4 ms·
Yea honestly a jockey'd horse is hard to beat, since the human can pace them. Wonder how wild horses would fare a human chasing them to exhaustion.
by idnefju 7y ago
Yea honestly a jockey'd horse is hard to beat, since the human can pace them. Wonder how wild horses would fare a human chasing them to exhaustion.
- elfexec 7y agoProbably not too well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting There are documentaries of wolves and wild dogs hunting large prey by chasing them until the large prey is so exhausted and overheated that it collapses.
- tomerico 7y agoOf note - the most important reason why a human would win the horse (and other animals), is because a human would carry water with them.
- gadders 7y agoThere doesn't seem to be as much consensus on the case for persistence hunting as there once was. https://undark.org/2019/10/03/persistent-myth-persistence-hunting/ https://undark.org/2019/10/03/persistent-myth-persistence-hu...
- huffmsa 7y agoThe only people who persistence hunt still are the people who didn't find a better approach. Be it that they don't need a better approach (which is fine. Means they're optimized) or that they simply spend.so much time hunting that they don't have the excess time and resources to experiment with new approaches
- gadders 7y agoI also think it depends on the environment. I can imagine ancient humans persistence hunting across the plains of Africa. I have a harder time picturing it in rain forests or the forests that used to cover most of Europe.
- mrkstu 7y agoAnd once you learn to drive big game into pits, most of the other options seem less efficient.
- de_watcher 7y agoFair test would be a jockey'd horse against a human carrying another human.
- usrusr 7y agoArguably dead weight ballast scaled to the same fraction of total weight would be more fair than unburdened runner vs horse+rider, but if you expect the human to carry another human (but not the horse to carry the equivalent of another horse) you might just as well go full symmetry and require the human to carry a horse. In this variation, horse would lose to elephant.
- de_watcher 7y agoI thought more about the ability to transport one human.