I read the paper, it made a pretty convincing case that the hand was buttressed for impact, but I don't think that it made the case that it was selected for due to its benefits in fighting. There can be other benefits to having a buttressed hand besides just fighting - personally my guess is that primitive contests usually involved grappling.
Primates strike though, don't they? What kind of grappling are you imagining? I'm not saying they wouldn't have, but hitting and biting seem pretty natural to us, and I think those methods inflict damage more easilly for the untrained.
Yeah, the most similar to primate striking I've seen is Cossack striking, which is now part of Systema. Lots of rotation at the elbow.
A lot of contests within a species take place in a ritualized manner to avoid injuring the other opponent - they simply assess the respective strength of the combatants. The cost of engaging in such a contest is relatively low, and it allows both the victor and the loser to get out of it without injury. Better to run away and mate another day. Grappling is a pretty handy way of fighting without incurring injury, so I'd imagine that early human societies had more time to practice it and formalize it before striking was practiced in a really formal way.
Maybe, I'm not disagreeing, just wondered what the reasoning behind it was. I'm inclined to think both would have been used, but it not something we'll ever know for sure without time travel.
The origin of boxing = One proto-human hit another proto-human in the chops. And humans have been hitting each other in the chops ever since.
I disagree with your concept of ritualized fighting contests. Saddly I'm not an anthropologist so take my argument with a grain of salt . But fights to the death are not un-heard of in our history (from today downwards), and so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that this took place in pre-history too. And then natural selection takes place for those that can deliver the most damage without damaging themselves (the modified fist's). There's a lot of evidence for grappling based fighting in human history, but I think that most fighting would be similar to MMA, that being both striking and grappling (even weapons), where things like ground n pound could take place needing those beefed up fists. We see this with most apes and monkies; tbf most apes and monkies don't "grapple" but instead bite, scratch, pound, and push, grappling may be ours since we have better arms (grain of salt factor is high). Again not an anthropologist, I'm just assuming based on modern and historical trends.
Essentially I'm trying to say what PASmith just said xD BTW that was the article that I'm talking about. I still have to read it properly. But my first impression was fist-walking may be the origin, but the text seems to indicate that it's a human only trait. But I'm not entirely convinced with their reasoning of chimps with "doughnut" fists since they have a different evolutionary track that may have favored said doughnut fist, there are a lot more problems with their reasoning. Maybe the published paper has a more well thought out conclusion :S
Not sure about the "better arms" bit, but the rest makes sense to me. There's no evidence that people were any different to us in pre-history, so I'd be inclined to think they would have codified fighting systems too. Depends how far back you go I guess.
Although some of our closest relatives (chimps) regularly kill each other and will go out on patrol with the intention of finding and killing solo members of other troupes. There's nothing ritualistic about what they do in that case. By contrast other close relatives (bonobos) don't fight much at all and are all about getting jiggy instead (IIRC).
Yeh let me clarify that a bit, since it's a pretty weak argument. Sorry I was taking shortcuts since I'm tired. Although I have limited grappling experience, the little bit that I do know and have observed requires quite a bit of manual dexterity (and strength too), manual dexterity is very much human and not chimp etc. Also there is the issue of knowledge (leverage, anatomy, etc.), and bipedal-ism.
I'd think it was the knowledge part that holds most weight. The ability to learn and pass that on to others. In other words: training.
Chimps do have cultures, much like humans, they have the capabilities to pass on knowledge, they just need the Jigoro Kano of chimps to come in. The idea excites me TBH. I like to think that sometime in the distant future humans and Chimp 2.0 would be sitting in offices together xD Yeh I have weird interests.
I remember reading an article in New Scientist about learning, and it said that chimps look at effects of action then figure out their own method of doing it, whereas humans blindly follow the steps involved. The example the psychologist who wrote the article gave for this human way of mimicking was her family recipe for roast ham. The method of cooking involved cutting both ends off the joint. She wondered why one day, and rang her mum. Her mum didn't know so she rang her gran, who told her she cut both ends off the joint because her oven wasn't big enough. Aren't genetically "uplifted" animals in a sci-fi book? Sounds like you might enjoy "Great Apes" by Will Self too,
You might wish to look into bonobos some more.Or rather the evidence against the "somewhat" slanted flower child image that some members of our own great ape species have given them. Here's just one example- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3353342/Bonobos-not-all-peace-and-free-love.html
I know bonobos aren't the peace loving hippies of the animal kingdom but compared to chimps their lifestyle are very different. All I'm saying is that you can't really draw parallels with nature and apply them to humans. Given that our closest relatives have a differing approaches to violence and what is normal. We may be like bonobos or chimps or like neither. Hunting monkeys aside bonobos are still described in that article as lacking in male dominance and physical violence compared to chimps.
