this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 63 points 1 year ago (39 children)

I believe in nature, humans are regarded as persistence hunters. Which is to say we have incredible stamina and perseverance while hunting. Other creatures can run faster than us, but only for short stints, relatively speaking, as long as we can keep track of them, we can continue to pursue prey for hours or days without significant external assistance (food, water, rest, help from others, etc).

So regardless of what we may be trying to kill, if we continue to keep our focus on it, we can absolutely find and kill it, given a long enough timeframe.

This also explains marathons, quite frankly. I don't see too many animals just running for dozens of kilometers without a reason to do so. Many can't run that far, and those that could, generally never would... Unless they're running from us, I suppose.

Something like the cheetah, is very very fast in short duration, but after a few minutes of running at full speed, it's thermal regulation tends to fail and it is biologically required to stop or it will overheat and die.

Add to that our intellectual capacity for planning, the creation of tools to assist us, strategy, teamwork, and all the things that are associated with intelligence and we're basically a killing machine, if we choose to be....

Amazingly, we're also the only species that we know to exist that feels bad about eating our prey. I've never seen a lion have an existential breakdown after killing off a gazelle so it can eat, yet there's entire subcultures of people who refuse to cause any harm to their food. Have you people not understood the "circle of life"? Did you not watch the lion king?

Whatever. Go live your life. Weirdo.

[–] Gloomy@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is very little evidence for the idea of persistence hunting ever beeing a thing.

Despite the idea’s foothold in popular culture, however, there is no hard evidence that ancient humans were persistence hunters, much less that persistence hunting shaped evolutionary traits. In fact, what evidence there is doesn’t support the notion that early humans acquired their meaty meals through feats of running endurance; it flatly contradicts it.

https://undark.org/2019/10/03/persistent-myth-persistence-hunting/

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Nice, I like you. You stick to the point. So many of these comments are just people getting butthurt about hunting in general.

I do apologize that I haven't done enough research on the topic and I can't really engage in the conversation further. I hope you have a wonderful day.

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