January 10, 2023 • 50 mins
Ever longed to play a game of catch with an octopus or a chimpanzee? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss animal throwing ability.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part three in our series on throwing
behavior in animals, especially non human animals. But we'll be
(00:24):
talking about throwing of the human variety some today. Now.
In previous episodes, we discussed a paper documenting a kind
of throwing or what appeared to be a kind of
throwing in octopuses in Australia, which used their siphons to
blast clouds of silt in their neighbor's faces when they
get a little too close. We discussed the ability of
(00:46):
elephants to throw with their trunks, and we talked about
mongoose is doing brutal reverse granny shots to bypass the
defenses of armored millipedes and as Mick Jagger would say,
get the meat. Uh. Today, our discussion continues with a
very important consideration. Well, when I told my wife that
(01:06):
this was the topic we're going to be covering, uh,
the question she asked was, well, what about air bud?
Are you going to talk about air bud? Handle the
air bud question a very important facet of this issue. Yes,
Airbud is, of course a motion picture about a dog
that plays competitive basketball based on the At this point,
I think classic sports movie trope. There's nothing in the
(01:30):
rule book that says a blank can't play whatever the
sport happens to be, and you can put into that
blank basically any animal, whatever animal seems doable from a
movie making standpoint and acceptable to the human imagination. And
I guess you could ultimately go beyond the realm of
humans into other things as long as you could somehow
cobble together a script around it. Yeah, I don't know
(01:52):
if I've ever seen another one of these. I think
I saw air Bud when I was a kid, But uh,
I know it's a tradition right there. You know, there's
a million movies like Aramy the Football Horse. Well, yeah,
I think one of the earliest, if not the earliest,
examples of this. And I could be wrong, because this
is not a subgenre that that I have personally explored
a lot. But I do remember seeing parts of this
(02:12):
one on TV the nineteen seventy six movie Guts, which
also had Ed Asner and don not sent it to
give you an idea of the you know, the caliber
of talent that was that was involved in this, But
it was about a terrible NFL team. I think there's
something like the California Atomics or something, and they end
up deciding to field a donkey as a kicker in
(02:34):
the game, and uh, um, I guess it works out
for them. Again, there's a there's nothing in the rule
book that says a donkey can't play in NFL. Yeah,
I I imagine movies like this must just encourage and
uh an overly stringent form of legalism when it comes
to professional sports. Yeah, Like does it say games must
(02:55):
take place on planet Earth and so forth? Yeah? Yeah,
they will the at this point really the future proof things.
But if we're going just based on these films, it
would seem that for a while they didn't have all
the loopholes filled in on this and um, and people
were just constantly rolling out new animals, Like it doesn't
anything about about art varks. So art varks are in
play in Professional Curly, yes, okay, But outside of Gusts
(03:20):
and air Bud, you also have movies like two thousand's
m v P Most Valuable Primate, in which a chimpanzee
play soccer. There are also I think thirteen additional Air
Bud sequels and spinoffs. Humans are also primates. All existing
soccer players are primates. Well, tell the producers of m
(03:41):
v P Most Valuable Primemate about that. Um, maybe they
maybe they actually touched on in the scramplay, but I
doubt it. But I'm sorry you were saying. How many
air Bud movies are there? Thirteen by my count, that
includes the Air Buddies uh like spinoff series and interestingly enough,
two thousands sixes Air Buddies. That was Don Knott's final film.
(04:04):
He voiced a bloodhound in it. Oh, now, I don't know.
Does that that means animals talk in Air Buddies. I
don't know if animals talked in air Bud. Perhaps you remember,
I don't mean I'm inclined to think not. I think
the dog in air Bud was silent. But yeah, well,
by by the time they get into the Buddies movies,
which by the way, descended into titles like Space Buddies
(04:26):
and Santa Buddies. As far as I can tell, these
are just an excuse to have a screen full of
Golden Retriever Puppies for eighty minutes. I think it is
absolutely crass mercenary filmmaking. It's just ultimate cute exploitation. Um.
But this was also the series that in a episode
long ago, we suggested should do a crossover with the
(04:48):
Clive Barker verse and create hell Buddies. Now. There's also
just real quick a few other mentions. There's Soccer Dog,
the movie, There's two thousand fives the Karate Dog, And
then there's the movie Ed in which a chimpanzee plays baseball. Oh,
and then there's Matilda about a boxing kangaroo. That one, Uh,
(05:11):
that one has interested me because I noticed it stars
Elliott Gould and it was also one of the films
you could pull up on the Criterion Collections UH streaming
service at least several months back. Boxing Kangaroo? Is that
a waltzing Matilda Joe? Um, I imagine so, and it's
it's I looked a little bit into this related to
(05:33):
this podcast episode, and I quickly realized, oh, well, the
boxing kangaroo is a whole thing unto itself. UM. That
does have some basis in kangaroo behavior, but often in
like a misinterpretation of kangaroo defensive behavior, but it has
kind of like a life of its own outside of
this particular picture. Might be something to come back to
in the future. Now, one more thing about the air
(05:54):
Bud franchise. You know, before they get to air Buddies,
I think you were saying that the Golden retriever end
up doing a bunch of different sports, and they've all
got puns in the titles. So the one where air
Bud does baseball is called air Bud Seventh Inning Fetch.
You gotta get some puns in there, all right. But
(06:14):
but bringing it all back around to today's episode, Okay,
some of these we can just instantly dismissed for now.
We don't need to concern ourselves with boxing kangaroos or
karate dogs because these do not involve throwing. You know,
we're gonna focus on the sports that involve throwing a ball.
Um Gus, that's impressive, but he's a kicker. Despite just
(06:34):
participating in a game that has a lot of throwing
in it doesn't seem to be throwing anything. So we
really only have to worry about the concept of dogs
playing scoring games with balls and chimpanzees playing scoring games
with battles. Real quick, let's talk about dogs, um and
and you may have additional expertise on this uh to
throw in here experience uh from being a dog owner.
(06:57):
But as far as dogs go, they can obviously be
trained to do a lot of different things, often very
impressive things, including chasing, after catching, and fetching balls and sticks,
and as is evident in many videos online, they can
also be trained to bounce basketballs into baskets off of
their their noses, off of their snouts. That always, I
don't know, Like a basketball is a fairly massive object.
(07:19):
I would think booping a basketball in mid flight with
the snout would really kind of hurt. Yeah, I'm not sure,
but I looked around. And as far as dogs throwing,
I'm not so certain about this. Drops. Yes, they can.
You know, you'll see plenty of examples of dogs catching
things dropping them. Um, But I'm not sure. I'm not
(07:40):
sure you really have anything like throwing even kind of
you know, a tossing aside of a stick or a ball, well,
not targeted throwing. I mean, I think what's quite common
for dogs is something more like what the mongoose did
with the millipede. Dogs will especially dogs that have been
trained in kind of unused torual environments with say a
(08:02):
a puzzle type treat retrieval toy. You know, so you
have like some kind of toy where the treat is
hidden inside, and the dog has to manipulate the toy
to get the treat out of the middle. In those cases,
I've seen dogs throwing the toy in order to try
to extract the treat, but it's very haphazard. They're not
like hitting a target. They're more just kind of like
(08:25):
throwing it wildly by tossing their head and it'll bounce
off the wall or something, and maybe the treat will
tumble out. Mm hmm. Now, I also found some some
discussions and some papers about the possibility that a dog
using a chewing stick is essentially a form of tool use,
and this would also apply to any other animal that
uses a stick in such a fashion. Uh So that's
(08:47):
an interesting idea to consider. Mm hmm. Yeah, you can
make that argument, I guess by the same token, you
could say like a bear scratching its butt against a
tree would be a form of tool use. Chimps, however,
chimps are a different case entirely so We're not saying
that chimpanzees should be encouraged to play baseball or soccer
(09:07):
or any other professional sport, or any sport for that matter,
but they have certainly demonstrated their use of tools in
both captivity and in the wild. And this includes the
targeted use of throwing objects. Now, one of the objects
or or substances I guess observed to be thrown a lot,
and this is something that is of course well documented online.
In fact, when we were researching other aspects of animals
(09:29):
throwing things, some of the search engines I I was
using were very excited to give me content of animals
throwing feces, potentially particularly chimps throwing feces. I was not
looking for this information at the time, by the Internet
really wanted to serve it to me. Now, this kind
of goes back into something we talked about earlier though,
the question if you're doing something with something that came
(09:51):
from your own body, is it truly tool use? I
don't know. I mean, I guess when I was thinking
about substances that come out of an animal's own body,
I was thinking about like things like spider silk, or
like the urdicating hairs that come off of a tarantiala's back.
Where the ways in which these substances are used are
(10:12):
not very generalized, They're not very free form. Instead, they
seem to be pretty tightly controlled, instinctually determined behavioral patterns,
whereas I don't know, you could say, maybe like a
chimpanzee pooping and then throwing its poop at someone or
something that that seems to be a little more free form. Yeah,
(10:32):
I guess also, and this is not something that any
of the papers I looked at got into, but I
guess there there's a difference between poop directly delivered to
the hand and then thrown, and like poop that is
just like say, in a creature's habitat or in its
general area that it then picks up. Uh maybe not
even its own poop. Um, So I guess we'd have
(10:52):
to consider that as well. Now, I do think we
should be clear that feces are not the only objects
that that apes like chimpanzees throw, but is a feces
are often observed to be thrown, especially in captivity. I
think yes, yeah, definitely. Uh, the sources I was looking at,
they're definitely mentioning this because in captivity, especially historically, there
(11:14):
are often less things for the animal to interact with.
