#beaureqard

[kaijutegu]

pls disragard these questions if you arent feeling like explaining anthropology that is probably not within your specific field, but i have questions and somehow youre the most accessible source for answers about ancient-ass humans. so: why are humans so much hardier than other animals? like if you break a horse's bone that horse is kaput, but people bounce back from shit like missing limbs. how are we so cool? also, how prevalent (and when) was pursuit predation? also, thanks! have a nice day

OH no worries, this is something I teach every year and it’s REALLY COOL. There’s footnotes and works cited below the jump if you want them, and I can point you at some other work if this is something you’re interested in reading about. Humans are ridiculously resilient. The reason for this has a lot to do with the tradeoffs we made for endurance rather than speed. Human walking is really energy efficient (it’s really just controlled falling) compared to a horse’s galloping, and we have pretty well-muscled legs. Our plantigrade feet mean that there’s not as much energy when we spring off compared to an animal that runs on their toes, but at the same time, we spend a lot less energy moving around. 

Our muscles and leg anatomy have a lot to do with it, too. Let’s look at a horse’s leg compared to a human’s.

Horses in particular have a hard time with broken legs because they have a LOT of mass resting on on those legs. Horses’ legs are basically built to go fast- their leg bones are actually quite light, and below the ankle there’s… well, basically nothing. Just tendon and skin- there’s no big muscles to stabilize or cushion the bone. This means that there’s less weight to drag around so the horse can escape a predator more quickly, but it comes with a major tradeoff- if a horse breaks their lower leg, it tends to shatter. In the wild, this is going to make the horse extremely easy to pick off. But like I said up there, humans- unlike horses- don’t run on our toes. Our ankle bones are chunky and strong, and our lower legs are cushioned with muscle and fat. But our healing ability goes beyond just basic anatomy! Our group dynamics also play into this, too. If a horse breaks a leg, what can the other horses do about it? The injured horse still has its biological needs to fulfill; it has to eat, drink, and evade predators. It has to keep moving- it can’t lie down for a few weeks and let the leg heal. But that’s not true of humans and our closest relatives! I’ll use Neanderthals for this example because I like them a lot, but the same goes for early modern humans, too. 

Let’s say that some Neanderthals are out on the hunt, and Thog gets knocked against a tree trunk by a mammoth and she breaks her leg. Because Thog’s a member of a social species, it’s not the end of the world for her or her group. The rest of her crew can keep hunting and Thog can limp back home, where her grandfather looks after her and her younger sister brings her water. She’s able to rest and keep weight off the broken leg, which means that so long as she keeps whatever wounds there might be relatively clean, sepsis is less likely. Group living means that you don’t have to be self-sufficient; no hominin is an island. Part of why we’re so successful is that our ability to care for each other ensures better group survival. If your reproductive-age individuals are also providers, group care means that you’re less likely to lose them. 

We know from looking at Neanderthal skeletons that they were injured frequently and were able to shake it off and survive; even elderly individuals with severe arthritis are often found in group contexts, suggesting they weren’t left behind. And we are talking serious injuries here- not just broken legs, but head and neck trauma, too. There’s a famous paper* that says that most Neanderthal injuries came from close contact hunting (due to them being mostly head and neck injuries rather than lower body injuries), but more up-to-date research notes that actually, Neanderthals could- and did- get hurt pretty much everywhere**. 

As to when pursuit predation came into effect, the best guess we have is “probably sometime around two million years ago, practiced by Homo erectus/ergaster.” One way we can tell this is by diet. Mandibles are very quick to adapt to dietary pressures, so by comparing mandibles to things with known diets, we’re able to tell what’s going on. Add that to dental wear and morphology studies and chemical analysis of subfossils’*** teeth and we can get a pretty good picture of who’s eating what. What we see with the H. erectus/ergaster complex of species is that they’re eating a wide variety of very tough foods; their jaws and molars suggest that they were eating root vegetables, tough meat, tubers, bone marrow, honey- really, anything they could find. We also know that they were eating a fairly high calorie diet compared to their predecessors; this was necessary for brain development- and we know that these calories came from meat. As average brain mass increases, so does evidence of meat-eating. Brain development is expensive- you have to put a lot of nutrients into it- nutrients that are really hard to get from plants alone. One way to feed the family is by hunting- though realistically this didn’t happen all that regularly. Rather, it’s more likely that hunting supplemented gathering, as it does with many forager groups today; hunting takes a lot of energy and can be dangerous.Archaeology also points to the “around two million years ago” date based on stone tool deposits and fossil prey species. One good example of this is Kanjera in Kenya; it’s a site by Lake Victoria that has good evidence for persistence hunting. There’s quite a lot of gazelle and antelope skeletons that aside from stone tool marks, don’t have a lot of damage. It looks like these were brought to the site for butchering- and they would have had to be hunted because hyenas, lions, and other predators and scavengers will actually eat those bones. Gazelles are a lot faster than humans, and the hominins of the time didn’t really do projectiles; rather, it’s more likely they ran the gazelles down until they were exhausted, then dragged them back to this lakeside camp site to process and eat. It’s likely that this strategy helped fuel the migration of Homo into Asia; once you’re able to hunt big game, your movement is less restricted by the availability of small animals, scavenged meat, and seasonal plants; you can follow herd animals and just chase one whenever you need to eat. However, the exact role that hunting and scavenging played in the development of the Homo genus is something that archaeologists and physical anthropologists do not agree on- when you’re trying to figure out what a species eats and how they got their food, you gotta realize that this can vary heavily by what’s available, what predators are in the area, your own group’s composition, and myriad other factors that can affect food acquisition. 

