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Originally Posted by duga
That assumption is just as naive as mine. Either argument is just as founded as the other. What proof do you have that it was simply a high protein diet of meat and the freeing of the hands that produced self awareness? It is an anthropological assumption, just as mine is.
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Ah, we're talking past eachother. I haven't been clear .. I think the increase in the size of our brains (which has been a trend in our history since we split with the other apes) were tied to these things and what makes that a likely assumption is that lack of sufficient nutrients like fat puts a constraint on the development of the brain. For example lack of vitamin Bs has serious consequences for brain development and will cause serious damage to our brains today, so it's a likely assumption that we had sources for vitamin Bs during the time our brains evolved.
I'm not saying that self-awareness comes from a change in diet and ecology, although I see how it may have seen like it. I believe self-awareness, in essence passing a mirror test, was something we could do before our change in diet.
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Originally Posted by duga
Not to mention modern primates have had thousands of years to evolve self awareness...there is absolutely no reason to assume that just because modern apes are self aware it means that their ancestors were as well. You said it yourself...you are "guessing" that our common ancestor wasn't less intelligent. Apes are also not nomadic in the way our early hominid ancestors were, so it is a stretch to say we lived exactly as they do now.
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Yes, it's a stretch, but since all great apes have the ability of self-awareness, it seems like it's the least stretch to me. It's a matter of parsimony if you want. If our common ancestor was not self-aware, that means that self-awareness evolved independently two or more times depending on which common ancestor we're talking about, one for each great ape lineage which stems from it. That means that you actually have to make a lot of assumptions. If you make the assumption that our common ancestor was self-aware, that reduces it to one assumption because the trait developed once (talking only about this branch on the tree of life).
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I also still can't see why it can't be a combination of the two. The freeing of our hands, a meat diet, and bountiful environment all combining to support the development of self awareness. At the very least, fossil records support that at some point a group of hominid ancestors ceased their nomadic activities and settled for a time, which would only have happened if the environment supported such an action.
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Alright, they settled, but how on earth are you gonna figure out if they were self aware? You can't tell, so you need some kind of reference, for example Koko or other animals which are self aware like bottleneck dolphins. Because animals who by our understanding must have generally lesser mental capability than our ancestors judging from the size of brains and so on still have self-awareness, that makes it more likely that self-awareness would have developed before nomadic cultures and so on.
What I'm thinking is that you got smarts and self-awareness mixed up. Certainly there were things in our evolutionary history which had to do with food availability that probably made us smarter. What I'm arguing is that self-awareness most likely happened before that. If you were talking about an increase in general smarts and adaptability, I would've been on the same page as you.