The poop is something that will happen eventually, will be
in the enclosure, and therefore is available to pick up, manipulate,
and throw if desired, whereas in the wild there are
other competitors out there, the other things that could pick up,
like sticks, like rocks that could be thrown, and we
have seen them throw such objects both in captivity but
(11:37):
also in the wild, and so it seems to be
a situation where they're they're far more incidents of poop
throwing in captivity versus the wild, though they have been
observed to throw poop in the wild as well. So yeah,
I guess I would not disqualify something from counting as
tool used just because it consists of an animal's own
excreta or something that came out of their body. I mean,
(11:58):
you could use poop, I suppose a tool for all
kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, this is kind of a tangent,
but I was looking around and back in seventeen, a
team from the University of Calgary hosted a competition to
make use of astronaut waste, and the winning submission was
titled Astroplastic from Colon to Colony, in which the d
(12:19):
n A of an E. Coli bacteria was modified so
that it removed acids from human feces and they did
not use actual poop in the experiment, used like a
mixture of things to simulate poop. But the idea was
here that this, uh, this, this modified E. COOLi would
produce a plastic that can then be used in a
(12:40):
three D printer to produce simple tools like wrenches and
screw drivers. So the aim here would be sort of twofold.
So say you're going to Mars on an extended mission.
This way you don't have to bring those tools with you,
you don't have to pay for the cost of getting
those tools into orbit and then two Mars and then
likewise you have to worry less about getting rid of
(13:02):
human waste on the journey. Uh. That that's quite brilliant. Yes,
I one day hope to have all kinds of plastic
tools and toys made out of poop. Now, um, this
is this is sort of another aside, but this is
goods Back to chimps specifically, Uh, you might even get
into the question of why did chimps throw poop um specifically,
(13:24):
even if they have a choice of their objects to throw.
And I found this rather fascinating older paper. This from
it is UM, a Russian paper titled UM a neglected
form of quasi aggression in apes Possible relevance for the
origins of humor. This is the current anthropology and I'm
just going to read a quote from it here. According
(13:45):
to people working at the Pavlov Center, at least four
adult chimpanzee mails and one adult female would also throw
feces at people, expressing joy when the target was hit
by making a playface, hooting, clapping, and stamping around. They
did not, however, throw feces at persons of whom they
were afraid. We have received the same information from people
(14:06):
in charge of chimpanzees at the St. Petersburg and Moscow
zoos at the Moscow Zoo. The same behavior was observed
in orangutanks. So at least in these cases, the chimpanzees
seem to get a real hoot out of hitting somebody
with some poop. Yeah, And and again this is older research,
and I detect at least a little bit of anthropomorphizing here,
(14:27):
But the distinction about fear was very interesting. So maybe
in this we do see the roots of something like humor.
But elsewhere primatologists do seem to agree that throwing poop, stones, sticks,
et cetera in primates is often a an act of
communication which matches up with some of the things we've
been discussing elsewhere in this series, and that we will
(14:49):
get to in a little bit when we talked about
human evolution. Yeah, and with chimps, it's not even uh,
it's it's not even a case of like necessarily purely
spontane is communication. Like it's easy to I think, to
make that leap. You think of like an animal trying
to say something, not having the ability to say it,
or having difficulty relaying that message, and then sort of
(15:11):
sort of spontaneously picking something up and throwing it, or
perhaps it already has something in his hand and it
throws it. And this would still be very fascinating. I mean,
even if you think of like a zoo environment, for example,
the chimp is attempting interspecies communication. Uh, even if that
interspecies communication consists of throwing a rock or some poop
at somebody, But it's not always spontaneous. Sometimes it is
(15:32):
premeditated in the case of of stone throwing that's been observed.
One of the the more famous examples of this was
Santino the chimpanzee born in nine eight, who made headlines
multiple times, and I think sometimes the news cycle would
come back around to him because in addition to being
a pretty talented artist, he also has some issues with people,
(15:57):
like to collect stones ahead of time so that he
could throw them at visitors to the Fruvik Zoo in Sweden.
Now that's really interesting that the collecting of stones in
advance aspect, because of course that indicates some kind of
forethought or premeditation or planning, like seeing the stone as
a tool for future use in a moment when it
(16:20):
is not currently needed for that use. Yeah, and apparently
wasn't an isolated incident. It said that he planned hundreds
of stone throwing attacks on zoo visitors over the years.
Um Sadly, he escaped from his enclosure in December two
and was subsequently shot along with some other escape piece,
which was a pretty controversial incident. Recently, there's a fair
(16:44):
amount of coverage about that, but not I don't think
everybody necessarily connected that this was the same chump that
had made headlines in the past for the throwing of
rocks and for art apparently and for our Yeah, you
can find videos of him online doing some uh some painting,
manipulating of pigments on the on on a on a
canvas to create some interesting works. Well, sad in for Santino,
(17:07):
but let an interesting life. Thank thank Now There's another
interesting wrinkle in stone throwing with chumps that I was
reading about, because in the wild, chimps will also engage
in what is called accumulative stone throwing, as reported by
(17:30):
cool at All in Nature Scientific Reports back in twos sixteen,
Modern chimpanzees will will actually create stone accumulation sites that
are reminiscent of human cairns, of of human um assemblages
of stone, something that we often associate with like deliberate
(17:50):
cultured acts of of human behavior, uh something. And this
is both from from an archaeological standpoint, when archaeologists find
examples of domes that have been gathered together in one area,
and also I think we just individually encountered this as well,
whether you see piles of stones that are put there
for a purpose, like perhaps you're on a nature walk
(18:11):
and these stones are are gathered together to help mark
the path you're supposed to be on, or you often
see this done out of for for pure amusement. Um
At times you'll just find places where humans have been
around multiple stones and there's like kind of this irresistible
urge to arrange them or stack them up. Yeah, and
(18:32):
so it's interesting, but I also am hesitant to make
the speculative leap here. I mean, I know, I was
reading about this paper, and I know what some people
have said about the you know, the accumulation of stones,
like throwing stones into the into a hollow tree or
something until they really pile up. That suggests, well, maybe
they're creating some kind of like ritual monument, like you know,
(18:54):
like humans would create a care and for some kind
of purpose to be observed and to mean something. I
don't think there's really evidence present to jump to that
kind of conclusion, because that seems like a different order
of uh, that symbolic behavior that, as far as I know,
is probably only the province of humans. But I guess
we could always be surprised. It seems kind of a
(19:14):
speculative leap to me, but it's still really interesting behavior. Nonetheless,
I mean, the the the chimpanzee is piling up the
stones for some interesting reason, even if it's not to
like create a symbolic marker for other chimpanzees to see. Yeah. Yeah,
So this particular paper they're drawing on various surveys and accounts,
(19:35):
and they found four populations in West Africa where chimps
quote habitually bang and throw rocks against trees or toss
them into tree cavities, resulting in conspicuous stone accumulations at
these sites. Um. They point out that chimps, along with
capuchin monkeys and long tailed macaques, are known to use
stones as hammers to crack open encased foods. Uh. They
(19:55):
point out that stone throwing and chimpanzees was first described
by Jane Goodall documented aimed throwing of sticks and rocks
by male chimpanzees during agonistic displays, and this behavior was
later described by researchers for other non human primates as well,
including Japanese macaques, wild baboons, and capuchin monkeys. Yeah. Female
bearded capuchins have also been observed to throw rocks during
(20:17):
courtship interactions. Um, which I guess this is would be
like tenderly throwing pebbles against a window to get their
lover's interest at night without awakening the parents downstairs, or
maybe not I like it, but human metaphors aside, I mean, like,
it is interesting that they would throw rocks at each
other for apparent purposes other than threats or intimidation. Yeah, again,
(20:40):
coming back into like the communication aspect of it. Um.
Now I mentioned the using using some sort of nutcracking
um behavior with rocks that can sometimes lead to those
rocks accumulating in certain places, which is a different type
of accumulation versus what we're talking with the chimps here um. Also,
the paper points out that Japanese macaques engage in stone handling,
(21:02):
which isn't tool of use but solitary object play behavior,
and it actually results in use wear patterns on the stones,
and the stones will then end up accumulating at quote
unquote PlayStations. So just sort of like handling manipulating a stone,
not really doing anything in particular with it. Yeah, yeah,
(21:24):
which is I get. You know, it's like the monolith
hasn't really kicked in yet, but but they're but they're
handling the stone. But chimpanzees are well beyond all of
these like, the chimpanzees are second only to humans in
the variants of their tool usage. They make use of
simple sticks, stone hammer, stone cleavers, to linked to to
cut foods. Uh. They've even been observed to hunt sleeping
(21:48):
bush babies with wooden spears. So this is I think
only been observed in female chimpanzees. But they'll take take
a stick and sort of sort of sharpen it at
their their teeth or chew on it, you know, to
get a something like a point, and then use that
stick to stab into the hollows of trees where there's
a sleeping bush baby and spirit and pull it back
(22:11):
out to eat. There's so many surprising little little cases
of of tool uisu pro to a tool used to
behavior in chimpanzees like this. Now, this this paper basically
comes down to two hypotheses about why the chimps do this.
The first, and I think the main hypothesis is that
they accumulate stone throwing behavior as a modification of male
(22:35):
chimpanzee display. This would make it mean that it would
be kind of like a an addition to their hand
and foot drumming, uh, which is you know, ritualized behavior
found in all known chimpanzee populations and the use of
the stones. Throwing the stones um into a pile, into
the hollow of the tree, et cetera, would be a
way of enhancing um this particular activity. That's and oh yes,
(23:00):
so like hitting a pile of stones with a stone
would probably make a louder sound than just throwing a
stone off into the dirt. Yeah, I I don't think.
I don't. I would not feel comfortable going as far
to say that they're making music, uh, though I think
I saw some headlines that that we're going in that direction. Uh.
They also say that the second area to consider this
(23:23):
that they could also not be male drumming. But if
it's not that it would mean that it quote may
need to be considered in a more symbolic context. And
and I think this is where things would get a
little foggier, a little potentially more nebulous, because you're getting
into this area where there is a connection between quote
ritualized animal behavior and the repeated stereotype behavior is commonly
(23:45):
observed during human rituals unquote, which granted that could cover
a great deal of ground. This is what I was
alluding to earlier that I mean, it seems like an
interesting possibility, but I think I'd need more evidence that
that's really the right way to think about it. Yeah,
And I think I think it's basically what the authors
here we're leaning towards. Like, It's like, if it's not
just part of the hand and foot drumming of the
(24:07):
male chimps, then it's something else, and that's something else
will require more research and more observation. Yeah, but a
really interesting behavior either way. Yeah. And one thing they
point out is that it could have some great importance
not only for our understanding of how chimps behave, but
also archaeologically. When we find piles of stones and things that,
(24:28):
again we can often easily associate with with human intention,
it could be something else. It could be chimps in
in a or or you know, some other human ancestor
engaging in some sort of display that involves accumulating throwing rocks. Yeah.
