Rock Apes

 

When you think Rock Ape your mind instantly goes to the RAF Regiment, but not so fast. Rock Apes, Batatuts or Nguoi Rung, people of the forest, are evidently a form of apelike, bipedal cryptid living in the jungles of far east Asia. Travelling in packs, the apemen would attack US patrols along the Cambodia/Laos border. A veteran states:

Rock apes are the real thing. I saw a band of them up on "Carlie Ridge" in Quang Nam Province in the spring of 1970. It was nightfall and I saw them through a Starlite scope. 10-15 of them headed away from us up a steep incline. They weren't VC because they walked as a pack side by side in the jungle and not in a military type line. They all looked to be very broad bodied and up to 5 ft tall.

 

He was lucky, Nguoi Rung were allegedly known to hurl rocks at people invading their territory and attack potential aggressors with utter, apelike ferocity. There were apparently so many sightings towards the end of the war that the Communist Vietnamese Party sent scientists to investigate.

One, Dr. Vo Quy from Hanoi, discovered footprints and made a cast of the imprint, which was wider than a human foot and too big for an ape. Another expert, Tran Hong Viet, discovered similar prints in 1982, in remote jungle.

Witnesses report that Rock Apes grow up to 5' in height, are covered with brown fur, broad shouldered and show no fear, or very little, of humans. It's suggested their remote location accounts for this; having never met the ferocity of Homo Sapiens, the apemen attacked in ignorance. Or, possibly, they regarded seemingly weaker humans as easy prey.

Regardless, some of the few people who read this mind blog have been to those jungles. Have you seen or heard of these creatures? There's plenty of evidence that they're there, and I feel that they're possibly living fossils, like Coelacanths but hominins, remnants of our evolutionary tree, alive today. Or not.

Your Call,

LSP

The Age Of Man

 

It's commonly accepted that modern man, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa in a Kenyan garden of Eden around 350,000 BC (Pleistocene) and spread out from there, eventually reaching Europe around 40,000 BC, and the America's some 30,000 years later across the Bering Strait land bridge.

Typical

All well and good, and the schema runs something like this: Ancient apes evolve into smarter apes, who evolve into still smarter apes, until over millions of years you get apelike semi-humans, hominins. Then, at last, in the middle Pleistocene, Homo Sapiens arrives, following on from Homo Erectus. The latter being the "missing link" between us and the ape people of prehistory.

Eoliths, which you can see are clearly not shaped in any way at all

It sounds good, but what if stone tools were found dating to a far earlier period in the earth's history, say the Miocene (23-5 million years BC), in the earth's Tertiary? What's more, tools which were indistinguishable from their counterparts in East Africa (Olduvai) in the Pleistocene some million years later. Or, for that matter, from stone tools made by modern humans, in Africa and elsewhere.

Yet More Ancient Stone

Without getting down in the weeds in an admittedly complex and fractious subject, what if Homo Sapiens is far older than currently thought, and existed with hominins for many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps interbreeding, as we apparently did with Neanderthals? What then.

Out of Africa?

All the history books would have to be rewritten, for a start, and dates pushed back much further. More seriously, the process and theory of evolution itself would come under question. As opposed to something gradual, taking place in tiny increments over thousands of years, we'd be faced by the sudden emergence of rational man at a very early date. 

Ahem

Gradualism to catastrophism? Perhaps. Maybe the same impetus that drove the explosion of megafauna after the cataclysmic demise of the dinosaurs drove the remarkable rise of our early human cousins and humanity itself. Then again, can intelligence evolve into reason? C.S. Lewis, famously, says no, the two are qualitatively different.

Hmmmmm

In the meanwhile, here at the Compound, sweet and sour pork's on the menu.

Bifacial Chipped Flint Forever,

LSP

World's Oldest Human Fossil Discovered in Morocco!

Paleoanthropologists  were stunned to discover the world's oldest human fossil, in a Moroccan cave. The fossil remains from Jebel Irhoud date back to a remarkable 300,000 BC, pushing back the history of the human race by some 100,000 years.

human?

“This stuff is a time and a half older than anything else put forward as H. sapiens,” said baffled boffin John Fleagle of the State University of New York in Stony Brook.

not human?

However, there's doubt about whether the fossil is actually human, its teeth and jawline align with Homo Sapiens but its cranium is elongated, suggesting a different kind of brain than those humans enjoy today.

a different brain

Still, whether human or humanlike, the Moroccan fossil is important. “It's placed at a critical time period when the earliest members of our species could have evolved, and they’re critical for better understanding the patterns of physical and behavioral evolution,"  says Zeray Alemseged from the University of Chicago.

Moroccan Fossil

As debate simmers over the ancient Moroccan fossil, the quest for the origin of our species continues.

Explorers Club forever,

LSP

Are We Descended From Apes?

Are we descended from apes and chimpanzees? Good question and one expert, Robin Crompton of the University of Liverpool, says it's the other way around.

Based on the fossilized bones of a 3.7 million year old human ancestor, Austrolipithecus, Crompton believes that our early ancestors lived in trees and were bipedal, they could walk upright. Chimps and other monkeys went on to knuckle drag in the interests of speed and ease but we didn't.

This means that the apes and ourselves, for that matter, come from a common ancestor that's more like us than some kind of chimp and that we took the high road and the apes didn't. Well done, human forebearers, you made the right choice.

Well so what. So a lot. We've been taught that humans started out as chimps, got bigger, became apes and then somehow became rational or irrational human beings. Ascent of the Species and thank you very much, Darwin, Boom.

But this lineal progression may not be true. Something very like a human existed in the happy canopy of the trees, according to Crompton, and advanced on. Others, coming from the same stock devolved into bestial apes, leaving us where we are today.

I'm no expert but maybe Crompton has a point, his early hominin fossil seems to say so, but consider this. When did monkeys become rational? When did apes start to reason?

We did, at some point, albeit imperfectly. When and how did this happen and why didn't it happen for the rest of the monkeys and still hasn't now. No one knows but it should have done, right? 

If we all come from a common arboreal ancestor and the ability to reason is simply part of the evolutionary process, then the monkeys that devolved from us should be able to pick up the plot, but they haven't.

Perhaps they're evolutionary dead ends. But serious question. There's a massive leap from irrational animal to rational human. How did that occur and if it could do so for us and not our ape allies, then why not? 

After all, we have a common ancestor, or not.

Harambe Weeps,

LSP