this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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I'll go further, i reckon i couldve done better than "featherless biped" as the definition of a human.
Honestly they mustve said so much bollocks that people were too embaressed to write down or copy and it was lost to time.
If I recall correctly, "fatherless biped" was an attempt to define a human in the simplest, most basic form, and as short as possible.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas and other primates. Are they classified as bipedal? I mean they don't HAVE to use their arms to move around. It's just more efficient for them...
Of course, I wouldn't have plucked a chicken and presented it ad a fatherless biped, either.. So what do I know lmao
At the time, in Greece they thought of apes as monkeys without tails. They also had no reason to think those creatures were particularly bipedal. Or that there was any particular relation to humans. Aristotle was describing Baboons, which walk on all 4s. To Plato, a bird might be the only other creature that walked on two legs. It also has pink skin for what that's worth.
It's easy to forget that the foundation of knowledge we have is so incredibly vast it would be incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. We learn in elementary school things that people wouldn't work out for centuries.
Imagine telling Diogenes that dolphins are foxes that learned to swim. Or that the giant skulls they keep finding aren't one eyed giants, but the skulls of ancient hairy elephants.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
I doubt Diogenes would care abt the foxes being dolphins so much as how u explained it. If u brought a series of dolphin to fox fossil records he'd accept it but if u come in waving ur hands abt and mumbling something abt dolphins and foxes he'd think ur as insane as him.