Walking with Cavemen

I believe there is a spider that the aborigines skewer and roast. I don't see it showing up on any menus of some venturesome French restaurant, however. The Japanese are noted for eating some really peculiar things and I don't find snails all that far from spiders as far as palpability. It's unlikely I will try it but then that's what I said about escargot until someone coaxed me into trying one after a few Bombay martinis.

I'm not sure where these scientists who are debunking the series are but I'd like to read what they have to say. Any links?

LiteWiz - Indigneous Australians do eat scarab grubs (witchetty grubs) and honey-ants, but not spiders (that I know of). You may be thinking of the tarantulas eaten in Thailand and Cambodia (also in South America). It's really just a cultural thing with us now (how's about fugo fish?), but to our ancestors anything edible must have been cordon bleu.

The series is just been screened here yet, so I don't have too much to add.

WIZ-THE SCIENTISTS WHO HAD PROBLEMS WITH WALKING WITH DINOSAURS, WERE 2 TECH CONSULTANTS. THEY HAD ADDED SOME IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT TIME AND EVOLUTION. I DONT THIN K THEYD STICK THIS INTO A LINK, IT WASNT THAT IMPORTANT, AND IM SURE THEY HAD CONTRACTS TO HONOR.
AS I SAID BEFORE,WALKING WITH CAVEMEN WAS A WELCOME FRESH APPROACH B Y THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL. THEY SEEMED TO HAVE SPENT MUCH MORE TIME IN FACTUAL QUALITY CONTROL RATHER THAN JUST CGI CARTOONS OF MONSTERS.

yeah - I have seen film of tarantula eating.

They were cooked over coals - and the hairs brushed off prior to eating.

they seemed very meaty.

I dunno. I watched the show last night and I'd disagree that the clip was added for the drama. There were several clips throughout the show of them eating termites, grubs, flies, etc as well as the spider and each time it was mentioned that our ancestors were largely opportunists and survival meant getting protein wherever it could be found. Taken as a whole, it seemed that the thrust was that they weren't picky about their cusine as long as they got what they needed to survive and that they learned what was and wasn't a source of protein as they migrated into new areas of the world and met up with other new species.

The spider eating was a lot less "ugh" factor then the clip of one of the females vomiting up mashed bamboo roots.

No link, no think I would consider it in a review. Until someone comes up with some provable lapse of science in the series, I give them a pass.

Hmmm...tarantulas stuffed with ham and cheese. Yummy, yummy!

Wasn't drawn to the dinosaurs or the prehistoric beasts (or whatever they called it) shows, but this one had me hook, line, and sinker. And, from what I could tell (which is very little, which makes trying to tell a little risky), they'd tried to remain fairly true to the science. Lots of speculation, it is true, but when it comes to trying to reconstruct behavior from fossil evidence, much of it is going to be. I enjoyed it a great deal. But, then, one of my favorite books when I was a kid was "The Inheritors," so I'm kind of a sucker for trying to project myself back in our evolution.



It doesn't seem to me that they could have presented any kind of coherent survey of dinosaur evolution in a couple of hours...

One thing, though: ergaster seemed a bit pigmentally challenged, given his environs, though I did appreciate the many melanomas the makeup artists slapped on...

EATING GRUBS IS A CULTURAL THING THAT WAS DEVELOPED OVER MILLENIA. IT INVOLVED TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE. THATS NOT AN AUTOMATICALLY ACQUIRED SKILL. THE SPIDER ON THE ROADSIDE WAS A "LOOK HERE IS FOOD" SORT OF REVELATION.
MY POINT WAS THAT MANY FOOD AVOIDANCE RESPONSES ARE EVENTUALLY GENETIC AND INCLUDE

DONT MESS WITH TIGERS AND BIG CATS

MANY SNAKES WILL KILL YOU

CERTAIN PLANTS -NOT GOOD

MILLIPEDES AND PARAPITII CAN KILL YOU IF YOU EAT THEM

SPIDERS AND SCORPIONS NEED SPECIAL HANDLING .

BEING AN OPPORTUNIST DOESNT MEAN THAT HOMINIDS JUST CARELESSLY POPPED ANYTHING INTO THEIR MOUTHS. THERE WERE MANY RULES OF DIET THAT WERE PASSED ON BY VERBAL AND NON VERBAL TEACHING FROM ONE INDIVIDUAL TO OFFSPRING OR CLAN/FAMILY MEMBERS. THE TV SHOW, TO BE ACCURATE SHOULD HAVE DEVELOPED SUCH THEMES , HOWEVER, THOSE ARE PROGRAM DECISIONS TO KEEP THE SHOW FROM GETTING BOGGED DOWN IN TIVIA

Also plausible is the trial and error process of figuring out that some of the things about which we should generally possess well-founded fears can be quite good in certain instances; this comes into play every time you eat a mushroom (and don't get sick). I've got no problem with them making wild speculations about things of this nature. Most fine details are speculative -- which, of course, ties into the over-arching theme they gave the piece, which is that it was our imagination that allowed us to "win out" over the other hominid species -- itself a speculation.

