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Imagine if, instead of spending your childhood, teenage years and early adulthood in schools, you just spent it learning to hunt, then continued to learn and pr

Imagine if, instead of spending your childhood, teenage years and early adulthood in schools, you just spent it learning to hunt, then continued to learn and practice hunting for the rest of your life. Imagine if everyone in your family, and everyone else you knew had also spent their entire lives learning to hunt and hunting. Imagine if every genius born into every generation devoted their entire intelligence to the problem of hunting, from their first moment to their last. Imagine if this had been going on for generation after generation, with knowledge and expertise refine and passed down through mentorship and oral tradition. Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. As such, it's perhaps no surprise that early humans were spectacularly successful at hunting so many of even the largest and most fearsome animals to extinction.

DarkTree 8y ago
That's a crazy thought. It's also a crazy thought to extrapolate that process all the way to how current first world countries operate. You can kind of start to bridge the gap between the two and see that our society is just an extreme manifestation of that whole scenario you described. We know that in fact there was a direct set of events that got us here, but it's also easy to separate the way humans lived and how we live now, as if they are detached but you can see a lot of those early behaviors still operating in our industrialized society.
hutzlibu 8y ago
It is a good thought, but I would like to add, that even in pure hunters societys, you also had different professions. You need to process and store the meat and fur, make the tools, heal wounds, help with births, praise and sacrifice to the gods and spirits (lets assume they do, most if not all native tribes do so), think about neighbour tribes, inner rivals, mating ... so I am basically just nitpicking that not EVERY intellectual capacity avaiable did go to hunting ..
jessriedel 8y ago
> Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. I mean, if you are measuring in terms of brain cycles, perhaps. But huge amounts of these brain cycles were wasted because people lived in small tribes and information decayed quickly in space and time, requiring everyone to continually re-invent things. And the detailed knowledge for hunting one type of animal in one region was not particularly applicable to other animals in other regions, so these are to a large extent just different problems.
- UrukParthian 8y ago
  IIRC, in the absence of writing, humans had great oral memory. Not only that but they used other mental tricks. EX: Aborigines connecting myths to places in terms like "... And this is where angry bear slept for three days. The water here is still poisonous today from his angry urine..." and so on. I would say it's more precarious than "modern knowledge" but we haven't really tested the longevity of tech civilization. There are still tribes in Siberia who tell legends of the hunter of the sky tracking the great deer. The "problem" is that they're talking about a set of constellations that were last visible 20000+ years ago. If disaster strikes, how many mediums will be rendered useless (floppies, CDs, lithograph, tapes, etc.)?
nitwit005 8y ago
That's true, but I suspect all humans needed to wipe most of these animals out was the invention of the spear. There's a difference in what humans hunt compared to most animals. Large healthy animals are quite dangerous, as anyone who's been kicked by a horse can attest, so often their predators are limited to the sick or otherwise vulnerable ones, limiting the population damage they can cause. Humans can throw a bunch of spears at the biggest thing they can find and follow it until its injuries to do it in. That's great from the perspective of being able to get a lot of food, but not so great in that you're killing off the healthy breeding population.
- SerLava 8y ago
  Rocks work too. Humans are lanky thin-haired things for a good reason. They can just jog after a wildebeest for 8 hours until it overheats, and then they can throw rocks at its head.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    To the water buffalo it's probably like being hunted by terminator.
    - burnte 8y ago
      It really is. Our ability to sweat to shed heat, our slow but incredibly sustainable pace, and our intelligence make us amazing hunters. We're not just pack hunters, we're able to communicate and create complex plans. And in the end, the endurance we have is unmatched in the animal kingdom.
jds375 8y ago
I completely agree. It’s super fascinating to think what other skills/practices that reasoning applies to as well (nutrition stands out the most to me). That being said, I don’t think your final comment is true (minus the part about farming) due to scale. Sure early humans spent just about all of their effort on hunting, but there weren’t many humans back then. Nowadays we spend much less effort on a given task, but because that effort is distributed amongst billions and billions of people we end up collectively putting in even greater amounts of effort than was likely possible in ‘early human history’.
tatersolid 8y ago
> Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. You leave out the human pursuit which has occupied most of our intellectual and physical resources since we first fashioned tools: war.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  In prehistoric terms, what's the difference between war and hunting other herds of humans?
  - Retra 8y ago
    Whether you eat the bodies or not?
QueensGambit 8y ago
This is incorrect based on Harari's book: Sapiens. Megafauna in Australia/America didnt have time to evolve, when humans migrated there. While, megafauna in Africa/Asia evolved with humans, so they learnt to survive. Excerpt from the chapter - Guilty as Charged: "Various human species had been prowling and evolving in Afro-Asia for 2 million years. They slowly honed their hunting skills, and began going after large animals around 400,000 years ago. The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator – Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies. So when a diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever to walk the earth, set eyes for the first time on this frail-looking ape, he gave it one glance and then went back to chewing leaves. These animals had to evolve a fear of humankind, but before they could do so they were gone."

