"AAT" The other "Theory of Evolution"

Perhaps we simply grew less hair because of our habit of wearing the skins of other animals, over time, hmm?

Like the way our toes are all but grown together from a long time of wearing shoes....

Humans sweat. Humans are sweaty little animals, its something humans do very well, that other animals aren't very good at, sweating. Sounds silly, but its true, man is good at sweating. Sweating is used to cool the body. Cooling the body is important, especially when you have a big, hot, calorie consuming brain trapped inside a ball of bone and live in africa. So humans got really good at sweating, to keep from over heating, and as such, the human pelt of hair thinned.

Actually, humans have just as many follicles as chimps, the hair is just not as thick and long.

Originally posted by Rren
I wasn't trying to argue against evolution, when I said "why is one speculative theory better than another" I was speaking of "aat" versus savannah ape evolution, I was honestly asking the question not trying to be sarcastic, or to imply evolution was bunk.

The normal paleoanthopology hypotheses are not as speculative as the AAT; not by a long shot. For one thing, they rely on actual facts instead of made up false "facts".

First, you have to get rid of notions like "savanna ape evolution"; actual paleoanthropological theories are not environmnetally deterministic like the AAT. AAT proponentns like to suppose they are because it makes their version sound scientific and it makes a great strawman. Now when you look at what's been done over the past 30 years or so, starting with the "woman the gatherer" idea, these theories presented the ways in which food-getting and tool use combined with social interaction to present opoportunities for hoiminds to increase their range of abilities and for this to vreate a feedback loop with better and later bigger brains and the use of more foods and environments. The best work done on this has been people likem Tanner and Zihlman, Vrba, Behrensmeyer, and Potts (IMO). There's also been other good people doing stuff, of course. If you want an easy to read, widely available book that covers the basics, a now old but still good book is my late wife's On Becoming Human (1981, Nancy Makepeace Tanner) which is available in many public libraries (and a lot of used book stores too).