going to use male-female sexual bonding to strengthen that relationship, it would probably work better if it was polyamorous so most or all of the group's fighting males would feel that attraction-affection-gratitude-protectiveness tangle of emotions toward many of the group's females.

Re: hunting hypothesis vs. defense hypothesis for the origins of human organized violence, which is something Ms. Ehrenreich talks about (she's strongly on the side of the defense hypothesis) - as I pointed out here, I think the human tendency to honor courage is suggestive; courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights with the strong, and quickly retreats if it loses the advantage. Then again, bravery is also useful in intra-species competition, so that's not conclusive (notably, I think the "a smart predator isn't brave" thing isn't so obvious to a lot of humans because present and recent historical human hunting is often partly an intra-species social activity oriented toward gaining prestige by killing big, strong, dangerous animals and taking impressive trophies). I also think that stuff like that visceral dislike of deserters David Graeber talked about fits better with this model. Like, yeah, I guess big game hunting might have been vital to survival sometimes, but it's hard to see "all men must be hunters!" as a strong imperative unless it's really about something else (like enforcing gender conformity). But an able-bodied adult male who runs away instead of defending the women and children when the hungry lions come? Yeah, I could see emotions that incline toward very strongly disincentivizing that behavior getting strongly selected for. Then again, the threat that encouraged strong negative attitudes toward deserters might have been organized violence by other human groups, we've had at least multiple millennia when the animal most likely to kill a human was another human, so again, not conclusive.

IDK though I'm probably biased toward this model cause it's extremely congruent with my kinks and damage lol. Like, one of my "maybe I'm an outlier and shouldn't be counted, but..." issues with 2010s flavor feminism was "if you're going to talk about masculinity, I'm a cis-in-the-expansive-sense male and I don't really see myself at all in this figure of the entitled misogynistic 'bro' you seem to think is the default state of men in our society, but I once ignored a severe and painful toe infection cause I just kind of didn't want to be a bother about it and didn't want to inflict a doctor's bill on my family, and something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the 'I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me' line in The Maiden and the Selkie."

Another thing I'm wondering about is if the book touches on the situation I talked about here and here, where early humans got smart enough to imagine pre-emptive self-defense with a long planning horizon and revenge and started to turn the tables and actively hunt human-eaters. Because if we're suggesting that the "put them in white robes and give them gold bands" aspect of war is originally derived from our responses to predation, that seems like it might have been a very important stage in the emergence of that!

There's a bit in the book speculating that the primordial situation religious sacrifice reconstructs is a group of proto-humans being attacked by a predator and one of them being killed and carried away, possibly with one of the proto-humans either voluntarily offering themselves to the predator so it doesn't hurt the others or being chosen as a designated victim (note: this was Barbara Ehrenreich relating somebody else's idea). And, yeah, I guess that might be a harrowing formative collective trauma of our species, but it doesn't leave much time for ceremony and it's an inherently unpredictable fast messy process. It really wouldn't be a promising nucleus for rituals to grow around. It might get associated grief rituals that happen afterward, but the kind of ceremonialization of war Barbara Ehrenreich is talking about is more about the preparation for organized violence, the build-up. Also, I think a big part of the emotional appeal of that ceremonialization of war is that it generates a feeling of power, whereas watching one of your friends get dragged away by a lion would have exactly the opposite effect, it would make you feel weak and afraid.

You know what would offer time for ceremony and a prolonged period of fearful-angry-mournful-but-also-hopeful emotional build-up? When some clever proto-humans get a bright idea. They already hunt small weak animals like monkeys (chimps do), they are already used to fighting their predators with simple weapons, they have already learned to track predators to some extent to better avoid them, now combine these skill sets! Instead of waiting for the predator to come to them again and have the fight on its terms and hope to just drive it off so everyone gets to live one more day, they can seek its trail, find its lair, fight it in circumstances of their choosing, kill it and the end the threat of it forever, invert the ancient relationship between its species and theirs, hunt the dinofelis or megantereon or whatever that predator is! Now give it maybe a few generations or centuries or millennia for that practice to become an institution...

