daftandbarmy
Army.ca Fossil
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Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you - literally...
When We Were Lunch
How being food for other animals has made us into the humans we are today
Being the hunted has left a deep impact on our personal and collective memories, with imprints that have, in the language of evolutionary biology, been “conserved,” not only in modern mythology but possibly in our genomes as well. It likely drove our ability to control fire, develop ever-more deadly tools, find security in social groups, even walk upright and speak. It also had its downsides: Our innate sense of fear, compounded by stress, which can waylay our bodies and brains, likely evolved from us being mere pieces of meat.
Being the hunted has left a deep impact on our personal and collective memories, with imprints that have, in the language of evolutionary biology, been “conserved,” not only in modern mythology but possibly in our genomes as well. It likely drove our ability to control fire, develop ever-more deadly tools, find security in social groups, even walk upright and speak. It also had its downsides: Our innate sense of fear, compounded by stress, which can waylay our bodies and brains, likely evolved from us being mere pieces of meat.
It wasn’t always thus in the annals of human-evolution research. A drive to kill other animals (as well as each other) was considered key to our past and present. “Man the Hunter” and even “Man the Murderous Cannibal” were ascendant evolutionary tropes when it came to hypothesizing about our earliest inclinations, in popular as well as scholarly thought.
This perspective was largely initiated by the South African anthropologist Raymond Dart, famous for having discovered a species of Australopithecus (Australopithecus africanus), which lived 3 million to 2 million years ago. Dart’s hyperventilating insistence on our murderous, war-prone prehistoric inclinations was reflected in such influential writings as The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man (1953), and which inspired popular (and grossly misleading) books such as Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (1977).
Dart also discovered an A. africanus skull designated the “Taung child,” who died at age 3 or 4. Dart dramatically proclaimed the child to have been an early victim of human murder and cannibalism. Subsequent analysis by anthropologist Lee Berger in 2006 revealed that the skull shows talon marks around the eye sockets as well as indentations on the base of the skull consistent with injuries incurred by nonhuman primates who are carried off and eaten by eagles and other large predatory birds.
When We Were Lunch
When We Were Lunch
How being food for other animals has made us into the humans we are today
Being the hunted has left a deep impact on our personal and collective memories, with imprints that have, in the language of evolutionary biology, been “conserved,” not only in modern mythology but possibly in our genomes as well. It likely drove our ability to control fire, develop ever-more deadly tools, find security in social groups, even walk upright and speak. It also had its downsides: Our innate sense of fear, compounded by stress, which can waylay our bodies and brains, likely evolved from us being mere pieces of meat.
Being the hunted has left a deep impact on our personal and collective memories, with imprints that have, in the language of evolutionary biology, been “conserved,” not only in modern mythology but possibly in our genomes as well. It likely drove our ability to control fire, develop ever-more deadly tools, find security in social groups, even walk upright and speak. It also had its downsides: Our innate sense of fear, compounded by stress, which can waylay our bodies and brains, likely evolved from us being mere pieces of meat.
It wasn’t always thus in the annals of human-evolution research. A drive to kill other animals (as well as each other) was considered key to our past and present. “Man the Hunter” and even “Man the Murderous Cannibal” were ascendant evolutionary tropes when it came to hypothesizing about our earliest inclinations, in popular as well as scholarly thought.
This perspective was largely initiated by the South African anthropologist Raymond Dart, famous for having discovered a species of Australopithecus (Australopithecus africanus), which lived 3 million to 2 million years ago. Dart’s hyperventilating insistence on our murderous, war-prone prehistoric inclinations was reflected in such influential writings as The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man (1953), and which inspired popular (and grossly misleading) books such as Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (1977).
Dart also discovered an A. africanus skull designated the “Taung child,” who died at age 3 or 4. Dart dramatically proclaimed the child to have been an early victim of human murder and cannibalism. Subsequent analysis by anthropologist Lee Berger in 2006 revealed that the skull shows talon marks around the eye sockets as well as indentations on the base of the skull consistent with injuries incurred by nonhuman primates who are carried off and eaten by eagles and other large predatory birds.
When We Were Lunch