Well it forces us to be humble about interpreting archaeological
evidence because I think we we we tend to always
(24:49):
want to say, oh, if we find a non natural
assemblage of stones or something like that, you assume it
must have an almost kind of like industrial purpose. You know,
it's used for wrecked survival benefit, maybe in the manufacture
of tools or something like that, which which of course
could be possible. Or the other side is people tend
to jump to religion, you say, is ritual use. But
(25:12):
then there are these cases that we observe in non
human primates today where it's like, it's not even clear
what this is for. Yeah, but I wanted to now
address the topic of the evolution of throwing in humans
because to the extent that animals throw, and we know
from everything we've looked at in these episodes that many
(25:32):
many non human animals do throw, they don't throw like
we do. No animal out there comes anywhere close to
the combined levels of force and target precision that humans
are capable of. And to further explore this, I was
looking at an interesting paper by Michael P. Lombardo and
(25:53):
robert O. Deaner published in the Quarterly Review of Biology
called Born to Throw The Ecological Causes that shaped the
Evolution of Throwing in Humans. Now, I'm not going to
address all the sub topics in this paper, but wanted
to pull out some highlights that I found really interesting.
So the authors begin by identifying two major turning points
(26:15):
in the relationship between human anatomy and human behavior that
sort of drove the evolution of the modern human body.
And they identified the shift to bipedal locomotion, of course
is is well known, but also the development of forceful
overhand throwing, and they argued that the former has gotten
a lot more attention than the ladder, but the ladder
(26:35):
might be considered equally important, if not more so. There
are other animals that throw in various scenarios, as we've documented,
but humans are the only primates that can be observed
to regularly throw targeted projectiles in order to kill or
cause injury to another animal. And I think also it's
(26:56):
worth noticing not only how much better we are throwing
than other ammals, but how this is pretty much the
only feat of physical strength. They're one of the only
feats of physical strength where we surpass our closest primate relatives.
So compared to other primates like chimpanzees and guerillas, humans
are incredibly weak. The author's site some research. It's older
(27:18):
research from ninety six, attempting to quantify the difference between
the you know, like the arm strength of a chimpanzee
versus an adult human. And this, this older study concludes that,
controlling for body size, an adult male chimpanzee is on
average roughly four times stronger than I fit adult human male.
(27:38):
Now this is probably a very approximate, guest, but I
think it is utterly uncontroversial to say that chimps are
way way stronger than humans. At chimpanzee could probably just
rip your head off. Oh yeah, And I've seen some
images of of hand. I can't recall of it was
a hairless gorilla or a hairless chimpanzee, but it allows
(27:59):
you to really see the muscle definition, and it was.
It was terrifying how how ripped this creature was. However,
despite being several times stronger than human on average in
a general since their muscles are just stronger, a chimpanzee
is several times weaker than even an adolescent human when
(28:19):
it comes to forceful overhand throwing. Uh. And I was
looking to try to find uh this comparison quantified. I
did find it in the work of a Harvard researcher
named Neil Thomas Roach, who studies the evolution of high
speed throwing. I'm going to come back to some research
he was involved in. In a minute, but just quickly here,
Roach cites figures that even an adult male chimpanzee who
(28:42):
has specifically been trained to throw a ball, so this
is not just a naive chimpanzee has never done this before.
This is one who you know, has humans have trained
them to throw as hard as they can. One who
has been trained can only achieve top throwing speeds of
about twenty miles per hour, whereas I'm humans, twelve to
thirteen year old recreational baseball pictures can achieve pitches above
(29:06):
sixty miles per hour, and professional adult baseball players can
throw fastballs in the like nine to one mile per
hour range. So isn't that bizarre. A chimpanzee might be
simultaneously three or four times stronger than you in general,
but you are probably right now at least three times
(29:27):
stronger than the chimp when it comes to throwing. Wow,
that's a massive blow to any chimpanzee playing baseball. Movies
out there are basketball movies like it doesn't make sense exactly. Yeah,
so like Chimp Rookie of the Year, that movie that's
based on false premise. Yeah, but I think this makes
(29:48):
more sense the more you think about the act of
throwing in granular details. So throwing comes so naturally and
so easily to us as a species, it takes real,
deliberate effort to understand an extremely difficult and complex behavior.
Forceful targeted throwing is It requires split second mental calculations
(30:09):
regarding force, angle, and timing, as well as coordination of
lots of precise and rapid movements by many different parts
of the body. So think about all this stuff. Think
about everything your muscles and your brain have to do
together to throw a rock and hit something, especially if
the thing is moving. You have to track the target,
(30:30):
anticipate future motion of the target, take into account the
physical features of the projectile, for example, like its weight
and its shape and so forth, which will affect how
it travels. You have to understand the object you're throwing
to throw it effectively. Um, you have to understand how
exactly to drawback and extend the arm for the throw,
(30:51):
how to grip the object in preparation for the throw,
exactly how and when to release the projectile from the grip.
And that's like a you know, tiny, tiny window, and
you have to time all of those muscular movements and
exactly the right sequence, which might all take place in
less than a second. Of throwing behaviors are one of
(31:11):
the fastest motions produced by the muscular skeletal system of
the human body. Yeah, which which makes it all the
more depressing when you throw a cat toy and the
cat doesn't chase after it and doesn't take the press like,
did you not see what I just did? But but
in the case of throwing a cat toy, you know,
I'm not trying to actually make the toy go anywhere specific.
But if I'm say bowling, which I guess I don't
(31:34):
know if you would call bowling throwing, I guess it's
sort of like their ticket counts. But but when I'm
doing that, that's one of those rare insces where I'll
I'll occasionally stop and think and try and sort of
focus on what all I'm doing to to carry out
this physical act. And yet it's, like you said, there's
so many things going on that we don't even really
have conscious control of, or or not privy to, or
(31:58):
and if we think too much about it, we're just
going to drop it on her toe. Anyway. Uh, It's
it's really quite amazing. That's another interesting aspect of throwing
that I think a lot of people can attest from
their own experience. When you think too much about throwing,
you tend to get worse at it. Isn't that strange?
Like that you tend to throw more accurately when you
(32:18):
kind of turn off your analytical brain and just let
your intuitions take over than thank you, Thank you so anyway,
the fact that we are so much better adapted for
targeted overhand throwing than other primates, even are most closely
(32:41):
related primates like chimpanzees, suggests specific selection pressure on our ancestors,
favoring the development of skeletal, muscular as well as neurological
adaptations that allow us to excel at throwing to the
extent that we do. We seem quite clearly biologically shaped
for throwing, and that requires changes in in multiple parts
(33:02):
of the body, the muscles and the skeleton of like
the arm and the shoulder and the torso, but also
the brain and the nervous system. Now, lest you think,
I don't know how useful in real world struggle could
throwing b I think this is uncontroversial, but the authors
do spend a fair amount of time just providing evidence that, like,
(33:24):
you know, they do observations of pre modern practices in
hunting and warfare to show the prevalence and utility of
targeted overhand throwing. They're like, yes, it's incredibly useful. Uh.
They say that human quote, hunters and warriors used human
muscle power to propel bolas, boomerangs, darts and knives, sticks, stones,
and spears thrown with or without the aid of auto lattels. Uh.
(33:46):
If you're interested in the autolattle. By the way, we
did an episode of Invention on that a long time
ago that I think was was one of my favorites.
I remember that being really interesting. Yeah. Anyway, many of
the technologies that replaced these practices in hunting and warfare
have simply replaced the muscular power with mechanical or chemical
sources of energy to power the throw. And that can
be everything from the tension of a bow string to
(34:08):
the combustion of gunpowder in in a firearm. Um. So
the question is how did our hominin ancestors make the
leap from something like the occasional low specialization, low utility
tossing behaviors we see in our closest primate relatives like
chimpanzees to the kind of habitual, powerful, targeted overhand throwing
(34:31):
that is characteristic of humans today. Now, like many questions
in evolutionary anthropology, we don't know the answer to this
one for sure. This is not one where somebody can
tell you the answer. But there are a few hypotheses
that are informed by some interesting evidence that we can
take a look at. Now, before we can figure out
how that advance from sort of occasional, low utility throwing
(34:53):
to human style throwing might have occurred, it's worth discussing
the major hypothesized uses of overhand throwing in an ancestral
hominin environment. Hunting is a very obvious one, right, being
able to throw a rock or a stick with force
and hit a prey animal would be extremely useful. But
the authors also call out interest specific and agonistic encounters,
(35:16):
which means conflict with other members of the same species.
And then finally, I thought this one was really fascinating,
and uh, this one may help explain and and help
you see how this this bridge could have been crossed behaviorally.
The practice of power scavenging, which means not just regular scavenging,
not just wandering around looking for a dead animal to
(35:38):
to feast upon. Power scavenging means waiting for other predators
to take down a prey animal and then chasing those
predators away from the kill and taking it for yourself. Yeah,
there was a There was a fabulous BBC documentary several
years back kindled Human Planet, that was narrated by John Hurt,
(35:59):
and it had to do with various human practices of
often hunting or source scavenging that that have been practiced
to some degree into the modern age, and one of
them involved stealing part of the kill from a lion,
which would be an example of power scavenging something where
you want to get in there like that the lion
(36:20):
has done the I guess the hard part and has
brought down prey, but now you're gonna do an also
hard thing. You want to get in there, drive the
predator away long enough to get yourself a little bit
of the meat as well. Right. Um. So, for this hypothesis,
the authors cite a work by Bingham and Susa from
two thousand nine which makes the case that during the
(36:42):
time of transition from Australia Epithes Senes to the emergence
of the Homo genus to which we belong. Uh climate
conditions in Africa may have given rise to these little
like isolated savannah environments containing hominins. But these environments also
quote lacked dangerous predators and power scavengers like lions and hyenas,
(37:03):
but contained smaller and less dangerous predators such as leopards
and cheetahs. So if that's correct, it's it's maybe easy
to imagine how with leopards and cheetahs you could more
more plausibly chase them away, or early hominance could have
chased them away from a kill by throwing things at them,
even without very specialized weapons, maybe just by like throwing
(37:26):
rocks or or unmodified sticks. And this could be thought
of as a kind of high risk, high reward strategy.
