# Somebody watched someone hit the ground



## Elvenswordsman (Dec 8, 2013)

Was thinking about it. Somebody in the history of humanity had to have realized that jumping off of high things would result in bad.

Just picturing cavemen trying to hammer this one out.


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## Lewdog (Dec 8, 2013)

What are you talking about?  As long as you wear a cape or hold an umbrella you can fly.


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 8, 2013)

If I can jump out of a tree and only hurt my ankles, surely it's the same from the 10th floor?


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## escorial (Dec 9, 2013)

give it a go and post your answer..ha... E11


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## popsprocket (Dec 9, 2013)

It's an instinctual thing. I don't think many people died figuring out that you can't survive a fall from height. Animals with smaller brains than ours know not to jump off high things.

What really gets me is who was the first guy to try red things like tomato and capsicum. Red is the universal colour for poisonous, so who decided they should try and eat the bright red things growing on the pretty pants?


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## Gargh (Dec 9, 2013)

popsprocket said:


> who decided they should try and eat the bright red things growing on the pretty pants?



That's _never _a good idea! :shock:

I always assumed it would be experiment driven by scarcity and need, combined with natural selection of tolerant people who could eat a more diverse diet and, therefore, increase their chances of survival. Similarly though, I have wondered who first decided to try cooking potatoes? I guess it would have been a similar trial and error process but I bet they were seriously pleased with themselves!


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## popsprocket (Dec 9, 2013)

What about leavened bread? Who was it that made some dough, left it a few days and once it had begun to smell bad, decided to bake it anyway?


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## Kevin (Dec 9, 2013)

My new book will be called _Olives, Acorns, Burns and Peels: the fates of cooks and stale meals _

edit: and nobody wanted to hit the ground, not from very high.  6 feet up and your feet start to hurt. I can imagine Uncle Ug, falling off the cliff while collecting bird eggs.


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 9, 2013)

I'm thinking it was probably a generational thing that was handed down through social conditioning.

An entire generation was climbing a mountain and they all came tumbling down. Unto their children the solution was found.

Also, as for weird things people eat, where did the idea of drinking milk come from?


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## Sam (Dec 9, 2013)

Once they've jumped, there really is nothing else you can do other than watch.


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 9, 2013)

Gargh said:


> That's _never _a good idea! :shock:
> 
> I always assumed it would be experiment driven by scarcity and need, combined with natural selection of tolerant people who could eat a more diverse diet and, therefore, increase their chances of survival. Similarly though, I have wondered who first decided to try cooking potatoes? I guess it would have been a similar trial and error process but I bet they were seriously pleased with themselves!


I have been told that where potatoes come from they would never consider cooking them the way we do, they would be frozen first, then usually taken through a process that included fermentation and drying to produce a flour, now how would you arrive at that?


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## Gumby (Dec 9, 2013)

All very interesting questions. Why do humans cook their food and how did that come about? Mysteries we'll never solve, I guess.


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## popsprocket (Dec 9, 2013)

Flour gets me. So you grow wheat, great. But how do you get from growing wheat to grinding it into flour? That had to be some pretty strange experiment that turned out right by pure accident.



Elvenswordsman said:


> Also, as for weird things people eat, where did the idea of drinking milk come from?



That one is probably less crazy than the less. It could be simple observation based on human young drinking their mother's milk and calves doing the same. But still... maybe it was a dare.


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## Lewdog (Dec 9, 2013)

popsprocket said:


> It's an instinctual thing. I don't think many people died figuring out that you can't survive a fall from height. Animals with smaller brains than ours know not to jump off high things.
> 
> What really gets me is who was the first guy to try red things like tomato and capsicum. Red is the universal colour for poisonous, so who decided they should try and eat the bright red things growing on the pretty pants?



I actually saw a story on Mysteries at the Museum about this!  The tomato is not native to the U.S. so when it was brought to over everyone did indeed think it was poisonous because it was red.  You can see the video below:

http://www.travelchannel.com/video/a-poisonous-tomato


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## Morkonan (Dec 10, 2013)

Elvenswordsman said:


> Was thinking about it. Somebody in the history of humanity had to have realized that jumping off of high things would result in bad.
> 
> Just picturing cavemen trying to hammer this one out.



We are somewhat hard-wired to understand the macro-physics of our World. We can easily comprehend Newtonian physics, for instance. Even monkeys can do that... They can take a handful of poo and fling it several yards, hitting their target without ever having to use a slide-rule. 

