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>Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. This remi
by cmpb 6y ago
>Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion.
This reminds me of a show I watched on the Science channel when I was young about how humans have evolved. They showed various African civilizations and detailed how they hunt in parties by simply keeping pace with the animal until the animal just collapses. It goes on to say that that is one characteristic of human evolution that has made us drastically more successful at surviving than other species
- illuminated 6y agoAnd that characteristic is the ability to sweat. That's what made the human species "stand out from the crowd" and be able to outrun the prey.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoIs that also why humans aren't furry?
- cephaslr 6y agoCorrect, its a big benefit over the furry prey. Especially when chasing the animal in the hottest part of the day for hours, pre-modern people had quite a different life.
- fallat 6y ago> pre-modern people had quite a different life You know I've thought about this, and if you look at it a certain way, I think you can say life is no different. We still wake up as a group. We still "hunt" except the payoff is money convertible to food. We still eat together. We still sleep together (just across from one another in houses). It's neat to think about.
- kazen44 6y agoAlso, the massive impact of having a complex enough brain to form complex and intricate social structures made it possible for humans to dominate the food chain.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoIs that right? As a beardy guy, I find beard is cooler in Summer and warmer in Winter. I'd speculate that hair allows more heat transfer to sweat. Hair also send to keep a local air layer near the skin which helps Summer-cooling and Winter-heating.
- dmoy 6y agoHow hot and/or humid is your summer?
- caymanjim 6y agoKeeping a "local air layer" near your skin is not going to help at all with summer cooling. You need constant sweat evaporation to cool off. I don't think a beard is going to have much effect either way, since it's small, and our cheeks and chins are not designed to radiate heat or even sweat much compared to most of the body.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoSurely if the evaporation can cool the skin surface, then a local insulation layer would prevent ambient air from heating the skin. Just as a locally warmed layer prevents ambient air from cooling the skin during Winter. It's certainly a hypothesis I've long held but never had chance to test. Citations for support/contradiction welcome, thanks.
- tim333 6y agoIt probably also explains afro style hair - keeps the heat of the sun off at midday while the prey doesn't have that.
- dsfyu404ed 6y agoMeat eating really helps a lot too because we can shove a couple thousand calories in our face in basically no time at all compared to a herbivore that must graze and forage those calories. That alone lets us cover more ground week to week than a lot of species. When you top it off with an efficient high duty cycle transportation system (i.e. biped that can sweat) and from the perspective of a water buffalo it's like being chased by terminator.
- ekianjo 6y agoMeat + fire = even more calories out of it.
- Balanceinfinity 6y agofire made eating animal protein much more efficient. imagine the patience of eating raw deer off the bone - hours of chewing. With fire, it converted a monotonous task to something efficient
- bluGill 6y agoCooking doesn't do anything for meat unless you cook low and slow. A quick cooked cut of meat is not easier or harder to chew. Cooking made a big difference for vegetables because heat quickly breaks down some hard to digest fiber.
- Balanceinfinity 6y ago"In essence, cooking—including not only heat but also mechanical processes such as chopping and grinding—outsources some of the body’s work of digestion so that more energy is extracted from food and less expended in processing it. Cooking breaks down collagen, the connective tissue in meat, and softens the cell walls of plants to release their stores of starch and fat. The calories to fuel the bigger brains of successive species of hominids came at the expense of the energy-intensive tissue in the gut, which was shrinking at the same time—you can actually see how the barrel-shaped trunk of the apes morphed into the comparatively narrow-waisted Homo sapiens. Cooking freed up time, as well; the great apes spend four to seven hours a day just chewing, not an activity that prioritizes the intellect." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes...
- Macumbapotatos 6y agoAre there examples of how humans are/were able to outrun an animal until it collapses? I find it difficult to imagine unless you corner the animal and have enough manpower to not be run over.
- bradyd 6y agoIn the BBC documentary "The Life of Mamals", they followed San bushman doing persistence hunting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009lwhq https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009lwhq
- bewuethr 6y ago"Born to Run" has long descriptions of that hunting method. https://www.chrismcdougall.com/born-to-run/ https://www.chrismcdougall.com/born-to-run/
- dboreham 6y agoIf you watch big animals hunting (wolves, bear are the ones we have here), they also stand significant chance of being injured by prey (horns..), and as a result tend to harry the prey until it is exhausted and basically gives up. The other strategy is a quick surprise coup de grace, like lions. We have lions/pumas here but they're hard to spot and I've never seen one hunting but I assume it's like a scaled up version of a house cat, or big felines seen on TV.
- andyjohnson0 6y agoThis is called "persistence hunting". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
- hyperpallium 6y agoAttenborough https://youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o https://youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o The relentless zombies are us. We're physically adapted: sweat pores, bipedal, achilles tendon. Perhaps neccessary, but high calorie ROI seems insufficient for the evolution of intelligence.
- ganzuul 6y agoIt annoys me to no end when fiction portrays humans as a weak, defenseless species without our tools. We're nothing of the sort. We can climb on negative inclines, run an ultra-marathon, lift several times our own weight, deep-dive, heal massive wounds, our immune system is without par, and we perform all kinds of feats of dexterity. It is simply modern humans who have no need for the adaption our ancestors have gifted us with.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>our immune system is without par // Is it just lack of use that means we get sick from tainted meat, and such, when other mammals seem to stay healthy?
- ganzuul 6y agoI'm not sure about that one. As a species we need to stay in groups and take care of our sick. We traveled vast distances by foot and sought out our own kind. To equivocate, I did hear about ancient ruins of villages in China where unknown strains of plague were unearthed, before this COVID-19 stuff. I assume these then became cursed villages that no one visited.
- quaquaqua1 6y ago
- duxup 6y agoI've seen similar things. It was interesting that while most wild animals can outrun humans, they're not very good at endurance, something humans excel at. It's funny because when I see a wild animal I'm usually thinking "No way I can catch that." But apparently it's not as unlikely as I might think. Outside of migration and other factors, they seemed to belive that the success rate for a hunt, provided they found the animal, was pretty high.
- gumby 6y agoHumans can outrun a horse and there was a famous bet about it: https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/long-distance-running-and-evolution-why-humans-can-outrun-horses-but-cant-jump-higher-than-cats.html https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/long-distance-running-and-.... The bet was over a short distance (22 miles) and the trend is clear. Attenborough followed a koala Hari bushman pursuing an antelope — video on YouTube. And Larry Niven wrote a short story about it, “The Hunting Park”
- systemvoltage 6y agoI wonder if this is an overly stated aspect of the reason why Humans propelled themselves. I thought the reason why we beat all other animals was because we evolved to have a larger brain size especially the frontal lobe which is used for inventing, mirror neurons (copying), planning and strategy. Hunting isn't necessary to survive. We can live off of bugs, plants and fruits, etc.
- int_19h 6y agoThere is a strong correlation between IQ and calorie intake, especially for children (as the brain develops), even today. We might be able to live off bugs and plants in our present state, but could we have evolved to that state by relying solely on those sources? This all is a bit arbitrary, anyway, because you'd need to draw a clear line in hominid evolution where humans became sufficiently different from other animals before you can say that we "beat them all". Is that before or after behaviorally modern humans evolved, for example?