Like with power scavenging. You can get a big meat
pay day with relatively little energy investment since you don't
have to like chase the prey animal down yourself, but
it's dangerous. You do have to confront one or more
(37:46):
predators for the kill, and this type of strategy might
not be worth the risk if you have to fight
a leopard with your hands or with handheld weapons. But
if you can just throw rocks at it from a
distance until it runs away, that could be a really
a good deal. Yeah. And and again not necessarily drive
it off completely, but just create an opening during which
(38:08):
you can carry out some power scavenging and then get
out of there. Yeah. Now, another question to look at
is what is the earliest we have, like totally clear
physical evidence to establish the use of thrown projectiles by
humans um the author's right quote unambiguous archaeological evidence of
the use of modified throwing weapons manufactured by members of
the genus Homo are the stone spear points, manufactured approximately
(38:31):
three hundred thousand years ago in Africa. Hunting spears with
their center of gravity one third of the way from
the tips, suggesting that they were thrown were found in
Germany and date from three hundred thousand to four hundred
thousand years ago. These two examples are evidence that manufactured
weapons were thrown by members of the Homo genus at
least three hundred thousand years ago. But while it's harder
(38:54):
to be certain about what happened before that, the authors
infer that human ancestors were probably throwing sticks and rocks
going back a couple of million years, so there was
probably use of throwing of less modified or unmodified objects
from the environment before. We have evidence of these modified
throwing weapons from like three D four hundred thousand years ago.
And one idea I came across in trying to locate
(39:17):
the origins of habitual forceful throwing is based on studies
of anatomy, and this brings us back to that researcher
I talked about a minute ago, the anthropologist Neil Thomas Roach,
who along with some colleagues studied the bodies and behavior
of practiced human throwers like baseball pitchers and uh, and
(39:37):
let's see the citation here is Roach, Vincadason, Rainbow, and
Lieberman from published in the journal Nature, and the paper
title is Elastic Energy Storage in the Shoulder and the
Evolution of high speed Throwing in Homo And basically, these
authors contend that the anatomical difference that may humans so
(40:00):
good at throwing is our ability to store elastic energy
in our shoulders. So it's not just like the strength
of the muscles, but the fact that the human body
is designed to sort of cock back the arm before
a forceful throw, and a human essentially creates a bio
mechanical sling shot by stretching the tendons and the ligaments
(40:22):
surrounding the scapula or the shoulder blade, and this tension
could be thought of as analogous to the tension in
a bowstring. It allows very rapid extension of the arm
after the wind up. Now, how come we can do
this and our nearest relatives like chimpanzees cannot. The researchers
here argued that there are basically three important anatomical changes
(40:43):
that are found altogether around two million years ago uh
in the species Homo erectus. So these three changes are
the expansion of the waste and this sort of lets
the torso rotate above the hips, which generates more rotational force.
So when you're like cocking your arm back to throw overhand,
(41:04):
you typically you twist your torso, and that change in
uh in Homo erectus allowed them to twist their torso
like that. The second is a lower positioning of the
shoulders on the torso, and this changes the orientation of
the muscles around the shoulder, again helping us to store
more energy in the wind up of an overhand throw. Again,
(41:24):
this is found in Homo erectus, and then the twisting
of the humorous bone, which is the upper arm bone,
and that twisting is yet another way to stretch the
bow string, storing up even more energy in the wind
up uh. And you can see these differences. There's a
diagram they include. You might be able to look up
for yourself if you see a comparison of like a
(41:47):
muscle diagram or the scapula of a chimpanzee and a human,
and you can see some of these differences, particularly the
lower position of the shoulder on the human body. You know,
you look at the upper musculature of a chimpanzee and
you're like, well, I really would not want to be
clubbed by this animal. And I imagine that animal can
really like climb a tree really well. But there's there's
(42:09):
some kind of different twisting of the shoulder and the
pectoral muscle in the human body that apparently allows us
to to perform this cocking back or wind up behavior
before and overhand throws so much better than a chimp can.
This also means, according to this illustration, the chimpanzee nipple
is also just a little bit higher. It's true comparatively,
(42:30):
um so roach and colleagues argue that these anatomical changes
that favor throwing coincide with archaeological evidence showing increased hunting
activity in these hominins, so like more processed animal bones,
that occupied sites, stone tool work, and so forth. So
that would make a link between the this these anatomical
(42:50):
changes that favor the ability to throw, and what human
ancestors were eating. The Homo erectus was apparently dining on
more meat. Now, coming back to that paper by Lombardo
and Dianer. From that they examine a number of other
different things, like talking about the prevalence and effectiveness of
overhand throwing in warfare and hunting, and they also look
(43:11):
at things like sex differences in throwing behavior. For example,
in chimpanzees, there's some evidence that male chimpanzees tend to
throw more uh and relative levels of lethality and targeted
throwing behaviors and so forth. But to come to the
conclusion regarding that transition, like how did the leap happen
from you know, sort of occasional, non specialized throwing like
(43:32):
we see in chimpanzees today to the habitual, targeted, forceful
overhand throwing that humans can do uh. The conclusion, they argue,
is that this adaptation grew out of quote a way
for throwers to manipulate the behavior of targeted individuals during
interest specific agonistic interactions, and then later transitioned into you
(43:54):
steering power, scavenging and hunting by hominans, perhaps in the
Australi epithesenes. So why do they think it's started with
manipulating the behavior of of other hominins within the same
species and agonistic interactions. Well, I think we can get
some clues by looking at our closest primate relatives. Again,
(44:16):
this this in no way clinches the argument. We don't
know for sure, but it's an interesting line of evidence.
So they say, if you look at our relatives like chimpanzees,
Binobo's guerrillas and so forth, these animals have all been
observed throwing. But when and how do they throw? Well,
do they throw to hunt? The answer there seems like
either no or almost never. There are almost no claimed
(44:40):
observations that any of these animals use projectiles for hunting,
with basically one possible exception, and that's a report by
Jane Goodall actually in nineteen eighty six, where to read
from the paper here quote Goodall reported three observations of
throwing by hunting chimpanzees. In two instances, stones thrown by
an male may have been intended to cause the prey
(45:02):
adult bush pigs to run rather than to harm them.
In another instance, six male chimpanzees hunting baboons through stones
at male baboons that were attacking the hunters. None of
these accounts closely resembles the highly skilled aimed throwing used
by human hunters, so even if these instances count, they
appear to be somewhat ambiguous and relatively unique. There are
(45:26):
basically no other reports of apes throwing to hunt uh,
and instead, apes and monkeys seem to be used throwing
as part of communication behavior during encounters with other members
of the same species or sometimes with other animals such
as humans. Most often, it's used for agonistic interactions, a
(45:46):
kind of threat display that you might throw rocks or
sticks at another member of the same ape species or
another animal to sort of drive them away or intimidate them. So,
if a chimpanzee is trying to display dominance or intimidate
an other one, or trying to get an interloper away
from the group, throwing rocks and sticks is a common
behavior there, but it's also not just aggressive interactions those
(46:08):
are the most common. There are also, in fewer cases
more benign examples, like particularly in binobos and some monkeys
were throwing can be a bid to initiate play or
some other type of non threatening communication. Yeah, pebbles on
the window again here. So for the most part, it
seems chimps don't really hunt or power scavenge by throwing.
(46:29):
They throw most often as a threatening display toward other
chimps or to communicate in some way. But you can
see how this behavior could bridge over into power scavenging
if you're generally throwing to threaten, so you know it
starts off with agonistic interactions, and then maybe sometimes you
throw to threaten a predator that is there with with
(46:51):
a kill, and instead you drive the predator away and
you take the meat. This creates an association between throwing
to threaten and to meet reward that could increase singly
lead to throwing to hunt directly, especially if you were
able to create modified projectiles such as spears. So it
makes me wonder like if those specific chimpanzees observed by
(47:12):
Jane Goodall, if they were in fact using rocks to
hunt or aid in hunting in some way. You kind
of have to wonder if maybe they're on the bleeding
edge of chimp technology in some way, like the one.
Those are the ones who, if left alone for a
few hundred thousand years, might evolve to select anatomical traits
that favor throwing and you know, modify objects from their
(47:33):
environment to make their throwing more effective. Yeah, yeah, that's
fascinating this so you can see the links here between,
like this sort of growing understanding to some degree that
being able to throw an object at another creature is
a way to alter its behavior or disrupt its behavior
(47:55):
at a distance, and then that that potential extra step
and realize that this also can harm the animal, and
then there are ways to enhance the materials so as
to increase harm. Uh. Yeah, that's fascinating. So what do
I think about their hypothesis here? I wouldn't say I'm
a hundred percent convinced, but it seems very plausible. They
(48:16):
make a pretty good case alright, So hopefully this episode
will help us, you know, Spook, you will help mess
you up the next time you need to try and
throw something with intention and direction, maybe your next softball game,
maybe the next time you you go to beer somebody
at an outdoor party. They'll just be that moment of
(48:37):
doubt where you you run through the evolutionary history of
getting to this point and then you miss your target,
overthink it and then slice. All right, Well, we we'd
love to hear from anyone out there if you have
any thoughts and feedback related to this episode or other
episodes in this uh this series about humans throwing things,
(48:57):
animals throwing things, um right in, We'd love to hear
from you, and of course we could we could potentially
keep going with this topic. So we're gonna we're gonna
discuss after we wrap this episode and see if we're
going to part four now or if we're gonna come
back in the future. I don't know. We don't have
to tune in Thursday to see what happens. In the meantime,
we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(49:19):
a science podcast that publishes core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Monday's,
we do listener mail. On Wednesday's, we do a short
form artifact or monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to discuss a weird movie
on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks to our audio producer
J J. Pauseway. If you would like to get in
(49:40):
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff
to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow your Mind.
