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> “Ultimately, we hypothesized that prey size had played a major part in human evolution: at the beginning the largest animals were hunted, and when these were
by distortionfield 3y ago
> “Ultimately, we hypothesized that prey size had played a major part in human evolution: at the beginning the largest animals were hunted, and when these were gone humans went on to the next in size, and so on. Finally, when hunting was no longer energetically viable, humans began to domesticate animals and plants. That's how the agricultural revolution began."
I had never considered this angle before. I always thought humans started agriculture to deal with scaling and the development of cities, but the idea that it was actually a scarcity pressure from decreased size of huntable game is a really interesting alternative.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoEarly cities were pretty undesirable places to live, so it makes sense,
- Detrytus 3y agoModern cities are no different.
- gigglesupstairs 3y ago“Desirable” is a variable though across such different times
- kadoban 3y agoAs evidenced by what? All the people that want to live in them? "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jterwill 3y agoIt’s hard not to see this angle as making the capacity for cultural evolution very fortunate for us (or unfortunate for other species). What other animals can exhaust primary food sources and ‘quickly’ pivot to another? I’ve often wondered how much rituals and social routines for affiliation and bonding drove for this capacity (which we often associate with lithic tools) as opposed to the need for food. Perhaps some of this is due to another scarcity: hair. How did hairless apes manage relationships without grooming?
- staplers 3y ago"Necessity is the mother of invention"
- gostsamo 3y agoI used to support this theory, but there were some studies showing that large gain got extinct due to the climate changes after the last ice age. Can't dig links right now.
- jahewson 3y agoThe thinking I’m familiar with is that various megafauna were in a vulnerable position due to climatic changes reducing their territory around the same time humans arrived in the regions they lived, leading to fairly rapid extinction.