One thing we do know for sure: Persistence hunting works. Our species is super good at it, even today. If you’d like to see some persistence hunting in action, it’s actually still used by San groups in Africa.

Footnotes*This famous paper is, of course, “Patterns of Trauma among the Neanderthals” by Thomas Berger and Erik Trinkaus. Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 1995 (Volume 22, issue 6, pp. 841-852), this study is really interesting but doesn’t quite take lower leg injury patterns into account and underestimates the potential prevalence of these types of injuries.

**For more about Neanderthal injuries, check out Erik Trinkaus’s more recent work; he’s one of the authors on the famous “rodeo rider” paper from the 1990s, and it’s his 2010s-era revisions that expanded our understanding of Neanderthal and early modern human injuries.

***You can’t do the same types of analysis with full fossils because the bone tissue is basically replaced by rock, but you can still look at dental morphology! Just can’t get isotopes.

Works citedBraun, D, et al. Early hominin diet included diverse terrestrial and aquatic animals 1.95 Ma in East Turkana, Kenya. PNAS107(22): 10002-10007. June 2010.

Plummer TW, Ditchfield PW, Bishop LC, Kingston JD, Ferraro JV, Braun DR, et al. (2009) Oldest Evidence of Toolmaking Hominins in a Grassland-Dominated Ecosystem. PLoS ONE 4(9): e7199. Open Access:  http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007199

Pobiner, B. New actualistic data on the ecology and energetics of hominin scavenging opportunities. Journal of Human Evolution 80: 1-16. March 2015

Trinkaus, E. “Neandertals, early modern humans, and rodeo riders.” Journal of Archaeological Science 39(12): 3691–3693. December 2012.

Image SourcesHorse leg: http://www.sacredequine.com/faqs.htmlHuman leg: https://www.anatomylibrary99.com/wrist-tendon-anatomy-diagrams/wrist-tendon-anatomy-tendons-of-the-posterior/

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To: @beaureqard From: @animelover1016​

[olivemeister]

beaureqard replied to your post:strawberrydia replied to your post:lovelylilkitten...

idt allukas dead at all? at least one kakuhou got removed, yeah, but that doesn’t mean death, and also dont they grow back or sth? alluka is… probably as fine as any ghoul in ccg custody can be (fuckin prays for her anyway)

they do in fact grow back. there is a precedent in tokyo ghoul for a ghoul who has their kakuhou repeatedly harvested.

[charaznablescanontoyota]

oh and as an apology for sending you a non-oc related question directly after you asked for oc questions: how was cap zosmas twin brother murdered? does she know? do you know? whodunnit & why?

it's a mystery!!! in her spare time cap likes to persue leads and track down clues as to the murderer's whereabouts and motives.

[fourblocksofgold-blog]

what the Heck how does an itty bitty shift in key make that song So much better like what the fuck. explain that to me ify ou understand it because i dont understand it

i honestlyyyyy dont really know i mean. im sure there is science behind it but, personally to me it might be because C is the most common key usually so having it in B instead might make it more interesting to the ear since its more unusual. it also makes the dominant chord F#, which is an even more rare chord to hear, with A# as the leading tone and i think that’s very ear-catching, if you will. this is obviously per anyones interpretation but i think B (whether major or minor) is a key that causes more tension to the listener possibly because everything is just a half step below our most common key of C, which gives you that feeling of wanting to raise your eyebrows and stand on your toes to make the note reach the spot you think it should be, which for the context of that  song is perfect. idk this is all my opinion but thats all i got lmao

[kaijutegu]

you characterized human walking as controlled falling--does animal walking take more effort because they have 4 legs, they have to push off each one? what about the relative stresses of human vs animal running? is there an example of a well-muscled animal that doesnt have such trouble with fragility, or a social animal that can care for wounded members of its group? we've sort of gotten away from anthropology huh lmao Sorry! I guess... what pressures selected for the above in humans?