It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
(50:01):
my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen me to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part three in our series on throwing
behavior in animals, especially non human animals. But we'll be
(00:24):
talking about throwing of the human variety some today. Now.
In previous episodes, we discussed a paper documenting a kind
of throwing or what appeared to be a kind of
throwing in octopuses in Australia, which used their siphons to
blast clouds of silt in their neighbor's faces when they
get a little too close. We discussed the ability of
(00:46):
elephants to throw with their trunks, and we talked about
mongoose is doing brutal reverse granny shots to bypass the
defenses of armored millipedes and as Mick Jagger would say,
get the meat. Uh. Today, our discussion continues with a
very important consideration. Well, when I told my wife that
(01:06):
this was the topic we're going to be covering, uh,
the question she asked was, well, what about air bud?
Are you going to talk about air bud? Handle the
air bud question a very important facet of this issue. Yes,
Airbud is, of course a motion picture about a dog
that plays competitive basketball based on the At this point,
I think classic sports movie trope. There's nothing in the
(01:30):
rule book that says a blank can't play whatever the
sport happens to be, and you can put into that
blank basically any animal, whatever animal seems doable from a
movie making standpoint and acceptable to the human imagination. And
I guess you could ultimately go beyond the realm of
humans into other things as long as you could somehow
cobble together a script around it. Yeah, I don't know
(01:52):
if I've ever seen another one of these. I think
I saw air Bud when I was a kid, But uh,
I know it's a tradition right there. You know, there's
a million movies like Aramy the Football Horse. Well, yeah,
I think one of the earliest, if not the earliest,
examples of this. And I could be wrong, because this
is not a subgenre that that I have personally explored
a lot. But I do remember seeing parts of this
(02:12):
one on TV the nineteen seventy six movie Guts, which
also had Ed Asner and don not sent it to
give you an idea of the you know, the caliber
of talent that was that was involved in this, But
it was about a terrible NFL team. I think there's
something like the California Atomics or something, and they end
up deciding to field a donkey as a kicker in
(02:34):
the game, and uh, um, I guess it works out
for them. Again, there's a there's nothing in the rule
book that says a donkey can't play in NFL. Yeah,
I I imagine movies like this must just encourage and
uh an overly stringent form of legalism when it comes
to professional sports. Yeah, Like does it say games must
(02:55):
take place on planet Earth and so forth? Yeah? Yeah,
they will the at this point really the future proof things.
But if we're going just based on these films, it
would seem that for a while they didn't have all
the loopholes filled in on this and um, and people
were just constantly rolling out new animals, Like it doesn't
anything about about art varks. So art varks are in
play in Professional Curly, yes, okay, But outside of Gusts
(03:20):
and air Bud, you also have movies like two thousand's
m v P Most Valuable Primate, in which a chimpanzee
play soccer. There are also I think thirteen additional Air
Bud sequels and spinoffs. Humans are also primates. All existing
soccer players are primates. Well, tell the producers of m
(03:41):
v P Most Valuable Primemate about that. Um, maybe they
maybe they actually touched on in the scramplay, but I
doubt it. But I'm sorry you were saying. How many
air Bud movies are there? Thirteen by my count, that
includes the Air Buddies uh like spinoff series and interestingly enough,
two thousands sixes Air Buddies. That was Don Knott's final film.
(04:04):
He voiced a bloodhound in it. Oh, now, I don't know.
Does that that means animals talk in Air Buddies. I
don't know if animals talked in air Bud. Perhaps you remember,
I don't mean I'm inclined to think not. I think
the dog in air Bud was silent. But yeah, well,
by by the time they get into the Buddies movies,
which by the way, descended into titles like Space Buddies
(04:26):
and Santa Buddies. As far as I can tell, these
are just an excuse to have a screen full of
Golden Retriever Puppies for eighty minutes. I think it is
absolutely crass mercenary filmmaking. It's just ultimate cute exploitation. Um.
But this was also the series that in a episode
long ago, we suggested should do a crossover with the
(04:48):
Clive Barker verse and create hell Buddies. Now. There's also
just real quick a few other mentions. There's Soccer Dog,
the movie, There's two thousand fives the Karate Dog, And
then there's the movie Ed in which a chimpanzee plays baseball. Oh,
and then there's Matilda about a boxing kangaroo. That one, Uh,
(05:11):
that one has interested me because I noticed it stars
Elliott Gould and it was also one of the films
you could pull up on the Criterion Collections UH streaming
service at least several months back. Boxing Kangaroo? Is that
a waltzing Matilda Joe? Um, I imagine so, and it's
it's I looked a little bit into this related to
(05:33):
this podcast episode, and I quickly realized, oh, well, the
boxing kangaroo is a whole thing unto itself. UM. That
does have some basis in kangaroo behavior, but often in
like a misinterpretation of kangaroo defensive behavior, but it has
kind of like a life of its own outside of
this particular picture. Might be something to come back to
in the future. Now, one more thing about the air
(05:54):
Bud franchise. You know, before they get to air Buddies,
I think you were saying that the Golden retriever end
up doing a bunch of different sports, and they've all
got puns in the titles. So the one where air
Bud does baseball is called air Bud Seventh Inning Fetch.
You gotta get some puns in there, all right. But
(06:14):
but bringing it all back around to today's episode, Okay,
some of these we can just instantly dismissed for now.
We don't need to concern ourselves with boxing kangaroos or
karate dogs because these do not involve throwing. You know,
we're gonna focus on the sports that involve throwing a ball.
Um Gus, that's impressive, but he's a kicker. Despite just
(06:34):
participating in a game that has a lot of throwing
in it doesn't seem to be throwing anything. So we
really only have to worry about the concept of dogs
playing scoring games with balls and chimpanzees playing scoring games
with battles. Real quick, let's talk about dogs, um and
and you may have additional expertise on this uh to
throw in here experience uh from being a dog owner.
(06:57):
But as far as dogs go, they can obviously be
trained to do a lot of different things, often very
impressive things, including chasing, after catching, and fetching balls and sticks,
and as is evident in many videos online, they can
also be trained to bounce basketballs into baskets off of
their their noses, off of their snouts. That always, I
don't know, Like a basketball is a fairly massive object.
(07:19):
I would think booping a basketball in mid flight with
the snout would really kind of hurt. Yeah, I'm not sure,
but I looked around. And as far as dogs throwing,
I'm not so certain about this. Drops. Yes, they can.
You know, you'll see plenty of examples of dogs catching
things dropping them. Um, But I'm not sure. I'm not
(07:40):
sure you really have anything like throwing even kind of
you know, a tossing aside of a stick or a ball, well,
not targeted throwing. I mean, I think what's quite common
for dogs is something more like what the mongoose did
with the millipede. Dogs will especially dogs that have been
trained in kind of unused torual environments with say a
(08:02):
a puzzle type treat retrieval toy. You know, so you
have like some kind of toy where the treat is
hidden inside, and the dog has to manipulate the toy
to get the treat out of the middle. In those cases,
I've seen dogs throwing the toy in order to try
to extract the treat, but it's very haphazard. They're not
like hitting a target. They're more just kind of like
(08:25):
throwing it wildly by tossing their head and it'll bounce
off the wall or something, and maybe the treat will
tumble out. Mm hmm. Now, I also found some some
discussions and some papers about the possibility that a dog
using a chewing stick is essentially a form of tool use,
and this would also apply to any other animal that
uses a stick in such a fashion. Uh So that's
(08:47):
an interesting idea to consider. Mm hmm. Yeah, you can
make that argument, I guess by the same token, you
could say like a bear scratching its butt against a
tree would be a form of tool use. Chimps, however,
chimps are a different case entirely so We're not saying
that chimpanzees should be encouraged to play baseball or soccer
(09:07):
or any other professional sport, or any sport for that matter,
but they have certainly demonstrated their use of tools in
both captivity and in the wild. And this includes the
targeted use of throwing objects. Now, one of the objects
or or substances I guess observed to be thrown a lot,
and this is something that is of course well documented online.
In fact, when we were researching other aspects of animals
(09:29):
throwing things, some of the search engines I I was
using were very excited to give me content of animals
throwing feces, potentially particularly chimps throwing feces. I was not
looking for this information at the time, by the Internet
really wanted to serve it to me. Now, this kind
of goes back into something we talked about earlier though,
the question if you're doing something with something that came
(09:51):
from your own body, is it truly tool use? I
don't know. I mean, I guess when I was thinking
about substances that come out of an animal's own body,
I was thinking about like things like spider silk, or
like the urdicating hairs that come off of a tarantiala's back.
Where the ways in which these substances are used are
(10:12):
not very generalized, They're not very free form. Instead, they
seem to be pretty tightly controlled, instinctually determined behavioral patterns,
whereas I don't know, you could say, maybe like a
chimpanzee pooping and then throwing its poop at someone or
something that that seems to be a little more free form. Yeah,
(10:32):
I guess also, and this is not something that any
of the papers I looked at got into, but I
guess there there's a difference between poop directly delivered to
the hand and then thrown, and like poop that is
just like say, in a creature's habitat or in its
general area that it then picks up. Uh maybe not
even its own poop. Um, So I guess we'd have
(10:52):
to consider that as well. Now, I do think we
should be clear that feces are not the only objects
that that apes like chimpanzees throw, but is a feces
are often observed to be thrown, especially in captivity. I
think yes, yeah, definitely. Uh, the sources I was looking at,
they're definitely mentioning this because in captivity, especially historically, there
(11:14):
are often less things for the animal to interact with.
