I recall seeing an old theory that large brains are needed to get sufficient timing accuracy on throws. If I vaguely recall correctly, it made the argument that the number of neurons needed to get sufficient timing accuracy goes as the sixth power of the throwing distance, for a fixed size target.

This is still an active area of research

https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-limits-a...

Throwing is a very valuable hunting skill, since unlike melee it does not place the hunter at direct risk of injury by the prey.

The thing about your hunting theory is that lots of other animals use coordinated social attack on prey. They have to do risk/benefit based on how many other of their kind are there and how many other of the other kind. I also don't think charging an animal has a small amount of optionality - they have to decide how

That being said I believe the freeing of the hands was probably crucial to brain development. The trade-off of sending so much energy to the brain became worth it once you had the physical means to build tools and such.

The human body does not, really, support your idea. The human brain is big but not the biggest (either by size or ratio) and the human body (tall hands and tall legs) is made for running, walking, traveling and not thinking.

Birds (Eagles) are much better at targeting animals, and they are the projectile. And our sight compares really badly to other hunting animals.

My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river)

> This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group.

Social structure is not unique to humans. Other animals have it and have complex ones too (like birds who mate for life!). Some animals are self-aware and might be even conscious.

> My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river)

Foragers are the vast majority of human history and they're just as capable of weighing long-term risks as you or I. It would also be incorrect to say that all agriculture originated around river valleys. Mexico and New Guinea are both counterexamples.

New Guinea is an island, definitively not a river but the sea is rich in resources; kinda of a different regime. For Mexico, I thought they had lots of water (assuming you mean Tenochtitlan). The city was literally floating in water.

All agriculture happens in places with water. That's sort of a necessary prerequisite. In Mexico we're really talking about Oaxaca and especially the highlands in early agriculture. In New Guinea, the whole island is a swampy tropical rainforest. Neither of these are compatible with the hydraulic hypothesis though.

Also Southern Florida's indigeneous people's aquaculture

It’s a little cheap to say eagles are the projectile, as they can continuously update their trajectory until the moment they grab their prey. Humans have to get it right right at the moment the projectile leaves their hand; they can’t correct as the projectile flies.

A Peregrine falcon in a 200 MPH dive assuming ~0.05 second reflexes is completely unable to do anything to correct their flight path within the next ~15 feet.

Throwing accurately might seem complex, but chimps have been recorded throwing rocks at targets and once the basics are down being slightly better at throwing probably doesn’t add much difficulty.

And why exactly would you assume 0.05s reflexes? Why don’t you assume, say, 0.01s instead?

Fastest recorded visual reaction time in any animal was 0.015s (15ms) for a tiny fly to sudden bright light. The general rule is it increases with the physical distance a signal needs to travel across an animals nervous system and the complexity of what’s being responded to.

So, while I don’t have exact measurements on hand ~50ms is good enough for an internet comment.

Accurate human throwing requires a timing accuracy of 1 ms.

Precision of 1ms not timing of 1ms. It’s just like taking a step you can chose when to start but you need to synchronize motions after that point to maintain an efficient stride.

In the end that kind of precision is extremely easy for nervous systems as the lag just gets built in. Which is how hummingbird hearts can do 21 beats per second with different timings between each of the 4 chambers at sub 1ms precision.

> is made for running, walking, traveling and not thinking

I think most runners, walkers, hikers, and travelers would say they do quite a lot of thinking while they’re moving.

Nietzsche has entered the chat: "No great idea has ever been conceived while sitting"

Animals tend to run away when you throw something like a rock or a big stick at them. It's possible the primary benefit of utilizing projectiles by early humans, even before they could fashion weapons or throw accurately, was as a defense mechanism that increased their survival rate.

... as anyone who ever met a snarling, menacing dog in deserted Balkan mountains can confirm.

Even bending down and pretending to pick up something from the ground will often work.

There is the tooling hypothesis, i.e. that the ability to build tools also brought the need to communicate how to build the tools.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/tools-and-language/

The structure of steps in a process necessitated structured grammar and thought. US philosopher Daniel Dennett is a proponent of language-as-debugging. Our rational faculty was an emergent property of evaluating statements. Errors provoke laughter as a debugging response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Detection_of...

Notable comedian George Carlin demonstrated a real genius for debugging language. His piece about the progression from "shell-shock" to PTSD is a good example.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246642/characters/nm0137506

I like the idea proposed by I think Larry Niven the SF author, that speech started as a way to bypass and augment the corpus callosum so the two hemispheres of the brain could get more in sync, and provide a way of organizing, "do this, then do that, then 'be careful here' swing the rock and release."

Think about the internal focus you have when doing something carefully and how you talk yourself through it, from carpentry to skiing.

Using the same verbalizations, when showing someone else the same thing, evolves to language.

Orca gang together to generate large waves in unison to wash off waiting penguins and seals from ice floes: https://youtu.be/g1VEwsI4SlY. Likely they do other premeditated hunting too. A recent discussion of grandmothers show we also share menopause with Orca (and pilot whales, who also hunt in groups and also very closely related to Orca) so it might be these are the only other species that come close to us, culturally.

Maybe this is why birds are smart relative to their size. They are melee but are also themselves the projectile

Early humans used running for hunting, see persistence hunting.

Animals who hunt for food still need strategy. They hunt together, with few animals upwind pushing prey into a trap of waiting animals downwind. Predicting where prey will be while running is also very useful.

Running is important, but running is not prefered if you can quietly and easily kill animals. e.g. You catch fish with a trident, instead of running fish along the river.

Persistence hunting does not work on fish. And human intelligence predated complex tools like tridents.

Empathy, not apathy. Otherwise, a very interesting hypothesis. I must ruminate (pun intended) on it for quite a moment.

William Calvin has written along something like those lines. I don't know whether it's his current view.

I like this. It's a fun thought

You're describing features that many other animals have. Being bipedal, hunting, using projectiles, and so on.

Gravity’s Rainbow