Small prey compelled prehistoric humans to produce appropriate hunting weapons | Hacker News Reader

Small prey compelled prehistoric humans to produce appropriate hunting weapons

phys.org

47 pointsdiodorus48 comments

> “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.

Early cities were pretty undesirable places to live, so it makes sense,

Modern cities are no different.

“Desirable” is a variable though across such different times

As evidenced by what? All the people that want to live in them?

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

It’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?

"Necessity is the mother of invention"

Can’t wait to see what we invent after the crops fail and we can no longer farm the Earth.

We've already invented mass graves.

I 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.

The 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.

> A new study from the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University found that the extinction of large prey, upon which human nutrition had been based ...

We ate them all.

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

A global population half the size of London contributed to many of the world’s largest mammals to extinction. The per capita impact of our hunter-gatherer ancestors was huge. ... Trace the footsteps of these tiny populations of the past and you will find extinction after extinction after extinction.

https://ourworldindata.org/quaternary-megafauna-extinction

Between 52,000 and 9,000 BCE, more than 178 species of the world’s largest mammals were killed off. These were mammals heavier than 44 kilograms, ranging from mammals the size of sheep to mammoths.

From the article:

"But one may well ask: Why did humans become smarter all of a sudden? What was the advantage of having a large brain that consumes so much energy? We demonstrate that these biological and cognitive changes correlate directly with the size of prey. To hunt small elusive animals humans had to become smarter, faster, more focused, more observant, and more collaborative. They had to develop new weapons for hunting from afar and learn how to track their prey."

Eating meat is often credited with boosting human intelligence, but it probably was the challenge of adapting to decreasing biodiversity and the need to hunt smarter that truly accelerated our cognitive development. Similarly, as we grapple with climate change and pivot towards plant-based diets, these new challenges may offer opportunities for our intelligence to evolve even further. ;)

One of the interesting things for me about the hypothesis is that if humans had developed better food preservation techniques this outcome might have been different. Specifically a lot of large animals would rot before one could finish eating them so the rate of consumption was higher than strictly necessary. (not that early humans cared, but later humans developed a wide range of preservation methods due to scarcity pressures it seems).

I think more to be able to live in climates where hunting, foraging, or farming year-round was not possible.

Early humans were nomadic. They had no need to stay in the same place year-round. Just follow the animals.

There is almost zero evolutionary pressure on the human species right now. We are probably backsliding.

There’s massive evolutionary pressure now that we’ve developed birth control.

True, I mean evolution in the forward sense, implied by my "we are probably backsliding"

What do you mean by backsliding? Is it only 'evolution' when things become stronger/smarter/faster?

Evolution is organisms adapting to their environment in the face of selection pressure, it has no particular direction.

A lot of people who would not have survived childhood in the past now live. Birth defects, childhood cancers, diabetes, severe asthma or allergies, poorly functioning immune systems, profoundly poor vision or hearing, etc.

Who uses birth control? Smart, pragmatic, disciplined, responsible people. This is being selected against.

I was using "evolution" in the sense of "survival of the fittest" and there aren't really selections for "fittest" (healthier, stronger, smarter) operating on humans anymore, it's more the opposite.

Oh. That's why Elon Musk have 11 kids.

It sounds like you are disputing the premise but at least at a glance it seems obviously true. Why do you think surviving previously unsurvivable ailments or living a normal life with what would have otherwise been a debilitating illness past reproductive age isn't partially nullifying natural selection? And is the billionaire with 11 kids the normal case or just maybe slightly cherry picked?

Because circumstances have changed, selective pressures have changed, and an ability to grab the half gnawed finger bone from your fellow ape-creature is less valuable now than it once was. In a world where the disabled can write code or whatever, they have evolutionary value. I don't disagree with the premise btw of devolution a la Idiocracy, just think your specific argument falls flat.

> I was using "evolution" in the sense of "survival of the fittest"

The people who are reproducing more and passing on genes are "the fittest", by definition.

> there aren't really selections for "fittest" (healthier, stronger, smarter) operating on humans anymore, it's more the opposite.

That's still evolution. Selection may not be working in ways that select for attributes you or I would necessarily choose, but if there are selective factors and the organism is changing, that's evolution baby.

Evolution does not mean "improving", which is subjective anyway.

(I picked up on this because basically this idea that evolution has a direction, or aims, or that you can be somehow more or less evolved, that the human organism is de-evolving etc ... all this is the sort of thinking at the root of eugenics, which has some pretty dark history.

And it's not the definition or the scientific understanding of the idea - a fish that evolves to be blind in the ocean depths is not de-evolving or going backwards. It's evolving subject to the selective pressures it is under)

People who don't want kids are being selected against.

Sex drive will eventually be replaced with a reproduction drive.

I'm pretty sure evolution and survival of the fittest is not as simple and straightforward as having more babies. Among other things, if you have fewer kids but they thrive and reproduce, then you're still in the game.