"Falling" is probably one of the most instinctually averse actions we can possibly engage in, other than being eaten by something big, hairy and scary... In fact, the "Falling Response" is something that is used to test the development of a baby's nervous system not long after birth. The baby is held in the hands then the hands are dropped to the floor while still holding onto the baby, of course. The baby will fling its arms and legs out to the sides, just as one would expect one to do when they were falling and flailing around for any support they could grab. This is instinctual, it isn't a learned response. There may be similar responses in other primates, but I don't know about any other animals that may not have any sort of arboreal ancestor in the woodpile.



			
				Gumby said:
			
		

> ...Why do humans cook their food and how did that come about?...



While we won't know the exact circumstances, it's pretty easy to figure out the general evolution of cooking.

Cooked meat is easier to digest than uncooked meat. In fact, one can spend a very large amount of calories attempting to digest uncooked meat. (Lions spend most of their time dozing, digesting meals, rather than hunting for new ones.) By cooking our meat, we reduce the amount of calories necessary to digest it and increase the amount of time we have available to do other things. Plus, the nutritional value is not significantly reduced. (It's actually increased, since we have an additional ability to digest formerly hard-to-digest components. ) In fact, the side-effect of cooking our meat means that some pathogens, many microorganisms and parasites are killed, making it less likely we will become sick from eating tainted meat. There's also another side-benefit - Storage. By carbonizing the meat and "cooking" it, we can preserve it longer. The microorganisms are largely killed off and the meat becomes more difficult for microorganisms to colonize it, so it can be stored for longer times.

 Much of this applies to plants, as well. We do not naturally have the means to digest cellulose, which is a primary component in many plants. But, we can render indigestible plant material at least partially digestible (Though, we don't get much nutritional benefit from it) by cooking plants before we eat them. Though, it is much harder to guess at the evolution of cooking plant material.


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## popsprocket (Dec 10, 2013)

Lewdog said:


> I actually saw a story on Mysteries at the Museum about this!  The tomato is not native to the U.S. so when it was brought to over everyone did indeed think it was poisonous because it was red.  You can see the video below:
> 
> http://www.travelchannel.com/video/a-poisonous-tomato



Haha! Where has this video been every time I made a remark  about idiotic people eating red vegetables?

Maybe humans aren't as stupid as I think.


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 10, 2013)

Morkonan, thanks for the information. Great post. I can't give you more reputation though, so this will have to suffice.

I've always thought spider silk was pretty impressive, but don't know who the first person was that thought strength testing it was a good idea.


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## dale (Dec 10, 2013)

humanity has learned nothing from watching people fall from high places. think about it. it's as funny now as it was funny way back
at the beginning of man to watch people fall. i worked construction, and some of the most hilarious moments were watching people 
 fall off roofs and scaffolding. i mean...none were seriously hurt...and i was even the cause of that laughter at least once...but people falling from high places is funny. unless they die, of course. and then it's only funny if you don't really like them.


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 11, 2013)

Dale! Haha that's fairly valid, I suppose. Although I've had family who've come out worse for wear. Why haven't we learned from building things in the air?


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 11, 2013)

Regarding cooking plants, the cell wall of plants is made of cellulose, indigestible to us, as Morkonan says, boiling breaks down the cell wall and makes the starch inside the cell available.

There was an anthropologist of the late fifties early sixties named Levi Strauss (Yes, same as the jeans) who investigated universal human habits, one was eating hot food at the temperature of a freshly killed animal, another, using roasted food for ceremonial and important occasions, and a third feeding invalids boiled food. seems like quite a bit is 'hard wired'.

I know of a boy who frequently jumped out of his first floor bedroom window to play truant from home, the height is only part of the problem, the mass hitting the ground also plays a part, a light child can get away with falls that would seriously injure a fully grown man.


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## qwertyman (Dec 11, 2013)

Natural selection…The folk that didn’t figure it out didn’t survive.  We are all related to the one’s that did.

All the bears that didn’t figure out they needed a long sleep over the winter are extinct.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a short story about a tribe in Malaya, that did nothing just sleep, eat fruit and reproduce, ‘parrently they smiled a lot.

Trouble was some energetic interferers with misguided vision (probably effing missionaries), kicked them further into the jungle where there wasn’t any fruit trees and they became extinct… in their hammocks.


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 11, 2013)

Peaceful nations die out quickly, sure. That island off of Greece that they found plumbing on - that was several thousand years older than the known invention date.


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## Morkonan (Dec 14, 2013)

Elvenswordsman said:


> Morkonan, thanks for the information. Great post. I can't give you more reputation though, so this will have to suffice.
> 
> I've always thought spider silk was pretty impressive, but don't know who the first person was that thought strength testing it was a good idea.



Thanks!