Here is the opportunity for vows of revenge choked out through tears as what's left of the predator's latest victim is buried in honor. Here is the opportunity for the selection of champions. Here is the opportunity for rituals to prepare the chosen for their terrible and glorious task (dream image: an old woman opening a shallow cut on her left arm with an obsidian butchery flake and using a thumb to smear a little of her blood on the foreheads of five 16-26 year old boys). Here is the opportunity for the chosen to dance around the fire and sing confident war songs ("you big dumb cat, you don't know what's coming! You think we'll wait for you to come again and eat another of us like the dumb antelope! You'll be so surprised when we hunt you instead, when we trap you in your hole and kill you! I'll cut your stomach open to get my niece's bones back! I'll cut off your head and cut out the teeth you tore up my niece with and give them to my mother and my aunt to wear in their hair!"). Here is the opportunity for the community to luxuriate in the promise of power and deliverance their cleverness offers them (the big dumb cat indeed is oblivious to the danger it's in, no other prey species has the cognitive capacity for the kind of strategic thought these early humans are doing, this kind of prey behavior is an outside context problem its instincts do not prepare it for) and dream of a better future when the enemy is defeated. Here is the opportunity for the chosen to be indulgently pampered with food, affection, and sex as a reward for their selflessness, with the promise that they will be given more of the same treatment if they come back from their great task victorious and their memory will be honored if they die during their mission.

Imagine the high that might be for a prey species, especially if they still remember the long age of fear and grief and impotent anger before they realized they could turn the tables, hunt the hunter. Something something that Frantz Fanon-ish therapeutic value of inflicting violence on your tormentor idea.

“One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and intelligent society with grievances. The damage that vengeful intelligence can wreak, you cannot even imagine.” - Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune.

Aside: I know some nonhuman animals do sometimes attack their predators pro-actively, e.g. I've heard about cape buffalo doing that, but I don't think they do anything like try to systematically exterminate every individual predator that attacks a member of their group including tracking them and hunting them down with days-to-weeks planning horizons; you'd need some pretty serious cognitive capacity for that kind of strategic thought which I don't think cape buffalo and the like have.

In a different corner of Tumblr somebody made a post arguing that it's absurd to think that men experience gender oppression qua being men because there's no uniquely male experience of oppression. It's not an argument I particularly want to get into, but I think what I've just written is kind of a counter-argument against that idea, though admittedly a very weak one; highly speculative, and Anglophone internet feminists are usually talking centrally about relatively peaceful societies where being a man isn't particularly dangerous, and societies where being a man is dangerous are often really dangerous for women too.

I'm going to consolidate my replies to multiple people's responses to this post here:

@weiszklee: I think in early humans/proto-humans demographic value (the "wombs are expensive, sperm is cheap" thing), not sexual dimorphism, would probably have been the main thing pushing the development of the kind of defensive strategy I was talking about. Given approximately human-like reproductive biology and approximately bonobo-like sexual behavior, a male who gets killed by lions at 22 could have way more kids than a female who gets killed by lions at 22. Humans are a long-lived and slow-breeding species, so protecting females from predation would have been particularly important for our viability as a species if we became a long-lived slow-breeding species before we got smart enough to systematically kill off most of the things that hunted us.

@wmb-salticidae: I think Barbara Ehrenreich thinks that moving from forest to savanna/grassland exposed proto-humans to increased predation pressure, which makes sense; an open landscape makes you much more visible to predators and doesn't offer obstructions that would slow a charging predator down. On the other hand you'd be more vulnerable to surprise attacks in a forest, then again natural grasslands can have pretty high grass that predators can hide in (though that would reduce your visibility to them too). The gendered defensive ring strategy also seems like it'd be more effective in an open environment. Notably, Barbara Ehrenreich's example for a primate that does that sort of gendered defensive formation is baboons. So if bonobos don't have male defensive ring behavior but proto-humans/early humans did, those would be my guesses for the reasons why.