The poop is something that will happen eventually, will be
in the enclosure, and therefore is available to pick up, manipulate,
and throw if desired, whereas in the wild there are
other competitors out there, the other things that could pick up,
like sticks, like rocks that could be thrown, and we
have seen them throw such objects both in captivity but
(11:37):
also in the wild, and so it seems to be
a situation where they're they're far more incidents of poop
throwing in captivity versus the wild, though they have been
observed to throw poop in the wild as well. So yeah,
I guess I would not disqualify something from counting as
tool used just because it consists of an animal's own
excreta or something that came out of their body. I mean,
(11:58):
you could use poop, I suppose a tool for all
kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, this is kind of a tangent,
but I was looking around and back in seventeen, a
team from the University of Calgary hosted a competition to
make use of astronaut waste, and the winning submission was
titled Astroplastic from Colon to Colony, in which the d
(12:19):
n A of an E. Coli bacteria was modified so
that it removed acids from human feces and they did
not use actual poop in the experiment, used like a
mixture of things to simulate poop. But the idea was
here that this, uh, this, this modified E. COOLi would
produce a plastic that can then be used in a
(12:40):
three D printer to produce simple tools like wrenches and
screw drivers. So the aim here would be sort of twofold.
So say you're going to Mars on an extended mission.
This way you don't have to bring those tools with you,
you don't have to pay for the cost of getting
those tools into orbit and then two Mars and then
likewise you have to worry less about getting rid of
(13:02):
human waste on the journey. Uh. That that's quite brilliant. Yes,
I one day hope to have all kinds of plastic
tools and toys made out of poop. Now, um, this
is this is sort of another aside, but this is
goods Back to chimps specifically, Uh, you might even get
into the question of why did chimps throw poop um specifically,
(13:24):
even if they have a choice of their objects to throw.
And I found this rather fascinating older paper. This from
it is UM, a Russian paper titled UM a neglected
form of quasi aggression in apes Possible relevance for the
origins of humor. This is the current anthropology and I'm
just going to read a quote from it here. According
(13:45):
to people working at the Pavlov Center, at least four
adult chimpanzee mails and one adult female would also throw
feces at people, expressing joy when the target was hit
by making a playface, hooting, clapping, and stamping around. They
did not, however, throw feces at persons of whom they
were afraid. We have received the same information from people
(14:06):
in charge of chimpanzees at the St. Petersburg and Moscow
zoos at the Moscow Zoo. The same behavior was observed
in orangutanks. So at least in these cases, the chimpanzees
seem to get a real hoot out of hitting somebody
with some poop. Yeah, And and again this is older research,
and I detect at least a little bit of anthropomorphizing here,
(14:27):
But the distinction about fear was very interesting. So maybe
in this we do see the roots of something like humor.
But elsewhere primatologists do seem to agree that throwing poop, stones, sticks,
et cetera in primates is often a an act of
communication which matches up with some of the things we've
been discussing elsewhere in this series, and that we will
(14:49):
get to in a little bit when we talked about
human evolution. Yeah, and with chimps, it's not even uh,
it's it's not even a case of like necessarily purely
spontane is communication. Like it's easy to I think, to
make that leap. You think of like an animal trying
to say something, not having the ability to say it,
or having difficulty relaying that message, and then sort of
(15:11):
sort of spontaneously picking something up and throwing it, or
perhaps it already has something in his hand and it
throws it. And this would still be very fascinating. I mean,
even if you think of like a zoo environment, for example,
the chimp is attempting interspecies communication. Uh, even if that
interspecies communication consists of throwing a rock or some poop
at somebody, But it's not always spontaneous. Sometimes it is
(15:32):
premeditated in the case of of stone throwing that's been observed.
One of the the more famous examples of this was
Santino the chimpanzee born in nine eight, who made headlines
multiple times, and I think sometimes the news cycle would
come back around to him because in addition to being
a pretty talented artist, he also has some issues with people,
(15:57):
like to collect stones ahead of time so that he
could throw them at visitors to the Fruvik Zoo in Sweden.
Now that's really interesting that the collecting of stones in
advance aspect, because of course that indicates some kind of
forethought or premeditation or planning, like seeing the stone as
a tool for future use in a moment when it
(16:20):
is not currently needed for that use. Yeah, and apparently
wasn't an isolated incident. It said that he planned hundreds
of stone throwing attacks on zoo visitors over the years.
Um Sadly, he escaped from his enclosure in December two
and was subsequently shot along with some other escape piece,
which was a pretty controversial incident. Recently, there's a fair
(16:44):
amount of coverage about that, but not I don't think
everybody necessarily connected that this was the same chump that
had made headlines in the past for the throwing of
rocks and for art apparently and for our Yeah, you
can find videos of him online doing some uh some painting,
manipulating of pigments on the on on a on a
canvas to create some interesting works. Well, sad in for Santino,
(17:07):
but let an interesting life. Thank thank Now There's another
interesting wrinkle in stone throwing with chumps that I was
reading about, because in the wild, chimps will also engage
in what is called accumulative stone throwing, as reported by
(17:30):
cool at All in Nature Scientific Reports back in twos sixteen,
Modern chimpanzees will will actually create stone accumulation sites that
are reminiscent of human cairns, of of human um assemblages
of stone, something that we often associate with like deliberate
(17:50):
cultured acts of of human behavior, uh something. And this
is both from from an archaeological standpoint, when archaeologists find
examples of domes that have been gathered together in one area,
and also I think we just individually encountered this as well,
whether you see piles of stones that are put there
for a purpose, like perhaps you're on a nature walk
(18:11):
and these stones are are gathered together to help mark
the path you're supposed to be on, or you often
see this done out of for for pure amusement. Um
At times you'll just find places where humans have been
around multiple stones and there's like kind of this irresistible
urge to arrange them or stack them up. Yeah, and
(18:32):
so it's interesting, but I also am hesitant to make
the speculative leap here. I mean, I know, I was
reading about this paper, and I know what some people
have said about the you know, the accumulation of stones,
like throwing stones into the into a hollow tree or
something until they really pile up. That suggests, well, maybe
they're creating some kind of like ritual monument, like you know,
(18:54):
like humans would create a care and for some kind
of purpose to be observed and to mean something. I
don't think there's really evidence present to jump to that
kind of conclusion, because that seems like a different order
of uh, that symbolic behavior that, as far as I know,
is probably only the province of humans. But I guess
we could always be surprised. It seems kind of a
(19:14):
speculative leap to me, but it's still really interesting behavior. Nonetheless,
I mean, the the the chimpanzee is piling up the
stones for some interesting reason, even if it's not to
like create a symbolic marker for other chimpanzees to see. Yeah. Yeah,
So this particular paper they're drawing on various surveys and accounts,
(19:35):
and they found four populations in West Africa where chimps
quote habitually bang and throw rocks against trees or toss
them into tree cavities, resulting in conspicuous stone accumulations at
these sites. Um. They point out that chimps, along with
capuchin monkeys and long tailed macaques, are known to use
stones as hammers to crack open encased foods. Uh. They
(19:55):
point out that stone throwing and chimpanzees was first described
by Jane Goodall documented aimed throwing of sticks and rocks
by male chimpanzees during agonistic displays, and this behavior was
later described by researchers for other non human primates as well,
including Japanese macaques, wild baboons, and capuchin monkeys. Yeah. Female
bearded capuchins have also been observed to throw rocks during
(20:17):
courtship interactions. Um, which I guess this is would be
like tenderly throwing pebbles against a window to get their
lover's interest at night without awakening the parents downstairs, or
maybe not I like it, but human metaphors aside, I mean, like,
it is interesting that they would throw rocks at each
other for apparent purposes other than threats or intimidation. Yeah, again,
(20:40):
coming back into like the communication aspect of it. Um.
Now I mentioned the using using some sort of nutcracking
um behavior with rocks that can sometimes lead to those
rocks accumulating in certain places, which is a different type
of accumulation versus what we're talking with the chimps here um. Also,
the paper points out that Japanese macaques engage in stone handling,
(21:02):
which isn't tool of use but solitary object play behavior,
and it actually results in use wear patterns on the stones,
and the stones will then end up accumulating at quote
unquote PlayStations. So just sort of like handling manipulating a stone,
not really doing anything in particular with it. Yeah, yeah,
(21:24):
which is I get. You know, it's like the monolith
hasn't really kicked in yet, but but they're but they're
handling the stone. But chimpanzees are well beyond all of
these like, the chimpanzees are second only to humans in
the variants of their tool usage. They make use of
simple sticks, stone hammer, stone cleavers, to linked to to
cut foods. Uh. They've even been observed to hunt sleeping
(21:48):
bush babies with wooden spears. So this is I think
only been observed in female chimpanzees. But they'll take take
a stick and sort of sort of sharpen it at
their their teeth or chew on it, you know, to
get a something like a point, and then use that
stick to stab into the hollows of trees where there's
a sleeping bush baby and spirit and pull it back
(22:11):
out to eat. There's so many surprising little little cases
of of tool uisu pro to a tool used to
behavior in chimpanzees like this. Now, this this paper basically
comes down to two hypotheses about why the chimps do this.
The first, and I think the main hypothesis is that
they accumulate stone throwing behavior as a modification of male
(22:35):
chimpanzee display. This would make it mean that it would
be kind of like a an addition to their hand
and foot drumming, uh, which is you know, ritualized behavior
found in all known chimpanzee populations and the use of
the stones. Throwing the stones um into a pile, into
the hollow of the tree, et cetera, would be a
way of enhancing um this particular activity. That's and oh yes,
(23:00):
so like hitting a pile of stones with a stone
would probably make a louder sound than just throwing a
stone off into the dirt. Yeah, I I don't think.
I don't. I would not feel comfortable going as far
to say that they're making music, uh, though I think
I saw some headlines that that we're going in that direction. Uh.
They also say that the second area to consider this
(23:23):
that they could also not be male drumming. But if
it's not that it would mean that it quote may
need to be considered in a more symbolic context. And
and I think this is where things would get a
little foggier, a little potentially more nebulous, because you're getting
into this area where there is a connection between quote
ritualized animal behavior and the repeated stereotype behavior is commonly
(23:45):
observed during human rituals unquote, which granted that could cover
a great deal of ground. This is what I was
alluding to earlier that I mean, it seems like an
interesting possibility, but I think I'd need more evidence that
that's really the right way to think about it. Yeah,
And I think I think it's basically what the authors
here we're leaning towards. Like, It's like, if it's not
just part of the hand and foot drumming of the
(24:07):
male chimps, then it's something else, and that's something else
will require more research and more observation. Yeah, but a
really interesting behavior either way. Yeah. And one thing they
point out is that it could have some great importance
not only for our understanding of how chimps behave, but
also archaeologically. When we find piles of stones and things that,
(24:28):
again we can often easily associate with with human intention,
it could be something else. It could be chimps in
in a or or you know, some other human ancestor
engaging in some sort of display that involves accumulating throwing rocks. Yeah.