Actually, a lot of this is still anthropology! Bipedalism- one of the defining characteristics of hominins- and its origins are extremely important to physical anthropologists and primatologists.

Human walking is divided into two parts: stance phase and swing phase. As an experiment, stand up, take a slow walking step, and really think about what you’re doing. Then sit down again because things tend to get weird when you actually think about what you’re doing when you walk- it’s kind of like remembering to breathe or being aware that you can feel your tongue in your mouth. By and large as a species*, our brains are so used to the motions of walking that thinking about it can throw us off our stride. This is why learning to walk again after an injury can be so challenging- actively thinking about locomotion is not something the human brain likes to do. To walk, we pick up a leg, swing it forward, land on it, roll off the toe of the other leg, pick it up, swing forward, land on it… it goes on forever. Here’s an illustration of what that looks like!

This doesn’t actually require a lot of energy, from a caloric standpoint. It’s just falling with style. Running is quite similar; it’s just more energy put into it. It’s still the same motion; the leg just gets lifted a little higher. There’s a phase where both legs are off the ground (which you can’t see in this gif, unfortunately)- same as when a horse moves from walking to galloping. 

 Let’s compare that to a horse- the first gif is a horse walking, the second is a horse galloping.

Much of the stress in four-legged running comes from body weight; a horse is going to be a lot heavier than a human, so that’s a lot of force put on the knees. Running is always going to be more stressful than walking, but for humans, our relatively small body size is going to make it comparatively less stressful and more efficient.

Now, this isn’t to say that other animals aren’t efficient for what they are/can do; it’s just to say that we’re more efficient. There’s only two animals that can really keep up with us: domesticated dogs and domesticated horses. We’re going to keep looking at horses because horses and the energetics of their movement are really well-studied; horses have had a long working relationship with humans. Unlike most other animals, it’s unlikely we domesticated them just to eat- equines are real dynamos and are able to do a tremendous amount of work. Now, this is where things kind of get into physics, but bear with me for a moment. Consider for just a second: animals (us included) as machines. There’s an input: oxygen and calories. There’s an output that we call “work,” which is using a force to move an object a distance when both the force and the motion of the object are in the same direction. That’s what we mean when we’re talking about “work,” the ability to move an object (at bare minimum, the animal’s body) a distance. Horses have been selectively bred over millennia for stamina and speed, and as a result the domesticated horse’s maximum work output is about 3.5 times higher than what it should be**. So back to that question of two feet versus four feet: It’s not just about quadrupedalism versus bipedalism, but also about aerobic potential, lung capacity, metabolism… there’s a lot to it. 

Efficiency versus the capacity for speed is one of those evolutionary tradeoffs. There’s quite a lot of them in locomotion, including the fragility of various species. Horses and other leggy ungulates are typically more fragile than most other quadrupeds. If we look at predators- let’s use coyotes as an example- they might not be as fast initially as an ungulate, but they’ve also got some padding around their ankles. They’re less likely to shatter a bone. Bigger carnivores, like lions? Even more padding, with hunting strategies to match. Lions like to chase their prey into ambushes rather than just chase it down. To escape these ambushes, prey species need speed; like all things evolutionary, those fragile legs are a tradeoff. 

As far as social animals caring for wounded members of their group, you’ll sometimes see this in other primates- they’ll lick each others’ wounds, pick off debris, that sort of thing. There’s some evidence that they’ll chew plants with medicinal properties, but interpreting these actions is really difficult because there’s so much we don’t know about great apes’ cognition. There’s an excellent book, The Evolution of Sickness and Healing, that has loads of information. While it’s a little older- it was published in 1997- it’s a great jumping off point. The whole thing’s available for free online here. Chapter 2 in particular has a lot of good information on what chimpanzees have been observed doing, including one of my favorite Jane Goodall anecdotes about a 23-year-old male chimpanzee (so, an adult) who got hurt in a fight with another chimp and started screaming; his elderly mother came running from about half a kilometer away and started grooming him, which got him to calm down. Even for chimps, mom’s attention can make it all better. 