@hedoughnism: I suspect proto-human/early human social groups were higher-trust than that theory of the origin of monogamishness in Catching Fire seems to imply (at least going by your description of it). Like, if you were in the wilderness with a normal-ish group of modern humans you would not need to intensively cultivate a special relationship with a particular person to get them to make sure your food didn't get stolen while you cooked it. I suspect the level of cooperativeness necessary to not have to do that is older than monogamishness.

Continue Reading

—

Siobhan Leddy in The Outline. We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin

Her novels imagine other worlds, but her theory of fiction can help us better live in this one.

There’s a link to a PDF of Le Guin’s essay here.

(via protoslacker)

The bag is actually much more profoundly human than even Le Guin imagined.

We have helpless infants who must be carried all the time. They can’t hang on our fur because we don’t have any and they wouldn’t be strong enough anyway. But they must be watched and protected constantly, and they must be fed frequently. There is no way to do that and still be able to gather enough food to feed yourself and your toddling children or elderly parents who aren’t strong enough to gather for themselves, unless the baby is in a bag. As long as you have only one free arm, your gathering capabilities are severely limited.

Humans also have lengthy childhoods where we’re kind of useless – unlike apes, who have significantly shorter childhoods – and elderly folk who cannot reproduce, unlike apes who die in their 60’s without ever hitting menopause. So our existence utterly depends on the ability to gather more food than the gatherer can eat, in order to feed the weaned children who can’t gather enough food for themselves and the disabled elderly. (We also have evidence that humans have always cared for people who were disabled from birth or in youth, too.) But our infants’ helplessness makes this literally impossible to do for close to a year at a time.

Either we invented the bag before we fully developed these traits, or, more likely, we eked out a much more marginal existence because gatherers who were nursing infants literally could not collect food for anyone else, and possibly not even enough for themselves, given that they had only one useful arm. (It’s certainly possible that the babies were passed to the elderly who can’t gather to hold, allowing the mothers to collect more, but babies need to be nursed a lot, restricting a nursing mother’s range significantly if she can’t bring her baby with her.)

The first technology humans probably developed was some means of strapping their babies to their bodies. Before we had clothes (we evolved in a grassland with a hot climate, not much need for clothes), before we had weapons, before we had fire, we had to have been strapping our babies on. Which probably led to the bag, because if you can strap a baby, what if you could strap more fruit and vegetables?

Noting the possible importance of carrying containers to human evolution is interesting and neat, but I honestly find the way that quote gets passed around a bit frustrating, because we actually can do a bit better than this Greek philosophy approach of trying to work out the history of tools by study of present day humans and pure reason! Tool use has been observed in chimpanzees! Chimpanzees may not be a perfect model for our own distant ancestors, but they give us a glimpse at what sort of tools an omnivorous sorta human-like smart but not human-smart primate closely related to us uses, which seems a step up from the sort of speculation you see in that quote in the OP.

Chimpanzee tools noted here:

Hmm, a little bit ambiguous. But chimps and humans aren't the only primates that have tool use, so it may be illuminating to look at the even more primitive tool-kits of other primates.

Some chimpanzees do maybe seem to use spears and there are other references to animals using weapons, whereas I don't see any mention of carrying containers (the nearest thing I can find is the references to chimps using leaves as sponges to drink), which gives a point to the spear hypothesis. But spear use in chimpanzees is noted as something not documented until relatively recently and pretty unusual; they'd be the only animal other than humans known to do such a thing. Whereas I see lots of references to tool use by nonhuman animals other than chimps. What I see is a lot of other kinds of tool use that make it pretty likely that the actual answer to "was the first tool the spear or the carrying bag?" is "it was neither." Chimpanzees use stones to crack nuts and sticks to catch insects and gather honey, for instance. Orangutans also use tools for insectivory, and to help them eat a kind of fruit - and apparently sometimes as sex toys lol. Gorillas seem to mostly use tools to stabilize themselves, e.g. as walking sticks while crossing water - which I guess makes sense, being big and heavy and living in a jungle means fall injuries might be a serious problem for them.

