Medieval Icelanders were likely hunting blue whales before industrial technology
hakaimagazine.com
hakaimagazine.com
"Medieval Icelanders were likely hunting blue whales long industrial technology"
Seems they were trying to hunt industrial tech from whales. I guess a "before" went missing before "industrial"?
Then again, as she always said, "Smoked meat lasts longer."
> New research suggests that medieval Icelanders were scavenging and likely even hunting blue whales long before industrial whaling technology
"You shot 290,000 pounds of food, but were only able to carry 100 pounds back."
From a purely historical lens whale hunting in a small boat is one of the most extreme things I can imagine. The closest I’ve physically come to whales is sailing and hearing a pod breathing while swimming past - I was scared since the unexpected sound was quite loud and deep.
Just spit balling here but interesting to think of whales “hunting humans” as we’ve seen them start taking out more pleasure craft around Europe (and elsewhere?) in the past few years. Would be curious to “hear” their side of history!
I did a whale watching tour from Húsavík last year on a cranky old boat. We found one but the poor thing was asleep apparently, just surfacing every few minutes to breathe. Immediately buzzed by about 5 boats full of people every time it surfaced, two pictured here: https://imgur.com/a/g4em6sc . I think I'd be in the mood to tip a fishing boat after that every day.
It is in latin tho, and created in Rome. It is the oldest "complete" map where scandinavia is depicted with any kind of accuracy.
A macabre kinship that involved spearing her calf. And eventually, killing the female whale herself while trying to kill her calf again.
"Ólafur appears to have developed a personal kinship with the whale, choosing not to try to kill her again. But he had no problem shooting the whale’s calf. One summer, when he raised his spear and took aim at the calf, his spear went askew, hitting the mother instead.
With that, he’d had enough. That was the last time Ólafur speared a whale."
does anyone ever think about a less vicious world? like I know evolution / survival of the fittest all that is a thing but did it have to be like this? Could we have evolved without killing?
That's just BS. In many species, the mother never has any interaction at all with the young. In some species, it's not particularly uncommon for a mother to eat her young.
perhaps i meant to say just mammals? would be cool if neuroscience advanced enough to figure out what makes mammals specifically different but alas like Moses won't live long enough to see that day
Also, some reptiles and fish care for their children. Some arthropod too. So it looks like reasonably easy to evolve.
In my head the more humans / beings have known about their world the better the have survived so it makes sense intelligence would be a fitness indicator that speeds up the search algorithm. But there's no intuitive answer to why killing as many people as possible would be a fitness indicator like population wasn't a factor until recently so it's not like resource scarcity was the issue
Let's say cave person a figured out how to dig a well cave person b not so much. cave person b kills cave person a to get the well and uses it for x years then dies because they didn't acquire the knowledge to dig another one. so cave person c will be like "protec well digger hooman". same for foraging let's say cave person a killed cave person b who was extremely good at remembering where trees are in a given area sure cave person a got a meal for today but is gonna die out unless they develop the skills cave person a had
sorry I'm a homeless dropout maybe I'm missing something super obvious I'm still not seeing the how killing leads to an optimum solution. Maybe a local maxima for sure but not the most optimal solution in the search space and as civilized as humans have become killing still persists I've seen some brutal stuff by some insanely rich folk (at least to me) that had absolutely nothing to do with resources so maybe that's coloring my viewpoint but idk even for inter species stuff some species have been hunted to extinction which is like a dairy farmer killing everything instead of planning for multiple generations it doesn't make any sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_cycle
Weirdly, Olaus Magnus (Big Olaf) was involved in this one as well, the same person who did the map in the article.
By what mechanism do you suppose evolution would implement long-term planning?
This would be no land of milk and honey. Maybe just the milk.
We're hardwired to have empathy for our own kind, e.g. the "selfish gene" theory, stronger for kin than for strangers but nonetheless strong enough to create an almost universal taboo against eating people. Note however that many other animals do seem to be wired to eat some of their own children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_cannibalism
"The most dangerous game." People are very resourceful, and furthermore have friends and family who hold grudges. Eating people is a bad strategy because people who make a habit of it tend to get killed for it sooner or later. Hunting nearly anything else is safer than hunting other humans.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
There are many people whose personal experience is decidedly not like that, so "citation needed".
I feel like when I was growing up this statement would have been accepted as a near tautology perhaps a cultural thing? or maybe a testament to the trauma-centric times we live in?
Sure, up to a point. If the treatment of the children later on is massively detrimental though, then that "credit" is well and truly expired.
But the internet? The internet is packed with people who focus on the negative, even people who resent their mothers (who may love them and treat them well) because they're so miserable they wish they had never been born.
Always remember that talking to people online doesn't give you a representative sample of what people at large are really like. There's a selection bias in play; people who have problems with "real life" have a tendency to spend more problem online.
In sheep it's somewhat common for first-time mothers to not want their offspring and refuse them the early ('raw'?) milk, which is pretty much a death sentence. A slow, painful death unless culled by a human.
The term mother isn't very clear in itself. Who is the mother in an anthill?
Except the queen, all the other ants are the daugthers of the queen.
IIRC thermites have many "queens" and "kings". I'm not sure about social wasps.
The new born ants are feed and cared by their sisters.
> Over half of the bones came from blue whales.
This claim just does not made a lot of sense.
> Spectroscopy, which reveals the chemical makeup of bones by analyzing collagen proteins found in bone fragments, is cheaper and faster than DNA analysis.
And much more inaccurate, it seems. Again, we have big claims (that people will repeat for decades) supported by dwarf proofs or subpar methods.
I want to play this game also: "Scientists discover that spears make whales autistic".
It's been an open secret in the industry for a long time that autism in whales is caused by harpoons, but big plankton doesn't want it to become public knowledge. In fact many believe that smaller harpoons can have the same effect in humans as studies have shown (2023, Ishmael et al.)
A proof with a stunted development obviously, so it never grow as tall as the other proofs and can be spotted as dubious from a mile even if it wears high soles to hide it.