Animals Throwing Stuff, Part 3

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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,

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, 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,

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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

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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 a science podcast that publishes core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Monday's,

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