I think OP meant something along the lines of Idiocracy. Or maybe a weird eugenics angle.

Honestly you can view idiocracy as an argument for eugenics... not that I particularly do, but a friend watched it for the first time recently and thought that was what it was.

I prefer to treat it as an observation about the direction of culture and a as a comic dystopia. And just a damn good laugh. Though there are definitely moments when I read the news and think "Damn, it really was a prophecy..."

In the strict definition of eugenics, Idiocracy is eugenic in its moral.

I’d be willing to bet most people are to some extent.

I’m not really comfortable with Idiocracy.

I understand why you think this, but evolution forces are extremely complex, and making value judgements like "backsliding" isn't helpful.

It's hard to understand how such a small population could have managed such an outsized ecological impact when we are several orders of magnitude more populace now.

During the ice age, the "world" was a lot smaller than it is today.

See also sixth mass extinction event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

I don't think we will pivot completely to plant-based diets, but we could use artificially grown meat.

"But one may well ask: Why did humans become smarter all of a sudden? What was the advantage of having a large brain ... To hunt small elusive animals humans had to become smarter, faster, more focused, more observant, and more collaborative."

So why didn't the big cats, larger insects, dogs/wolves, crocs n that, let alone bloody great 'awks 'n that etc become ... "smarter" for the same reasons?

"Just so" stories are lovely to read and so easy to digest and are just so much bollocks!

"And they had to choose their prey carefully, with preference for high fat content, to ensure a sufficient energetic return"

Total and utter bollocks: Predators pick off the easiest targets - sick, infirm or inattentive prey. There is absolutely no way they weight up calorific value. You grab what you can and try to survive.

I suggest that any numpty writing an article/paper like this tries to kill their own next dinner to discover why things are the way they are ...

> the big cats, larger insects, dogs/wolves, crocs n that, let alone bloody great 'awks

None of them are able to make all their prey go extinct.

Back to "origins of intelligence", I'm not sure what's the cause and what is the effect here.

The reason why humans are different from other animals is that our intelligence makes us adaptable. Take a lion, or a spider, or a hawk and the whole species exhibits basically the same behavior, which is based on instinct. If you saw one of them then you've kind of seen them all. Humans can change their behavior, develop new tools, new hunting methods, which is why we've been able to make some of our prey go extinct.

I think it's more about our ability to use advanced language than just being smart. Humans can talk, share stories, and pass down knowledge. That's how we build culture and learn from the past, and it makes a big difference.

Sure they did, many times.

> But one may well ask: Why did humans become smarter all of a sudden? What was the advantage of having a large brain ... To hunt small elusive animals humans had to become smarter, faster, more focused, more observant, and more collaborative."

Couple of armchair thoughts:

- it wasn’t “sudden”

- we didn’t become smart in order to do x. Instead, natural selection favored certain variation in the context of the environment and we happen to have certain mutations and environments

- symbolic reasoning

There is no need for any species to go extinct for evolutionary pressures to select for adaptations that allow for predation on other species.

The population of a predator reaching the carrying capacity of the existing prey base is enough to make it evolutionarily advantageous to develop means of adding new species to the prey base, ceteris paribus.

Maybe it is less risky to hunt smaller prey and the humans that learned to do so were favored. Doesn't explain the decline in the large prey animals, but that might be coincidence.

> Doesn't explain the decline in the large prey animals, but that might be coincidence.

It was "decrease in the quantity of bones of large prey (in settlement)".

Could be they just stopped hunting large prey animals.

It’s a pretty widespread coincidence. The extinction of Western Hemisphere megafauna correlates quite well with the arrival of humans. Megafauna that has survived to the present day has generally evolved in place with humans (viz, Africa and south Asia).

"humans began to make stone tools about 3 million years ago" is just as accepted as "male and female he created them".

I wonder if others read this text the same way I do.

I accept the first statement as an indication that we have reasonably strong evidence that human-ish (that is, genus homo) primates were using tools that had been fabricated, not just found; and that such fossils have been dated back to 3 million years ago, give or take.

The second statement comes with no evidence, no proof, no error bars. And the interpretation of the Bible as literal truth is an invention of the 18th century.

So no, the two statements are not "just as accepted."

The papers written by whom and for how long? Did this research of a multi-million year old world and evidence exist prior to the 18th century?

> The papers written by whom and for how long?

There are dozens of references to be found [1] if you're interested in reading more. But I'm not sure what you mean by "for how long."

> Did this research of a multi-million year old world and evidence exist prior to the 18th century?

Yes, people located multi-million year old dinosaur fossils prior to the 18th century. They didn't have enough evidence at the time to recognize the implications of what they were finding, nor the extensive chronological dating technologies[2] that we have today.

But I think you're mistaking my point about the 18th century: if the authors of the Bible did not believe it to be the literal truth, why should anybody else?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_dating

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