It's 150,000 years ago. You are on a dry savannah with grass up to your mid thigh. You are mostly naked but for a sharpened spear and a few more on your back. And a small sack tied around your waist. You have accustomed a herd of gazelle to your presence and are within striking distance. You notice the small herbivores sniffing, noses in the air in a certain direction and acting increasingly nervous. You instinctively reach down to a small dried animal skin pouch fastened to your waist, feeling relieved to find it still there. You reach inside to its weighty contents, you grab one of your small round and hard projectiles. Rocks you collected from a nearby river, rounded, the ideal size and weight for one thing. In your other hand your deadly, five -and-a-half foot sharpened wooden spear is held tight and ready, but you only have one of those. The rock pouch is for a different purpose altogether. You look in the direction where the wind is moving in relation to the gazelle's skyward flailing nostrils and you suddenly lock eyes with a bulky and mottled golden creature in the distance. Its piercing yellow eyes are looking directly at you, it's creeping, attempting to conceal itself in the grass. The feline super predator realizes its stealth has been lost. It’s been hunting you. It attacks. 600 pounds of muscle, fangs, and claws explode into a 40mph run. 8 inch fangs are peeking out from its flapping lips as it reaches top speed. In a couple seconds it’s close enough to appreciate its powerful chest muscles, and the deep scars on its sneering face, braced for a takedown. One more second you can smell what the gazelles could smell; the deathly stench of a blood thirsty predator, you are downwind, and you are about to die…
Modern man's ability to accurately throw projectiles was, I would argue, was the deciding factor on why us bipedal walking creatures, homo sapiens have an iron grip on the title of most dangerous predator that the world has ever seen. This was not always the case and certainly didn’t happen overnight… Humanity's ascendance through and above the darkness of the animal world is a thrilling voyage indeed. Not so different that it's difficult to imagine however, there are many habitats and wilderness around the world that have remained relatively unchanged for some hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, we can use these environments to deduce a rational explanation for the eventual dominance of homo sapiens over all other creatures including other species of human.
How do we know that homo sapiens has become the most dominant Hominid on the face of the planet? Well quite simply, none of the others exist any more. While I remain hopeful one of the ancient species or flavors of semi-modern man or modern men may be (re) discovered deep in the Borneo jungle as little elf-like people, or the Appalachian Mountains as a 7 foot monster with telekinetic abilities… the current scientific consensus is that we are completely, utterly alone on this planet.
Anthropological history is a rich cornucopia of different shape and size hominids when get into the strata of millions of years ago. Interestingly enough, oral traditional legends tell stories of strange beasts, elves and dwarves in the forests of dangerous whispering man creatures that would come in the night. And occasionally these legends are eerily similar across continents and languages. Indeed, archeological records of fossilized bones of ourselves and cousin species, paint a very dangerous and difficult existence. Right up to 20 to 30 000 years ago, a mere blink of an eye in geological timeframes. Evolutionary researcher Danny Vendramini’s Neanderthal Predation Theory paints a very grim, yet gripping and triumphant picture of how we were shaped into what we are, by them. It’s always entertaining for me to listen to “traditional” and cowardly anthropologists struggle to explain the clear and obvious physical evidence for centuries of cannibalism and extreme violence, while attempting to not offend anyone; no it’s not some loving ritual with lofty spiritual implications. They were hunting and eating us for what could be 300 000 years. It’s the red in tooth and claw the reality of Nature. We as the creatures that we are today, were shaped by violence, predation, and warfare. Anyone can flip on the news to see we have turned our frighteningly bloodthirsty, warlike behavior on ourselves. This is not offensive, it’s the truth. But the good news, I suppose is: we’re here, they are not.
Now, lets return to the story of how physical adaptations due to selective environmental pressures, gave us vastly extended lethal range…
I want to isolate the moment where the upright ape decided to use a projectile and the evolutionary selection process and mechanism that pressured it into a species wide trait. There is a beauty to reducing evolutionary biology to its simplest understanding; you live and procreate or you die and you are removed from the gene pool. It’s a cold machine and cares not for justice, equity, ethics, morals… these are constructs that only come into the machine, thousands of years later when our only predators became ourselves.
The mechanism of physiological adaptation does not function by successful traits surviving more it works by elimination. In other words if a hominid male could not throw a stone, it would be an easy target for the nightmare inducing pleistocene super predators.
The chaos of nature introduces slight variations in genetics by many means. Natural sources such as cosmic radiation, and even asymptomatic viral integration.
A mutation will arise which gives slight advantages and thus continuation of a species, however these are extremely rare and slow to propagate and it’s only until near total elimination of the individuals without the mutation, which can take millions of years, or even never… until all are equipped throughout a species.
But sometimes, a selection pressure is so large, so deadly that species will experience a selection bottleneck. And morphological change can happen within timeframes that we can more easily fathom. Think a comparatively frail, slow, mostly arboreal creature being forced onto a savannah where the average beast can run 4x faster. The hominids beginnings were humble and meager indeed.
There were quite a few different flavors of humanity in the very early days and we can deduce real world situation circumstance with mechanical good old Darwinian evolutionary applied logic to determine why we arrived and how, to where we are today as the dominant life form on the planet by a large margin in our particular niches, though you could say our niches are as what we choose!
The modern human being is characterized as being an excellent and accurate projectile throwing machine. Harvard University has conducted morphological studies on the mechanical nature and evolution of our skeleton to facilitate the deadly accurate and forceful ability to throw small objects to devastating effect. Our bodies are a marvel at being able to store energy in the muscles throughout our shoulders and then release that energy into the tip of our hand with incredible slingshot forces up to 9000 degrees per second as seen in professional athletes.
I do believe there's a logical explanation for the near ubiquitous exhibition of our deadly built-in skill.
And this is going to take us back hundreds of thousands of years to an early branch of upright walking hominids, Homo Erectus… Humans have been walking on two feet for a very very long time even before that going all the way back to creatures known as Australopithecines. These little guys were not unlike modern chimpanzees except for one key difference, and that is they walked upright on 2 feet. The ability to throw most likely equivalent to chimps, in other words limited and poor. A chimp, despite having an upper body 400% stronger than a human’s, can only lob objects about 20mph and without accuracy.
What the common conjecture is around 2 million years ago upright walking humans and chimpanzees split off from each other however the upright walking hominids still didn't necessarily possess the ability to throw accurately though it seems as we left the trees and exposed ourselves into the open world of the Savannah being able to extend your deadly reach became extremely important and a deciding factor in taking on some of the world's most dangerous megafauna some of which that are still alive today.
One only needs to walk along with a Masai tribal warrior in northern Africa and observe them nonchalantly lobbing small rocks a good half soccer field to head shot a lion, witness the lion cower and shake and run away to understand the advantage that our naked Savannah going ancestors initially didn’t have…
That's right, in the early days of upright walking hominids they would have had to take on lions with their own hands, feet and whatever nearby sharp objects probably sticks they could muster, I would propose that this was an overwhelmingly losing battle for our ill equipped non-progenitors. Becoming good at athletic feats of accuracy and throwing would have been heavily selected for and encouraged in the early days, probably the origin of sports competition was grounded in the importance the game of life.
GG man…
Article by Sean Allman
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