I can't remember when it was first tested, but I think it was in the '60s or very early 70's when testing was definitive. There had probably been testing throughout the ages, especially when silk may have been scarce, like during WWII. The problem is that spider silk is incredibly difficult to harvest and certain protein combinations wouldn't have been known to peoples living before the 60s-70s, I wouldn't think. So, while someone may have looked at it on a lark, they would have known that obtaining any decent supply of it would be next to impossible, when harvested naturally. Silkworm silk comes from the cocoons, which are easily harvested and boiled. But, spidersilk comes in a large number of varieties and, IIRC, it's the webbing and anchor silk, not the egg-casing sort, that are the strongest. None of those differences would have been likely to have been noticed without sensitive instruments.

Google would probably give us the answer pretty quickly... But, that's no fun.


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 14, 2013)

If you're into it, check out Hagfish Slime. It's a new, easily manufactured substitute, that performs magnificently in strength tests.

All someone had to do was leave it out to dry and realize it gets hard and doesn't snap very easily.


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## Morkonan (Dec 16, 2013)

Elvenswordsman said:


> If you're into it, check out Hagfish Slime. It's a new, easily manufactured substitute, that performs magnificently in strength tests.
> 
> All someone had to do was leave it out to dry and realize it gets hard and doesn't snap very easily.



Interesting! I found a short article about making clothes out of it: http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/hagfish-slime-super-clothes-121203.htm

As far as manufacturing a "substitute," I don't know how easy that is. Genetically engineering bacteria to produce it might get a bit difficult. (As in the article.) What is the "easily manufactured" solution you mention?


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 16, 2013)

I suppose perhaps I'm misinformed, or the level of production I'm talking about differs greatly from the one you are.

The Hagfish lay ~30 eggs in their reproductive cycle, each produces around 4l of slime. You could have a farm of them, producing the slime, and could easily produce a ton of the stuff. UCMP Berkeley claims you can have 15,000 in small areas, indicative of low mortality rates. 60,000 litres of the stuff can be harvested (at least daily, perhaps more often).

I'm sure the reproduction of more, and creation of more farms, would be fairly easy as they claim the reproduction cycle is very short.


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## Morkonan (Dec 16, 2013)

IIRC, hagfish slime can be harvested without seriously harming the hagfish. So, one school of them could produce multiple batches. But, in an industrial setting, you need tens of thousands of gallons of material, yielding perhaps hundreds of thousands of pounds, I would assume. That's a lot of "harvesting" and that's likely why researchers are looking towards using genetically modified bacteria to produce it. You can easily control bacteria, compared to having to control hagfish while managing to physically harvest their slime.

It's very cool, though. I wonder how models on New York runways will feel while modeling lingerie produced by hagfish slime? It comes off sounding sort of ... icky.


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## Gargh (Dec 16, 2013)

I had a little fish around t'internet as well when I read Elven's post about the Hagfish (fantastic name). I seem to remember that the reason for trying to synthesise it rather than farm it was that they hadn't been able to keep the Hagfish successfully in farm-like conditions.


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## Kevin (Dec 16, 2013)

> Hagfish (fantastic name).


 They are something I do not like to contemplate. What happens to bodies at sea?  Eyeless, no lower jaw, primitive, boring into...


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## Gargh (Dec 16, 2013)

Fishfood! Ever since Elven mentioned them I've been wondering where they could fit in to a murder story. You know the one... Agatha Christie's long-lost, never before seen, Marple novel, _Death at Hagfish Farm_?


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## J Anfinson (Dec 16, 2013)

Elvenswordsman said:


> Was thinking about it. Somebody in the history of humanity had to have realized that jumping off of high things would result in bad.
> 
> Just picturing cavemen trying to hammer this one out.



Surely by the time someone tried this they'd figured out how easy it is to die. Which leads me to wonder--how did they figure out sharp rocks would cut things? What kind of accident led to the creation of a knife?


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## popsprocket (Dec 17, 2013)

J Anfinson said:


> Surely by the time someone tried this they'd figured out how easy it is to die. Which leads me to wonder--how did they figure out sharp rocks would cut things? What kind of accident led to the creation of a knife?



It gets a little depressing when you consider how people came to the conclusion that they could make weapons that would kill another person. And then when considering how sophisticated those weapons became in a short amount of time.


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## Morkonan (Dec 17, 2013)

J Anfinson said:


> Surely by the time someone tried this they'd figured out how easy it is to die. Which leads me to wonder--how did they figure out sharp rocks would cut things? What kind of accident led to the creation of a knife?



Probably by stepping or falling on a sharp rock...