So my bet on "was the first tool a spear or a carrying bag?" is very heavily on "it was neither, the first tool of our lineage was probably a hammer used to break nuts or a stick used to pull termites out of their mound or something like that."

Really, the whole spear vs. carrier bag argument just feels fundamentally mistaken in its model of the relationship between tools and humanity. Like it thinks the first tool was a specifically human thing and learning to use tools was some big moment in the transition from ape to human. Given how many apes seem to do some tool use, the first tool probably long pre-dated the human-chimpanzee split!

I wonder if this is just an example of science marching on. According to this, Jane Goodall first observed chimpanzee tool use in 1960 - and tool use was previously believed to be exclusive to humans. IIRC at the time somebody said that now they'd have to redefine tool, redefine human, or accept chimpanzees as a type of human, because before Goodall observed chimps doing it tool use was seen as a specially and quintessentially human thing (turned out the option we chose was to redefine "human"). "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" was apparently written 16 years later, but maybe chimpanzee tool use just hadn't percolated widely into public consciousness yet?

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Aside: I think another important "extended phenotype of culture" thing related to infant care might be cutting and grinding food. Human babies need supplementary feeding with foods that aren't breast milk after six months or so. Our teeth don't start erupting until 8-12 months. Cutting or grinding food into a form suitable for feeding to a toothless baby may have been important in providing extra calories to fuel faster brain development early in life. Knives (that could be used to cut food into bite-size pieces that could be swallowed by a toothless person) might have been a crucial technology that enabled our brains to get so big in the first place, like fire. Early supplementary feeding would also mean more child-care could be outsourced to people who weren't lactating, like the grandparents and the father.

It's weird that tightly coiled hair is just an African thing AFAIK. Presumably an adaptation to heat? I can't think of any animals that have it (some sheep are close but I don't think wild sheep have it?) so presumably related to sweating? Weird then that those who left lost it, surely straight hair doesn't insulate THAT much for winter. Makes me wonder if curly hair is just diluted coil hair genes or if they work separately...

EDIT: different groups have different hair genes

Could just be founder effect. Some Africans have straight hair - notably, in the general region that's probably where the first Homo sapiens out of Africa migrants came from.

I'm a bit skeptical of explaining regional variation in human hair texture and color, nose shape, etc. by selection pressures. Like, skin color in Old World peoples does have a pattern that's roughly consistent with a vitamin D synthesis/UV resistance trade-off being the critical factor, and it makes sense that getting enough vitamin D and not getting skin cancer would be a big deal, but is having a broad nose vs. having a narrow nose really going to make that much difference to your chances of survival? I think a lot of this stuff might just be founder effect + genetic drift. There's no obvious fitness advantage to having blue eyes, and that's unevenly geographically distributed too.

why is it that europeans are white but northern native americans aren't? surely they got a similar lack of sun if it's just about vitamin D or whatever. how do you explain this without invoking the science of Dr. Yakub?

I assume this is talking specifically about the indigenous people of northern North America and Patagonia; much of the Americas is closer to the equator than Europe.

I was thinking about how bizarre it seemed to me thst hunter gathering was/is like a viable survival strategy, it seems to tenuous, but I thought about it more and for malthusian reasons we should expect the HG lifestyle to be right on th edge of plausibility. If it was super prosperous, population expands until it isn't anymore, if it's too tenuous, population decreases until it isn't anymore

@discoursedrome said:

well yeah but unlike other animals i dont have like claws or sharp teeth AND unlike other animals i am really big but cant eat grass/leaves! its weird! if you left me in the woods what would i eat? how did people learn to live out there! nobody taught them! i mean like. obviously most people were taught. but everything had to be figured out first

@yorickish said:

yeah this is true. i often think about how a modern persons idea of a forest isnt old growth so its like. a weird immature artificial forest. like if someone's idea of a city only had half-built buildings, and babies. there were also a lot less people which helped