Well it forces us to be humble about interpreting archaeological
evidence because I think we we we tend to always
(24:49):
want to say, oh, if we find a non natural
assemblage of stones or something like that, you assume it
must have an almost kind of like industrial purpose. You know,
it's used for wrecked survival benefit, maybe in the manufacture
of tools or something like that, which which of course
could be possible. Or the other side is people tend
to jump to religion, you say, is ritual use. But
(25:12):
then there are these cases that we observe in non
human primates today where it's like, it's not even clear
what this is for. Yeah, but I wanted to now
address the topic of the evolution of throwing in humans
because to the extent that animals throw, and we know
from everything we've looked at in these episodes that many
(25:32):
many non human animals do throw, they don't throw like
we do. No animal out there comes anywhere close to
the combined levels of force and target precision that humans
are capable of. And to further explore this, I was
looking at an interesting paper by Michael P. Lombardo and
(25:53):
robert O. Deaner published in the Quarterly Review of Biology
called Born to Throw The Ecological Causes that shaped the
Evolution of Throwing in Humans. Now, I'm not going to
address all the sub topics in this paper, but wanted
to pull out some highlights that I found really interesting.
So the authors begin by identifying two major turning points
(26:15):
in the relationship between human anatomy and human behavior that
sort of drove the evolution of the modern human body.
And they identified the shift to bipedal locomotion, of course
is is well known, but also the development of forceful
overhand throwing, and they argued that the former has gotten
a lot more attention than the ladder, but the ladder
(26:35):
might be considered equally important, if not more so. There
are other animals that throw in various scenarios, as we've documented,
but humans are the only primates that can be observed
to regularly throw targeted projectiles in order to kill or
cause injury to another animal. And I think also it's
(26:56):
worth noticing not only how much better we are throwing
than other ammals, but how this is pretty much the
only feat of physical strength. They're one of the only
feats of physical strength where we surpass our closest primate relatives.
So compared to other primates like chimpanzees and guerillas, humans
are incredibly weak. The author's site some research. It's older
(27:18):
research from ninety six, attempting to quantify the difference between
the you know, like the arm strength of a chimpanzee
versus an adult human. And this, this older study concludes that,
controlling for body size, an adult male chimpanzee is on
average roughly four times stronger than I fit adult human male.
(27:38):
Now this is probably a very approximate, guest, but I
think it is utterly uncontroversial to say that chimps are
way way stronger than humans. At chimpanzee could probably just
rip your head off. Oh yeah, And I've seen some
images of of hand. I can't recall of it was
a hairless gorilla or a hairless chimpanzee, but it allows
(27:59):
you to really see the muscle definition, and it was.
It was terrifying how how ripped this creature was. However,
despite being several times stronger than human on average in
a general since their muscles are just stronger, a chimpanzee
is several times weaker than even an adolescent human when
(28:19):
it comes to forceful overhand throwing. Uh. And I was
looking to try to find uh this comparison quantified. I
did find it in the work of a Harvard researcher
named Neil Thomas Roach, who studies the evolution of high
speed throwing. I'm going to come back to some research
he was involved in. In a minute, but just quickly here,
Roach cites figures that even an adult male chimpanzee who
(28:42):
has specifically been trained to throw a ball, so this
is not just a naive chimpanzee has never done this before.
This is one who you know, has humans have trained
them to throw as hard as they can. One who
has been trained can only achieve top throwing speeds of
about twenty miles per hour, whereas I'm humans, twelve to
thirteen year old recreational baseball pictures can achieve pitches above
(29:06):
sixty miles per hour, and professional adult baseball players can
throw fastballs in the like nine to one mile per
hour range. So isn't that bizarre. A chimpanzee might be
simultaneously three or four times stronger than you in general,
but you are probably right now at least three times
(29:27):
stronger than the chimp when it comes to throwing. Wow,
that's a massive blow to any chimpanzee playing baseball. Movies
out there are basketball movies like it doesn't make sense exactly. Yeah,
so like Chimp Rookie of the Year, that movie that's
based on false premise. Yeah, but I think this makes
(29:48):
more sense the more you think about the act of
throwing in granular details. So throwing comes so naturally and
so easily to us as a species, it takes real,
deliberate effort to understand an extremely difficult and complex behavior.
Forceful targeted throwing is It requires split second mental calculations
(30:09):
regarding force, angle, and timing, as well as coordination of
lots of precise and rapid movements by many different parts
of the body. So think about all this stuff. Think
about everything your muscles and your brain have to do
together to throw a rock and hit something, especially if
the thing is moving. You have to track the target,
(30:30):
anticipate future motion of the target, take into account the
physical features of the projectile, for example, like its weight
and its shape and so forth, which will affect how
it travels. You have to understand the object you're throwing
to throw it effectively. Um, you have to understand how
exactly to drawback and extend the arm for the throw,
(30:51):
how to grip the object in preparation for the throw,
exactly how and when to release the projectile from the grip.
And that's like a you know, tiny, tiny window, and
you have to time all of those muscular movements and
exactly the right sequence, which might all take place in
less than a second. Of throwing behaviors are one of
(31:11):
the fastest motions produced by the muscular skeletal system of
the human body. Yeah, which which makes it all the
more depressing when you throw a cat toy and the
cat doesn't chase after it and doesn't take the press like,
did you not see what I just did? But but
in the case of throwing a cat toy, you know,
I'm not trying to actually make the toy go anywhere specific.
But if I'm say bowling, which I guess I don't
(31:34):
know if you would call bowling throwing, I guess it's
sort of like their ticket counts. But but when I'm
doing that, that's one of those rare insces where I'll
I'll occasionally stop and think and try and sort of
focus on what all I'm doing to to carry out
this physical act. And yet it's, like you said, there's
so many things going on that we don't even really
have conscious control of, or or not privy to, or
(31:58):
and if we think too much about it, we're just
going to drop it on her toe. Anyway. Uh, It's
it's really quite amazing. That's another interesting aspect of throwing
that I think a lot of people can attest from
their own experience. When you think too much about throwing,
you tend to get worse at it. Isn't that strange?
Like that you tend to throw more accurately when you
(32:18):
kind of turn off your analytical brain and just let
your intuitions take over than thank you, Thank you so anyway,
the fact that we are so much better adapted for
targeted overhand throwing than other primates, even are most closely
(32:41):
related primates like chimpanzees, suggests specific selection pressure on our ancestors,
favoring the development of skeletal, muscular as well as neurological
adaptations that allow us to excel at throwing to the
extent that we do. We seem quite clearly biologically shaped
for throwing, and that requires changes in in multiple parts
(33:02):
of the body, the muscles and the skeleton of like
the arm and the shoulder and the torso, but also
the brain and the nervous system. Now, lest you think,
I don't know how useful in real world struggle could
throwing b I think this is uncontroversial, but the authors
do spend a fair amount of time just providing evidence that, like,
(33:24):
you know, they do observations of pre modern practices in
hunting and warfare to show the prevalence and utility of
targeted overhand throwing. They're like, yes, it's incredibly useful. Uh.
They say that human quote, hunters and warriors used human
muscle power to propel bolas, boomerangs, darts and knives, sticks, stones,
and spears thrown with or without the aid of auto lattels. Uh.
(33:46):
If you're interested in the autolattle. By the way, we
did an episode of Invention on that a long time
ago that I think was was one of my favorites.
I remember that being really interesting. Yeah. Anyway, many of
the technologies that replaced these practices in hunting and warfare
have simply replaced the muscular power with mechanical or chemical
sources of energy to power the throw. And that can
be everything from the tension of a bow string to
(34:08):
the combustion of gunpowder in in a firearm. Um. So
the question is how did our hominin ancestors make the
leap from something like the occasional low specialization, low utility
tossing behaviors we see in our closest primate relatives like
chimpanzees to the kind of habitual, powerful, targeted overhand throwing
(34:31):
that is characteristic of humans today. Now, like many questions
in evolutionary anthropology, we don't know the answer to this
one for sure. This is not one where somebody can
tell you the answer. But there are a few hypotheses
that are informed by some interesting evidence that we can
take a look at. Now, before we can figure out
how that advance from sort of occasional, low utility throwing
(34:53):
to human style throwing might have occurred, it's worth discussing
the major hypothesized uses of overhand throwing in an ancestral
hominin environment. Hunting is a very obvious one, right, being
able to throw a rock or a stick with force
and hit a prey animal would be extremely useful. But
the authors also call out interest specific and agonistic encounters,
(35:16):
which means conflict with other members of the same species.
And then finally, I thought this one was really fascinating,
and uh, this one may help explain and and help
you see how this this bridge could have been crossed behaviorally.
The practice of power scavenging, which means not just regular scavenging,
not just wandering around looking for a dead animal to
(35:38):
to feast upon. Power scavenging means waiting for other predators
to take down a prey animal and then chasing those
predators away from the kill and taking it for yourself. Yeah,
there was a There was a fabulous BBC documentary several
years back kindled Human Planet, that was narrated by John Hurt,
(35:59):
and it had to do with various human practices of
often hunting or source scavenging that that have been practiced
to some degree into the modern age, and one of
them involved stealing part of the kill from a lion,
which would be an example of power scavenging something where
you want to get in there like that the lion
(36:20):
has done the I guess the hard part and has
brought down prey, but now you're gonna do an also
hard thing. You want to get in there, drive the
predator away long enough to get yourself a little bit
of the meat as well. Right. Um. So, for this hypothesis,
the authors cite a work by Bingham and Susa from
two thousand nine which makes the case that during the
(36:42):
time of transition from Australia Epithes Senes to the emergence
of the Homo genus to which we belong. Uh climate
conditions in Africa may have given rise to these little
like isolated savannah environments containing hominins. But these environments also
quote lacked dangerous predators and power scavengers like lions and hyenas,
(37:03):
but contained smaller and less dangerous predators such as leopards
and cheetahs. So if that's correct, it's it's maybe easy
to imagine how with leopards and cheetahs you could more
more plausibly chase them away, or early hominance could have
chased them away from a kill by throwing things at them,
even without very specialized weapons, maybe just by like throwing
(37:26):
rocks or or unmodified sticks. And this could be thought
of as a kind of high risk, high reward strategy.