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 17, 2013)

I'm actually going to bet it was an evolution of experiences that brought around the knife. Some smart bloke kept hitting people with large rocks, and one day found his favorite - a jagged one that seemed to make more pain.

One day another bloke saw it, and realized he could get a more corner-y rock, and eventually someone said "Ugh, oo." which means "Damn, I think that force behind a jagged edge is greater than that behind a flat face."


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## BryanJ62 (Dec 17, 2013)

Lewdog said:


> I actually saw a story on Mysteries at the Museum about this!  The tomato is not native to the U.S. /QUOTE]
> 
> When I first read that I thought you said tornado. Now that I'd like to see.


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## The Tourist (Dec 17, 2013)

If you think falling hurts, you ought to try hitting something "at speed," especially if you're riding on the outside of the vehicle...


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## Elvenswordsman (Dec 17, 2013)

"Outside" - motorcycle?


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## Morkonan (Dec 18, 2013)

The Tourist said:


> If you think falling hurts, you ought to try hitting something "at speed," especially if you're riding on the outside of the vehicle...



When I was growing up, we all used to hang out at a corner fast-food restaurant. Since several in the group worked there, we'd spend quite awhile waiting for them to go off shift so we could go out and do stupid things. But, one of our pastimes was watching the very busy intersection and the crashes that frequently occurred there. I've seen plenty of motorcyclists ending up in very bad situations. I watched one plant his bike in the back seat of a Toyota, sideways, while going 60 mph. The police left that wreck in a neighboring parking lot with a sign on it, reminding others of the dangers of not paying attention to signal lights. There was another cyclist that was a real-life demonstration that all a leather riding suit will do for you is keep your parts in one place so you can be scooped up and buried... (Well, at certain speeds, that is.) He flew through the air for about 60 feet after t-boning the hood of something and then skidded for quite a distance before rolling to a stop. Neither ambulance pulled away from those accidents with their emergency lights flashing, unfortunately.

I guess it's one of the dangers of the "freedom" that motorcyclists enjoy. I'll take my stuffy seatbelt, thank you.


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## The Tourist (Dec 18, 2013)

Morkonan said:


> I guess it's one of the dangers of the "freedom" that motorcyclists enjoy. I'll take my stuffy seatbelt, thank you.



Other than my personal transportation lusts and the distinctly "Amurkin" passion for doing what I want when I want, we should approach this issue as a "writer."

Not only does conflict, desire and the discussion of human foibles become what we need for a "plot point," it's simply the underlying need (requirement?) to get any of us to read anything at all.

I'm sure there's a story somewhere out there about the lead who is an insurance actuary that calculates all facets of life before he makes any move in his own life.  It could even provide a touch of humor when the guy meets a dazzling redhead who just won the lottery--and he spurns her.  His pocket calculator shows him an algorithm that such a pairing results in a 47% chance of an early death, so he ditches the babe because "it's just too close a call."

Walter Mitty aside, who wants to read about a lead not doing anything?  The climax unfolds and Katniss remarks, _"Yikes, that's my last arrow, I'd better save it."_  Or, _"Damn, that's a torpedo--full speed reverse!"_

And BTW, I did hit something solid, broke my neck in five places.  I did date the redhead, darn near killed me, got me arrested, I lost my job and almost didn't reconnect with the woman who became my wife.  But there's more to it than just the thrill of living.

Most of that became the first chapter of my book...


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## ToBeInspired (Dec 19, 2013)

I would assume the creation of weapons was designed primarly for hunting rather than as a means of warfare. Though I could see cavemen with their primitive nature simply using the instict to "fling" whatever is close to hand. Once they found it inflicted damage they picked up the object of attention once again. Monkey see monkey do. The same would go for a knife. An accidental cut happens and they use it the next time a violent moment occurs. I find it far more interesting as to how they decided to use it as a tool as opposed to a weapon.

With cooking I could also see religious purposes playing a role. Fire, being "mystical" in its first appearance, would be seen as something otherworldy to the first discoverers. Fire has played a role in many past civilizations and societies. This includes certain ceremonies which would include sacrifice. Throwing live animals into a fire may have had certain significance. Once the fire settled down it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume someone might take a bite. Devouring the flesh could have been seen to have some importance even. Then the thought, "hey... this is a lot better than eating raw meat" came about.

Grinding flour has to of originated from the idea of medicine. Pastes have been used for many years, afterall. Herbs are left to dry out, so I'd assume it originated in a hotter climate. A dough like substance was made and it ended up rising due to being left out.

With the trying of any food that one should be very simple... hunger. Food wasn't as easily accessible as it is today.


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