Pre-agricultural humans didn't have sharp teeth and claws, but they didn't need them because they had something even better: tools! An early human hunter's equivalent of a tiger's claws and teeth was their spear and stone hand axe; a stabbing spear is basically superior to a big cat's natural weapons (longer reach and replaceable if damaged!), and people have been making and using spears for at least 400,000 years. A Pleistocene hunter-gatherer might also have things like fishing nets and carrying baskets which potentially make them a much more effective food-gatherer than a wolf or a monkey (as well as knowledge of how to preserve food artificially, artificially remove poisons from food like is done with casava and fugu, etc.). That's that extended phenotype of culture, baby! It's much older than agriculture!

If you go back to before human-like tool use, the closest biological analogy for our ancestors that far back would be chimps and the closest ecological analogy for them might be savanna baboons. Do you also feel incredulity at the idea that those animals survive?

Notably, Australopithecines were substantially smaller than modern humans. Likely we did get bigger (and smarter) because tools and controlled fire enabled us to acquire more food and get more nutrition from the food we acquired. Tools and controlled fire also enabled range expansion (e.g. into cold areas where tropical/subtropical apes would have problems without protective clothing) and I suspect a big increase in population density.

it would be so sick if humans were like a tenth the size. i feel like probably you could have human intelligence in something much smaller, african grey parrots are way smaller than like, baboons, and probably smarter. anyway. it would be great because physics would be so much more convenient. like we're at this weird size where theres a lot of things we CAN do but theyre really expensive. you can totally imagine a species thats too big for boats (with more than one or two passengers, maybe) to be viable, too big for aircraft to be viable, too big for manned spaceflight. our size isnt a limiting factor at all for boats (boats dont get much bigger than the biggest boats that exist now because theres not much demand but especially because beyond a certain length, waves can break it apart just from the sheer difference in height between parts of the boat) but it is for planes, and extremely limiting for spaceflight. also because humans are megafauna this limits how useful animals can be for us, very few animals are big enough to be able to do work on our scale. can you imagine like elf size humans. we would struggle early on of course from like, predation, but biological stuff would be relatively way more powerful if we harnessed it. also blimps would be viable

@youzicha said:

worth a read! interesting!

If floresiensis was evolving into the monkey niche as that post speculates, I'd expect to see signs of it in their feet, to wit a reversion toward an ape-like configuration where the toes are long and prehensile like fingers, suitable for an arboreal lifestyle. It appears that a floresiensis specimen does include the bones of the foot! Do they show any sign of such a reversion? I haven't looked it up, but if it's there it's not visually obvious to me on the bones, and I feel like I'd probably have heard of it if there was.

Aside:

Degenerate Hobbits | West Hunter (wordpress.com):

"Flores isn’t a very big island – ~5,000 square miles, similar to Connecticut. There couldn’t have been many hobbits. And they seem to have been there for a long time, hundreds of thousand of years, judging from tools found.

Which means that if they were what they seem to be, they would have suffered far more from genetic load than Neanderthals or Denisovans. All those problems of slightly deleterious alleles drifting to high frequencies would be much more serious, and the probability of salvage mutations would be much lower.. Moreover, the Flores Hobbits look screwed up (unlike Neanderthals), with many skeletal anomalies and asymmetries. This is why some anthropologists have argued that they are just diseased modern humans.

Point is, the island-dwarfed erectus story does makes sense, but it would inevitably result in them being highly screwed up. Like they are."