Like with power scavenging. You can get a big meat
pay day with relatively little energy investment since you don't
have to like chase the prey animal down yourself, but
it's dangerous. You do have to confront one or more
(37:46):
predators for the kill, and this type of strategy might
not be worth the risk if you have to fight
a leopard with your hands or with handheld weapons. But
if you can just throw rocks at it from a
distance until it runs away, that could be a really
a good deal. Yeah. And and again not necessarily drive
it off completely, but just create an opening during which
(38:08):
you can carry out some power scavenging and then get
out of there. Yeah. Now, another question to look at
is what is the earliest we have, like totally clear
physical evidence to establish the use of thrown projectiles by
humans um the author's right quote unambiguous archaeological evidence of
the use of modified throwing weapons manufactured by members of
the genus Homo are the stone spear points, manufactured approximately
(38:31):
three hundred thousand years ago in Africa. Hunting spears with
their center of gravity one third of the way from
the tips, suggesting that they were thrown were found in
Germany and date from three hundred thousand to four hundred
thousand years ago. These two examples are evidence that manufactured
weapons were thrown by members of the Homo genus at
least three hundred thousand years ago. But while it's harder
(38:54):
to be certain about what happened before that, the authors
infer that human ancestors were probably throwing sticks and rocks
going back a couple of million years, so there was
probably use of throwing of less modified or unmodified objects
from the environment before. We have evidence of these modified
throwing weapons from like three D four hundred thousand years ago.
And one idea I came across in trying to locate
(39:17):
the origins of habitual forceful throwing is based on studies
of anatomy, and this brings us back to that researcher
I talked about a minute ago, the anthropologist Neil Thomas Roach,
who along with some colleagues studied the bodies and behavior
of practiced human throwers like baseball pitchers and uh, and
(39:37):
let's see the citation here is Roach, Vincadason, Rainbow, and
Lieberman from published in the journal Nature, and the paper
title is Elastic Energy Storage in the Shoulder and the
Evolution of high speed Throwing in Homo And basically, these
authors contend that the anatomical difference that may humans so
(40:00):
good at throwing is our ability to store elastic energy
in our shoulders. So it's not just like the strength
of the muscles, but the fact that the human body
is designed to sort of cock back the arm before
a forceful throw, and a human essentially creates a bio
mechanical sling shot by stretching the tendons and the ligaments
(40:22):
surrounding the scapula or the shoulder blade, and this tension
could be thought of as analogous to the tension in
a bowstring. It allows very rapid extension of the arm
after the wind up. Now, how come we can do
this and our nearest relatives like chimpanzees cannot. The researchers
here argued that there are basically three important anatomical changes
(40:43):
that are found altogether around two million years ago uh
in the species Homo erectus. So these three changes are
the expansion of the waste and this sort of lets
the torso rotate above the hips, which generates more rotational force.
So when you're like cocking your arm back to throw overhand,
(41:04):
you typically you twist your torso, and that change in
uh in Homo erectus allowed them to twist their torso
like that. The second is a lower positioning of the
shoulders on the torso, and this changes the orientation of
the muscles around the shoulder, again helping us to store
more energy in the wind up of an overhand throw. Again,
(41:24):
this is found in Homo erectus, and then the twisting
of the humorous bone, which is the upper arm bone,
and that twisting is yet another way to stretch the
bow string, storing up even more energy in the wind
up uh. And you can see these differences. There's a
diagram they include. You might be able to look up
for yourself if you see a comparison of like a
(41:47):
muscle diagram or the scapula of a chimpanzee and a human,
and you can see some of these differences, particularly the
lower position of the shoulder on the human body. You know,
you look at the upper musculature of a chimpanzee and
you're like, well, I really would not want to be
clubbed by this animal. And I imagine that animal can
really like climb a tree really well. But there's there's
(42:09):
some kind of different twisting of the shoulder and the
pectoral muscle in the human body that apparently allows us
to to perform this cocking back or wind up behavior
before and overhand throws so much better than a chimp can.
This also means, according to this illustration, the chimpanzee nipple
is also just a little bit higher. It's true comparatively,
(42:30):
um so roach and colleagues argue that these anatomical changes
that favor throwing coincide with archaeological evidence showing increased hunting
activity in these hominins, so like more processed animal bones,
that occupied sites, stone tool work, and so forth. So
that would make a link between the this these anatomical
(42:50):
changes that favor the ability to throw, and what human
ancestors were eating. The Homo erectus was apparently dining on
more meat. Now, coming back to that paper by Lombardo
and Dianer. From that they examine a number of other
different things, like talking about the prevalence and effectiveness of
overhand throwing in warfare and hunting, and they also look
(43:11):
at things like sex differences in throwing behavior. For example,
in chimpanzees, there's some evidence that male chimpanzees tend to
throw more uh and relative levels of lethality and targeted
throwing behaviors and so forth. But to come to the
conclusion regarding that transition, like how did the leap happen
from you know, sort of occasional, non specialized throwing like
(43:32):
we see in chimpanzees today to the habitual, targeted, forceful
overhand throwing that humans can do uh. The conclusion, they argue,
is that this adaptation grew out of quote a way
for throwers to manipulate the behavior of targeted individuals during
interest specific agonistic interactions, and then later transitioned into you
(43:54):
steering power, scavenging and hunting by hominans, perhaps in the
Australi epithesenes. So why do they think it's started with
manipulating the behavior of of other hominins within the same
species and agonistic interactions. Well, I think we can get
some clues by looking at our closest primate relatives. Again,
(44:16):
this this in no way clinches the argument. We don't
know for sure, but it's an interesting line of evidence.
So they say, if you look at our relatives like chimpanzees,
Binobo's guerrillas and so forth, these animals have all been
observed throwing. But when and how do they throw? Well,
do they throw to hunt? The answer there seems like
either no or almost never. There are almost no claimed
(44:40):
observations that any of these animals use projectiles for hunting,
with basically one possible exception, and that's a report by
Jane Goodall actually in nineteen eighty six, where to read
from the paper here quote Goodall reported three observations of
throwing by hunting chimpanzees. In two instances, stones thrown by
an male may have been intended to cause the prey
(45:02):
adult bush pigs to run rather than to harm them.
In another instance, six male chimpanzees hunting baboons through stones
at male baboons that were attacking the hunters. None of
these accounts closely resembles the highly skilled aimed throwing used
by human hunters, so even if these instances count, they
appear to be somewhat ambiguous and relatively unique. There are
(45:26):
basically no other reports of apes throwing to hunt uh,
and instead, apes and monkeys seem to be used throwing
as part of communication behavior during encounters with other members
of the same species or sometimes with other animals such
as humans. Most often, it's used for agonistic interactions, a
(45:46):
kind of threat display that you might throw rocks or
sticks at another member of the same ape species or
another animal to sort of drive them away or intimidate them. So,
if a chimpanzee is trying to display dominance or intimidate
an other one, or trying to get an interloper away
from the group, throwing rocks and sticks is a common
behavior there, but it's also not just aggressive interactions those
(46:08):
are the most common. There are also, in fewer cases
more benign examples, like particularly in binobos and some monkeys
were throwing can be a bid to initiate play or
some other type of non threatening communication. Yeah, pebbles on
the window again here. So for the most part, it
seems chimps don't really hunt or power scavenge by throwing.
(46:29):
They throw most often as a threatening display toward other
chimps or to communicate in some way. But you can
see how this behavior could bridge over into power scavenging
if you're generally throwing to threaten, so you know it
starts off with agonistic interactions, and then maybe sometimes you
throw to threaten a predator that is there with with
(46:51):
a kill, and instead you drive the predator away and
you take the meat. This creates an association between throwing
to threaten and to meet reward that could increase singly
lead to throwing to hunt directly, especially if you were
able to create modified projectiles such as spears. So it
makes me wonder like if those specific chimpanzees observed by
(47:12):
Jane Goodall, if they were in fact using rocks to
hunt or aid in hunting in some way. You kind
of have to wonder if maybe they're on the bleeding
edge of chimp technology in some way, like the one.
Those are the ones who, if left alone for a
few hundred thousand years, might evolve to select anatomical traits
that favor throwing and you know, modify objects from their
(47:33):
environment to make their throwing more effective. Yeah, yeah, that's
fascinating this so you can see the links here between,
like this sort of growing understanding to some degree that
being able to throw an object at another creature is
a way to alter its behavior or disrupt its behavior
(47:55):
at a distance, and then that that potential extra step
and realize that this also can harm the animal, and
then there are ways to enhance the materials so as
to increase harm. Uh. Yeah, that's fascinating. So what do
I think about their hypothesis here? I wouldn't say I'm
a hundred percent convinced, but it seems very plausible. They
(48:16):
make a pretty good case alright, So hopefully this episode
will help us, you know, Spook, you will help mess
you up the next time you need to try and
throw something with intention and direction, maybe your next softball game,
maybe the next time you you go to beer somebody
at an outdoor party. They'll just be that moment of
(48:37):
doubt where you you run through the evolutionary history of
getting to this point and then you miss your target,
overthink it and then slice. All right, Well, we we'd
love to hear from anyone out there if you have
any thoughts and feedback related to this episode or other
episodes in this uh this series about humans throwing things,
(48:57):
animals throwing things, um right in, We'd love to hear
from you, and of course we could we could potentially
keep going with this topic. So we're gonna we're gonna
discuss after we wrap this episode and see if we're
going to part four now or if we're gonna come
back in the future. I don't know. We don't have
to tune in Thursday to see what happens. In the meantime,
we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(49:19):
a science podcast that publishes core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Monday's,
we do listener mail. On Wednesday's, we do a short
form artifact or monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to discuss a weird movie
on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks to our audio producer
J J. Pauseway. If you would like to get in
(49:40):
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff
to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow your Mind.
It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
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