Yes and no.
Chimps have been well documented to have tribes no larger than a hundred or so. Aiello and Dunbar published studies showing a strong positive correlation between the range of vocalizations and the size of social groups in a wide range of species of monkeys.

The point here is that it is difficult to know who is "us" and who is "them" if you don't have language. It is difficult to identify so many individuals. (By comparison, humans need team uniforms to distinguish teams when there are more than 2 or so on each team.) But language permits you to very quickly identify an outsider from your group. Therefore language capability enables super-tribes or clans of thousands to be formed. That was really my point, that _big_ tribes can be formed when you've got language, and the incoming homo sapiens had that sort of language, and almost certainly that kind of large-tribe bonding.

Actually just about nothing in palaeoanthropology has a "real foundation in facts". I qualified my number by the words "about" and "probably". I think that is a sufficient indication of the lack of confidence and precision. Don't you think so? Otherwise you have to just give and say we know nothing.

The number 250,000 is not far from the median of what people think of as the beginning of language, I think. And remember that we could also argue that chimps and lemurs have language. By this definitions, humans got language 6 million or more years ago (probably). If you ask for something a bit more like modern language, you might have to say about 100,000 or less years ago (probably). I don't think a slashdot item is the best place to expound all the theories of palaeolinguistics.

(This is the original item I posted, accidentally as AC, which makes the item almost totally disappear.)

In my (humble) opinion, it is no coincidence that the explosion of cave art about 40,000 years ago in Europe shortly preceded the extinction of the Neanderthals 35,000 years ago. The subject of cave art was mostly hunting scenes, where the modern humans could teach each other what to do during the hunt and learn vocabulary etc. The Neanderthals apparently did not have cave art. So they would not have been anywhere near as skilled at hunting in groups.

So into Europe come these humans, which were very highly trained group-hunters, against Neanderthals who could not hunt anywhere near as effectively, partly because of very poor language ability. So first, the modern humans would out-compete the Neanderthals for resources. But secondly, the Neanderthals would not be recognized as fully human because they could not speak in such a sophisticated way. So the Neanderthals would seem like animals.

The reason cave art is mostly about hunting scenes is that teaching vocabulary for static objects can be done with the objects themselves. For fast moving objects like prey, you need to have drawings, and caves are the only places where the drawings survived for us to find.

Some people are perplexed that modern humans make war (not love). The reason is clear. The modern human species gained its ascendancy through genocide and cannibalism tens of thousands of years ago. It's programmed into the genes.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but if the mafiaa's legal theory on "making available" is right, doesn't that mean that any company which makes available software which is easy to turn into a DoS zombie should be held liable. And the people who let their computers become zombies should be held liable for making their machines available to become zombies.

Not only that, those made-available computers actually _are_ exploited for evil acts.

So aren't the purveyors of dodgy software liable for damage caused by DDoS attacks?

Blaming the DDoS controlling people for the attacks is a bit like blaming the downloaders of music/videos for downloading copyright stuff instead of blaming the makers-available.

Just a thought....

That would help to explain the surge in this kind of thing in the last few days.

15:07:13.666770 IP 63.217.28.226.17498 > 158.64.65.65.53: 36407+ NS? . (17)
15:07:13.750783 IP 63.217.28.226.61231 > 158.64.65.65.53: 46118+ NS? . (17)
15:07:13.831834 IP 63.217.28.226.44626 > 158.64.65.66.53: 51544+ NS? . (17)

Except that that source IP address doesn't look like a Network Solutions address to me.

Is it possible that there is a DDoS technique where the source IP addresses on DNS packets to 3rd party DNS servers are spoofed so as to generate the appearance of an attack from a different source? I guess that's what they're saying. But it doesn't seem to multiply the power of an attack much. They just get 17 bytes of DNS response from each 17 byte request.

It's all a bit confusing really....