DarkTree 8y ago

That's a crazy thought. It's also a crazy thought to extrapolate that process all the way to how current first world countries operate. You can kind of start to bridge the gap between the two and see that our society is just an extreme manifestation of that whole scenario you described. We know that in fact there was a direct set of events that got us here, but it's also easy to separate the way humans lived and how we live now, as if they are detached but you can see a lot of those early behaviors still operating in our industrialized society.

hutzlibu 8y ago

It is a good thought, but I would like to add, that even in pure hunters societys, you also had different professions. You need to process and store the meat and fur, make the tools, heal wounds, help with births, praise and sacrifice to the gods and spirits (lets assume they do, most if not all native tribes do so), think about neighbour tribes, inner rivals, mating ... so I am basically just nitpicking that not EVERY intellectual capacity avaiable did go to hunting ..

jessriedel 8y ago

> Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. I mean, if you are measuring in terms of brain cycles, perhaps. But huge amounts of these brain cycles were wasted because people lived in small tribes and information decayed quickly in space and time, requiring everyone to continually re-invent things. And the detailed knowledge for hunting one type of animal in one region was not particularly applicable to other animals in other regions, so these are to a large extent just different problems.

UrukParthian 8y ago
IIRC, in the absence of writing, humans had great oral memory. Not only that but they used other mental tricks. EX: Aborigines connecting myths to places in terms like "... And this is where angry bear slept for three days. The water here is still poisonous today from his angry urine..." and so on. I would say it's more precarious than "modern knowledge" but we haven't really tested the longevity of tech civilization. There are still tribes in Siberia who tell legends of the hunter of the sky tracking the great deer. The "problem" is that they're talking about a set of constellations that were last visible 20000+ years ago. If disaster strikes, how many mediums will be rendered useless (floppies, CDs, lithograph, tapes, etc.)?

nitwit005 8y ago

That's true, but I suspect all humans needed to wipe most of these animals out was the invention of the spear. There's a difference in what humans hunt compared to most animals. Large healthy animals are quite dangerous, as anyone who's been kicked by a horse can attest, so often their predators are limited to the sick or otherwise vulnerable ones, limiting the population damage they can cause. Humans can throw a bunch of spears at the biggest thing they can find and follow it until its injuries to do it in. That's great from the perspective of being able to get a lot of food, but not so great in that you're killing off the healthy breeding population.

SerLava 8y ago
Rocks work too. Humans are lanky thin-haired things for a good reason. They can just jog after a wildebeest for 8 hours until it overheats, and then they can throw rocks at its head.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  To the water buffalo it's probably like being hunted by terminator.
  - burnte 8y ago
    It really is. Our ability to sweat to shed heat, our slow but incredibly sustainable pace, and our intelligence make us amazing hunters. We're not just pack hunters, we're able to communicate and create complex plans. And in the end, the endurance we have is unmatched in the animal kingdom.

jds375 8y ago

I completely agree. It’s super fascinating to think what other skills/practices that reasoning applies to as well (nutrition stands out the most to me). That being said, I don’t think your final comment is true (minus the part about farming) due to scale. Sure early humans spent just about all of their effort on hunting, but there weren’t many humans back then. Nowadays we spend much less effort on a given task, but because that effort is distributed amongst billions and billions of people we end up collectively putting in even greater amounts of effort than was likely possible in ‘early human history’.

tatersolid 8y ago

> Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. You leave out the human pursuit which has occupied most of our intellectual and physical resources since we first fashioned tools: war.

InitialLastName 8y ago
In prehistoric terms, what's the difference between war and hunting other herds of humans?
- Retra 8y ago
  Whether you eat the bodies or not?

QueensGambit 8y ago

This is incorrect based on Harari's book: Sapiens. Megafauna in Australia/America didnt have time to evolve, when humans migrated there. While, megafauna in Africa/Asia evolved with humans, so they learnt to survive. Excerpt from the chapter - Guilty as Charged: "Various human species had been prowling and evolving in Afro-Asia for 2 million years. They slowly honed their hunting skills, and began going after large animals around 400,000 years ago. The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator – Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies. So when a diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever to walk the earth, set eyes for the first time on this frail-looking ape, he gave it one glance and then went back to chewing leaves. These animals had to evolve a fear of humankind, but before they could do so they were gone."