I did find it interesting that no mention was made of the possible impact of disease on various populations. This too would be speculative, of course, and may not come into play on a really large scale in human society until the the domestication of animals and the advent of agriculture, but it is something that I was curious about...

WIZ-THATS SILLY. YOU WORK IN "THE BUSINESS" . ARE YOU NOT AWARE OF CONTRACT CLAUSES.? OR CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENTS? NOT BEING ON THE WEB IS HARDLY A REASON TO DOUBT CREDIBILITY, IN FACT ITS MANY TIMES AN INVERSE RELATIONSHIP. THERES SO MUCH SELF PUBLISHED CRAP ON THE WEB THAT KIDS AND ADULTS DONT KNOW WHATS TRUE OR NOT.

P-dog, the evidence is pretty strong that the kinds of diseases the we 'enjoy' are fairly recent and the result of a switch to intensive farming practices. More people, close contact with domesticated animals, social imbalance and nutritional deficiences based on the cultivation of a small number of species are reflected in the very tissues that are the most resistent. Bones and teeth are very good indicators of both diet and physical health, although the contents of rubbish and storage pits are other good indicators.

Those 'cavemen' probably had very good health. Allowing for the loss of those individuals that were either sick or had congenital problems the life-span was longer than formally been imagined. Curiously, the greatest risks wouldn't have been in the hunt or predation by carnivores, but life events such as childbirth and conflicts within human populations.

PATIO-ONE OF THE SKULLS IN THE SHOW HAD EVIDENCE OF A SEVERE TOOTH INFECTION THAT PROBABLY KILLED THE INDIVIDUAL. IVE ALSO SEEN SOME NEANDERTHALS BONES THAT WERE SEVERELY ARTHRITIC. ABOUT 30 YERAS AGO, NEANDERTHALENSIS WAS EVENTHOUGHT TO BE AN ARTHRITIC SPECIMEN OF CRO MAGNON. THAT WAS WHEN THEY HAD HUNDREDS OF LESS SPECIMENS AND DIDNT KNOW ANY BETTER.

So all the paleontologists in the world signed a contract not to debunk "Walking With Cavemen." Interesting. (Now who's being silly...)

I really want to watch this one!! Missed it thus far.

Wiz, farmerman was pretty specific about who he is talking about, why they wouldn't say anything, and how he knows. Makes sense to me. Doesn't mean they're worthless, just means that they have factual errors.

THANK YOU SOZ. i CAN BE RIGHT OR WRONG AS NEED BE, I JUST DONT LIKE TO BE MISREAD.

The point is actually that it's silly to argue about interpretations that some scientists may not agree when some mechanisms of evolution are still in debate. If the producers (the BBC) became a bit imaginative in order to entertain but committed no gross errors and took some judicious artistic license, I can see some paleontologist standing by their guns of how they interpret the evidence and criticizing the show. Otherwise, I like what I saw on the screen and I don't believe any of it was misleading to a fault. I'm well read on the subject and have discerned many dissagreements between one evolutionist/paleontolist and another, detecting some professional jealousy in some cases (scientists are, after all, only human). I knew farmerman was speaking of some of the scientific advisors to the show (although I've never heard of a gag order for a television show, except for not revealing plotlines of a premier like "Sex in the City" ). I think we are debating about windmills.

OK, WIZ, AGREED, HOWEVER, MY CRITICISMS WERE ABOUT WALKING WITH DINOSAURS , NOT THIS ONE. "DINOS" HAD SOME LARGE ERRORS THAT ARE PROBABLY ARCANE AND BEST LEFT ALONE. B F D

Yep, saw that. Realized this morning, as another of her relatives went in for surgery, that the past couple of years would have killed most of the gfs family not very long ago. A couple of cases of appendicitis, an eptopic pregnancy, roto-rootering of some arteries, a couple of treatable (and a couple more untreatable) cancers.

Never mind poor vision, "infertility" and the like. Selective pressures ain't what they used to be. (I'd have died at birth, too.)

Wow, youve been tried and tested there patio, hope things are goin up now.

Its interesting that things that would have prevented our ancestors from successfully passing on their genes are now no longer a big deal. Modern medicine has become one of our planets deciding factors in evolution for humans. second only to desertification . the lack of such medicine results in high mortality rates among the offspring and this seems to be autocorrelated with higher birth rates.