Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
30,000 years ago, or Heidelbergensis or Neanderthals who were mostly hunters, or H florensis
“hobbit” who lived off a pygmy elephant the probably went extinct after a volcanic eruption,
or Denisovans, is a separate issue perhaps related to adaptability, communication, and abstract
thought, including engineering ability to develop better tools, clothing, and hunting process.
Brain size is often mentioned as an advantage but Neanderthals had bigger brains. Non-human
primates who are not very mobile that rarely leave their ranges are resistant to most diseases
in their territory such as malaria or other diseases of closely knit communities like
tuberculosis. Indeed, malaria probably jumped species from western gorillas (but not eastern)
to humans based on mitochondrial DNA just as the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)
jumped to humans as HIV from Vervet/green monkey bush meat about 100 years ago and now
infects some 33 million people, 2.6 million are infected annually and some 1.8 million die
from HIV annually. Another disease is that of Hepatitis C (HCV), a virus similar to West Nile
Fever and Yellow Fever, which affects some 200 million people and kills some 350,000
annually and indeed, kills more people in the USA on an annual basis than HIV, and is only
more recently gaining notoriety.
Vervet Monkey with Stolen Apple
Hepatitis C is much more infective from a point of view of blood contact than HIV. In an
article in the New York Times of May, 2011, Carl Zimmer reported on a discovery by
Columbia University that swabs from dogs in USA dog shelters with respiratory disease had a
similar virus, now called Hepacivirus, and genetic evidence would suggest the virus jumped
species from dogs to man about 500 to 1,000 years ago. Living as they did, most hunter
gatherers in arctic habitats rarely lived beyond the age of 40 years because of the demands of
hunting and disease, although among the bushmen some appear to live regularly well into their
60s; this is without modern medical help. Today most people have had some life threatening
event by the age of 60 that has occurred because of modern “civilized” life (motor vehicle
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