Mammoth Civilization?

Sorry for a double post again, but I was thinking about the problem of musth. Do we even know what that would look like in Mammuthans? Assuming they're five million years separated from Elephants, it may manifest in some other way.

It would probably be significantly reduced and many jokes would be made about it by their culture (think of it as male PMS meets puberty). But for the most part I think it would be evolved away; it would be hard to build a functioning society if this happens every time a male mammuthan gets horny.

@Thespitron: nice pic. But it is totally different from the mammuthan. (it would be great if you could draw one though for the threat). They look like small elephants with "fingers" at the end of the trunk.
 
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Keenir

Banned
I did this for something totally different, but I thought you guys might find it amusing:

electrodes attached to the brain? earrings? bipedalism?

other than that, its a very good picture.

However, if the person at the beginning of the line wrote that sentence down on a piece of paper, and passed it on down the line, the last person in line would still be able to read off of it "I tossed the bird to the boot. Later, I plan to tuck in chips." If he spoke the dialect it was written in, and knew a little about the context, he would understand pretty closely what the original writer meant. That is, unless that phrase truly is a nonsense phrase and you are just having a joke on me...

two examples:
Bird = woman (UK), feathered animal (American)
Boot = back of the car (UK), heavy shoes (American)
Tuck = to eat (Australian), fold (American "to tuck in the kids for bed")

In the first case, you lost pretty much all of the information because the knowledge had to transfer between twenty different people, in the second place, it only had to pass between two people, despite the fact that the two people involved weren't right next to each other.

and if you ask 10 people what any given script says (like asking one person from each land now-ruled or once-ruled by England, what the "bird" sentance says - or asking ten Chinese people to read the newspaper: they all use the same script, but Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, and other Chinese languages don't come out the same)


Thank you, I'll look these up and see what I can find.

EDIT: Claiming a Continent, by David Day appears to be about the colonization of Australia...

apologies; I think I confused that with another about North America.


It would probably be significantly reduced and many jokes would be made about it by their culture (think of it as male PMS meets puberty). But for the most part I think it would be evolved away; it would be hard to build a functioning society if this happens every time a male mammuthan gets horny.

every species has problems....humans rape and have long periods of helplessness when young....why would musth be any more crippling to a society?
 
every species has problems....humans rape and have long periods of helplessness when young....why would musth be any more crippling to a society?

That's a good point.

I think that the issue is that if whole cities get destroyed once a year when the male elephants go on a rampage, it's going to be difficult to stick around.

However, I don't think the existence of this would prevent sentience from happening in the first place, long before permanent structures are built. And by the time they are, it's likely the Mammuthans figure out how to live with it, or possibly even control it:

* naturally occurring sedatives (are there any poppy species native to North America?)
* really deep pits with no way out, except when the afflicted individual can prove that they are feeling okay again.
* some sort of meditation exercise which allows the elephants to learn to control their instincts when they feel the symptoms coming on.

Alternatively, if they find a way to control it with medication, perhaps some civilizations might even figure out a way to induce it when they want to during times of war.

It's also possible that, in a sentient species, musth looks more like manic periods in humans. By that I mean, it isn't just knocking things down: there's also hallucinations, paranoia, obsession, even depression... Probably more dangerous, except for among the few individuals who can learn to focus their energies to become extremely creative during those phases (once a year, one particular Mammuthan turns into the equivalent of Van Gogh).
 
Or, intelligent elephants' reproductive systems evolved so that they either lost musth altogether or it became a less significant "problem". At some point in human evolution, probably no earlier than the divergence between the great apes and australopithecines (and possibly much later) prehuman females became sexually receptive year-round, which probably had a lot to do with human male/female pair bonding and our later social evolution. No reason to presume the reproductive systems/urges of male elephants might change at least as much as they evolve.
 
Or, intelligent elephants' reproductive systems evolved so that they either lost musth altogether or it became a less significant "problem". At some point in human evolution, probably no earlier than the divergence between the great apes and australopithecines (and possibly much later) prehuman females became sexually receptive year-round, which probably had a lot to do with human male/female pair bonding and our later social evolution. No reason to presume the reproductive systems/urges of male elephants might change at least as much as they evolve.

You know, I was thinking on that exact same route... but then I looked up more information about musth. http://www.upali.ch/musth_en.html There doesn't really appear to be a connection to reproduction, it isn't at all synched up with female estruous cycles (which aren't seasonally linked in Elephants, unlike other herd mammals), and can actually be detrimental to reproduction, since the male is a threat to any other living creature, including female elephants and his own young.

If it is more of a social dominance thing, then you can't really say that it might go the way that sexual behavior did in humans. Our sexual behavior is certainly much different from Apes, but our social-dominance behavior isn't quite as different.
 

Keenir

Banned
hm. I always thought that musth was related in some way to the cycles that male humans go through (women aren't the only ones - just the more noticable)

...and like elephants, mens' cycles aren't synched up with womens'.


You know, I was thinking on that exact same route... but then I looked up more information about musth. http://www.upali.ch/musth_en.html There doesn't really appear to be a connection to reproduction, it isn't at all synched up with female estruous cycles (which aren't seasonally linked in Elephants, unlike other herd mammals), and can actually be detrimental to reproduction, since the male is a threat to any other living creature, including female elephants and his own young.

If it is more of a social dominance thing, then you can't really say that it might go the way that sexual behavior did in humans. Our sexual behavior is certainly much different from Apes, but our social-dominance behavior isn't quite as different.
 
hm. I always thought that musth was related in some way to the cycles that male humans go through (women aren't the only ones - just the more noticable)

...and like elephants, mens' cycles aren't synched up with womens'.

If there is such a thing, and I'm a little bit skeptical, might be...
 
You know, I was thinking on that exact same route... but then I looked up more information about musth. http://www.upali.ch/musth_en.html There doesn't really appear to be a connection to reproduction, it isn't at all synched up with female estruous cycles (which aren't seasonally linked in Elephants, unlike other herd mammals), and can actually be detrimental to reproduction, since the male is a threat to any other living creature, including female elephants and his own young.

If it is more of a social dominance thing, then you can't really say that it might go the way that sexual behavior did in humans. Our sexual behavior is certainly much different from Apes, but our social-dominance behavior isn't quite as different.

Either way, if one is going to construct an alternative evolution in which a a certain group of elephants evolve human-like civilizations, you've already played around with things so much that getting rid of "that male problem" is the least of your worries.
 
Either way, if one is going to construct an alternative evolution in which a a certain group of elephants evolve human-like civilizations, you've already played around with things so much that getting rid of "that male problem" is the least of your worries.

That's a good point.
 
Either way, if one is going to construct an alternative evolution in which a a certain group of elephants evolve human-like civilizations, you've already played around with things so much that getting rid of "that male problem" is the least of your worries.


I used to have a supervisor who was so freaking cute that I actually sat on an icepack a couple times to keep my mind clear-ish.
 
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