I think prehistoric Blindsight vampires would have been like this too, for a similar reason.

i really like this series of posts about pre-clovis settlement in america. it talks about how the weird thing with pre-clovis is we seem *some* evidence of early humans, but not a lot! but biology doesnt really "do" maintaining a low population over thousands of years. generally, you expand up to your carrying capacity, or you fizzle out. and maybe humans didnt do as well pre-clovis because of differences in technology, or maybe differences in the environment, or etc etc, but it needs *some* explanation for why the carrying capacity was so much lower pre-clovis

Uh, I browsed that Wordpress blog and the comments on its posts a bit and I saw a lot of "this person is likely a shitty alt-reichy" red flags (one of the most obvious examples: they think The Marching Morons was a prescient book). That doesn't necessarily mean all the science stuff on their blog is wrong (they might be one of those people who's got one or two crank beliefs but is otherwise a pretty solid scientist, this stuff is way above my metaphorical pay grade, and it's possible I'm simply misjudging them), but it does incline me to take just about everything they say with a grain of salt and be on guard against Gell-Mann amnesia.

That said, yeah, this was a major thing that made me skeptical about early Americas settlement theories: if there were humans hanging around in the Americas for tens of thousands of years before the Clovis people, I'd think we'd have found more signs of them. Yeah, yeah, fossils only show you what organisms were common, but by 50-20,000 years ago Homo sapiens was a pretty capable species; the sort of species that I'd expect would have become common pretty quickly.

I'd have put it down to the first Americans being a fishing/whaling/beachcombing culture who basically just lived on the shore, didn't know how to live inland and were not strongly motivated to colonize away from the shore, but those footprints are in New Mexico, pretty far inland, so I don't think that works.

They might have gone through a pretty tight genetic bottleneck getting to the Americas, maybe they were just too inbred to thrive or be very fertile?

The idea of humans not being able to consistently achieve ecological dominance over other large predators until (relatively) recently mentioned in those posts is interesting, but I'm kind of skeptical. I think the killer app for achieving ecological dominance over other large predators would have been capacity to imagine pre-emptive self-defense and delayed revenge and delayed killing of rivals with long (as in, days to years) planning horizons (combined with spears or maybe even just hand axes and clubs). You'd need to be very smart to understand and anticipate an enemy that could do that, and even a very physically formidable predator would be quite vulnerable to an enemy that imaginative and patient, so I think it'd be a basically undefeatable OCP for most predators that they could adapt to only by learning to avoid attacking humans. I'm trying to imagine what the minimum intelligence might be for a viable "Grendel" (predator that can habitually attack humans and survive), and I'm thinking intelligence of a human toddler combined with the physical power of a jaguar or a wolf might do it, so probably considerably smarter than a chimp, I guess (it occurs to me that Yeti/"Abominable Snowman" modelled as an Australopithecus offshoot with large carnivore ecological niche and physical power and toddler-like intelligence might be a viable and relatively plausible "Grendel"). Capacity to imagine pre-emptive self-defense and delayed revenge seems like something we probably got relatively early; like I said, I think something with the intelligence of a small human child would probably be able to strategize on that level.

One possibility that occurs to me:

"biology doesnt really "do" maintaining a low population over thousands of years. generally, you expand up to your carrying capacity, or you fizzle out."

Purely instinct-driven biology doesn't, but intelligence and culture might! You don't want to live inside the bust part of a classical predator-prey boom and bust cycle. If you're smart, you want to keep your population stable at a level well below the carrying capacity of the land with your level of technology, because a population at carrying capacity is a population at the edge of starvation. Humans are smart enough to realize this and regulate their own reproduction accordingly! Most obviously we can invent condoms and birth control pills, but you don't really need those to do it; once you've figured out that pregnancy is a consequence of PIV sex (something I bet we figured out pretty early) you can prevent unwanted pregnancies with even very simple and primitive technology, or technically no technology at all. You don't even need to stop doing social sexuality, there are a bunch of sex-like things you can do that involve little or no chance of pregnancy. Pleistocene people could totally have done it! Presently existing hunter-gatherers act in ways that suggest a consciousness of the need to regulate their own reproduction, e.g. long nursing periods that allow lactational amenorrhea to be used as birth control. If this is the explanation, the question would then shift to why this population control system broke down around the time of the great warming. New religion? Arrival of a new wave of immigrants with a different, more pro-natalist culture? The great warming itself disrupted the old fertility control culture which was an adaptation to the harsh conditions of the ice age?