As always, footnotes and references/further reading under the jump!

Footnotes*I realize that this is a very broad statement. I struggled for quite a while with the wording of this because I am very aware that walking isn’t easy for everyone. There’s all kinds of physical and neurological disabilities that make walking a challenge, and in no way am I saying that people whose brains and bodies struggle with walking are less than or not part of the population or anything negative. Not everybody’s body and brain works the same way. That doesn’t mean those individuals are “less fit” (the question of evolutionary fitness is on a population level, not an individual level), and I fervently hope that in no way does this seem an endorsement of any ableist or eugenic statements. This is simply saying “hey, look, we’re a bipedal species. Here’s a relic of how that evolved.”**For more on this, put “horse energetics” into your favorite academic search engine (Google scholar is a wonderful tool!) and be amazed. A good place to start is Taylor, R. et al. (1981).Design of the mammalian respiratory system. III. Scalingmaximum aerobic capacity to body mass: wild and domesticmammals. Respir. Physiol. 44, 25–37. However, this is a lot of physics. Caveat lector.

Image creditsLeg.gif: adapted from Umberger 2010- please don’t use or repost without crediting Umberger 2010, even though I made the gif and for the most part am cool with sharing educational resources, since the gif is from Umberger’s video.Human leg running: Carolyn Eng at Harvard. https://giphy.com/gifs/harvard-running-human-skeleton-3o85xtad4WoUEk9EPeWalking horse: Public domain, images shot in 1887 by Edward Muybridge https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_horse_walking_animated.gifGalloping horse: Public domain, images shot in 1887 by Edward Muybridge (he really liked taking pictures of horses, ok?) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_horse_gallop_animated_2.gif

Works CitedFábrega, Horacio, Jr. Evolution of Sickness and Healing. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1997. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1j49n6b2/

Minetti, A., Ardigo, L., Reinach, E., and Saibene, F. The Relationship Between Mechanical Work and Energy Expenditure of Locomotion in Horses. The Journal of Experimental Biology 202, 2329–2338 (1999)

Umberger, B. Stance and Swing Phase Costs in Human Walking. Journal of the Royal Society INTERFACE 7(50): 1329-1340. March 2010. http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/50/1329

[sadafs]

1-10 on the hogwarts thing you dont have to draw all those i just... i want to know everybodys gay hogwarts dreams im sorry

1. What house will you be in?

RAVENCLAW 

2. If the sorting hat was on you and it said you'd be great in a house you didn't consider before, will you follow his advice or choose what house you want?

choose my fuckin house who gives a shit abt a damn hat this is a matter of house pride

3. What kind of animal would you bring to school?

a black cat! 

4. If you were in class, where would you normally sit?

middle of the room but near windows if possible haha

5. What do you think you'll be doing right now?

RIGHT NOW??? probably chillin in the common room. feeling wizardy

6. What's the core of your wand?

manticore hair! 

7. Do you think you'll be part of the Quidditch team?

the TEAM no. id like to play casually maybe 

8. Will you be part of any organization???

queer wizards, witches, and magic folk alliance... poc wizard groups??!? uh also if this is canon timed then obviously if possible dumbledores army+ order of the pheonix

9. Will you go home during holidays?

depends, will my friends be staying back or can i invite them to my house? at any rate i think id go home 

10. Do you think you'll have friends from other houses?

YES so many i hope i have a lot of interhouse friends! 

[olivemeister]

is gons kagune from a named/known character?

well, maybe

[olivemeister]

beaureqard answered your question:SPECIAL TREAT: ask me anything about tokyoxghoul...

do the zoldycks get more involve? is kalluto okay, will we see them

the zoldycks will get some screentime soon! i have yet to write anything with kalluto at this point in time, but i am not anywhere near done writing the fic.

[olivemeister]

hhey i was wondering, would it be ok if i wrote a spinoff to your high school au (which was amazing, by the way)? i've been thinking a lot about what happens next, especially and specifically to kalluto, but it's your au and i don't want to step on your toes, especially if you have plans for something similar!

well i mean i can’t stop you, but i consider it to be a contained and completed story and part of the point was to have that ambiguity as to what else happens, if that makes sense.

thank you for asking, though!

[fourblocksofgold-blog]

beaureqard replied to your photoset “themortalscout took my 8-bit AH poster to RTX to get it signed for me...”

Extreme Jealousy but also hot damn thats rad, congrats on the rad poster, what the hell im like. simultaneously happy and jealous

haha ty ty i'm happy too its more than i ever hoped for in life