Brain from the Ocean

[corypaul75]

Here is something for your BRAINS to chew on....and it's my idea!

In the beginning there was the earth...before life on land or any land at all... there was however much life in the sea...including us...we were not however in the form or body we are now...we were just a brain swimming in the ocean...like a jelly fish kinda...maybe tenticles...and then land started forming....organisms would wash on shore and then start to change due to the effects of the sun and atmosphere...and over time we would wash back into the ocean, onto land, back in the ocean, onto land...over millions of years...our brains started to develop a skeleton around itself and limbs...kinda like a turtle...perhaps it lived in the ocean without a shell but need one for land...so goes the same for humans...we developed a body to protect the most important part of us...OUR BRAINS! That is who we are...
Oh by the way...I believe in God...Strange huh?

[cuja1]

Yeah, that's probably right

[Zarathustra]

That is who we are...
Oh by the way...I believe in God...Strange huh?

, not really.

[lao tzu]

They're coming to get you Barbara, there's one of them now!

[sylas]

Just to take this curious idea seriously for a moment. It is a seductive idea that our brains are what we are; that they are some kind of measure of the essential thing about being human. This has an interesting association with the famous Piltdown Man hoax, in which an unknown hoaxer constructed a spurious "missing link" and send paleoanthropology (in Britain especially) off the rails for decades.

The hoax constructed what anthropologists at that time expected to find... an ape with the spark of humanity as a large brain. The hoax took a human cranium and combined it with the jaw of an orangutang. This fitted well with the romantic notion of an ancient ape with a mind, starting on the great journey to humanity. The OP takes this notion to an extreme.

The truth seems quite different. The point at which our ancestry split off from that of other still living apes was marked mainly by a change in gait. The early hominids -- the Australopithecines -- developed a capacity for bipedal motion. The brain was larger, but not drastically so. The Australopithecines had a brain far closer in size to that of the modern chimpanzee than to modern humans. The greatly inflated brain came later, and we have a pretty much continuous gradation of extinct hominid species with increasing brain sizes culminating in the largest of all -- the Neanderthals. We modern humans come in a very close second.

Of course; its not just a matter of having a brain, but what you do with it. The slightly larger brain of the Neanderthals does not seem to have corresponded with greater artistic skills or tools making capacities. The Neanderthals were quite decisively outclassed by H. sapiens in that regard, at least from what we can tell of physical remains. Speculations on this has been a factor in a number of speculative science fiction stories.

But I digress. My point is simply that the first thing to set our lineage apart from the lineage of other apes was not brain, but gait.

Cheers -- Sylas