Come to think of it, do we even know for sure that these mysterious, light-footprinted first Americans were Homo sapiens? Given how little we know about them, maybe they were a whole different species, with fundamentally different behavior? For example, maybe they had longer nursing periods than Homo sapiens, with proportionately lengthened lactational amenorrhea and birth spacing; that might have been a primitive trait of hominids! Maybe that explains Homo sapiens demographic "victory" over other hominids in general?

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This mystery is definitely going in my Blindsight fanfic notes as one of the things that becomes a lot easier to explain in a world where Blindsight vampires existed:

In Blindsight world the answer would be obvious and simple: the significant difference between the first Americans and the Clovis people was that the first Americans didn't have dogs! Vampires followed the first Americans across Beringia, and in the Americas kept their ancient law to not let the humans breed in great numbers. Then the proto-Clovis came, and the proto-Clovis had anti-vampire guard dogs, so vampires were less effective predators against the Clovis people (with anti-vampire guard/hunting dogs the Clovis people might even have begun to turn the tables, like water buffalo do with lions), so vampires were not able to control the numbers of the Clovis people through predation pressure.

i recently found out the funniest thing about big horses recently which is that for centuries humans have sworn that the feathering on big horse’s legs has been bred in there for a reason, and the reason given is usually something to do with how it helps keep the joints warm and safe when the big horse is doing hauling work in fields.

the thing is: it doesn’t appreciably do that, because the feathers wick up water and mud, which cancels out any insulation advantage they might hypothetically confer, and also it wasn’t even put there on purpose.

the Leg Get More Hair gene is just linked to the Bones Get More Big gene. when you breed any lineage of horses to have bigger bones–not just taller, but chunkier–the leg hair just happens anyway. so every single breed of draft horse has feathered legs, and even carriage horses like friesians get feathers once they hit a certain threshold of lorge.

when you supersize your horse, mother nature throws in a free pair of booties. how cool is that?

Ahhh, what a great example of linked traits! And also shows why evolution gets so complicated

I wonder if some human traits are like this, like the way our top of the head hair and facial hair grows continuously and gets super-long if we don't regularly cut it. That just seems like a really random trait with no obvious advantages and a really obvious disadvantage, and other apes don't have it, so I wonder if we have that just because the "continuously growing slow-shedding head hair" gene just happens to also be a "less body hair" gene or a "make the brain bigger" gene.

The other possible explanation that occurred to me is that long hair and beards can be styled, which might be adaptive as a way of signaling intelligence, creativity, cultural complexity, and factional affiliation.

It's weird that the evolution of pale skin happened so quickly (I think <100k years?) given that the downsides seem so slight. It's not like black people get noticeably sick in Europe. Maybe it's more pronounced in hunter gatherers?

IIRC, you can get vitamin D from seafood and organ meats, as well as eggs and mushrooms. So hunter-gatherers could probably have gotten a decent amount of dietary vitamin D, but early agriculturalists who ate mostly plants, got most of their calories from a handful of crops, and were heavily reliant on grain might have had a hard time getting enough from diet. A lot of theorizing I've seen about the origin of very light skin in Europeans is about it being an evolutionary adaptation to agriculture, about 6-10,000 years old. This fits with Cheddar Man having been dark-skinned and modern Inuits being darker than modern northern Europeans.

This does make me wonder about the accuracy of all those reconstructions of Neanderthals that depict them having skin tones like modern Europeans. Do we actually know they looked like that, or is it just a guess?

As far as I’m aware, we don’t actually know thew exact point at which our ancestors lost their fur coat. Australopithecus would have looked way creepier than most reconstructions if it had had bare skin.

The theory I'm familiar with is our ancestors lost their fur as an adaptation for better cooling in hot open country. And the first step of the human-ape divergence, preceding Australopithecines, was human ancestors adapting to live in open country while apes stayed in the forests. So based on that almost hairless (and dark-skinned) Australopithecus seems pretty plausible.