back
14 comments
> While the proportion of [dangerous fauna] increases from the early (0.03%) to late Middle Pleistocene (4%), they never predominate.

A 133 fold increase hardly seems trivial. It sounds more like putting a handle on the axe was a key technology that put humans close to the apex of the food chain. Even if our prey animals didn't much change, it was a major change to our own status as prey.

Yeah, and it makes me wonder if spears changed other things. Maybe they had to spend less time hunting since spears were more efficient. And that might have influenced human society and development in other ways.
Hunting comes in two parts, finding the animal and killing it (or catching). Better weapons make the kill easier and safer for the hunter but most of a hunter's day will still be spent finding and getting close to the animal. So i would not expect a major impact on net animals harvested until the advent of ranged weapons which could reduce stalking times.
Spears can be thrown, so they are a ranged weapon (albeit, short ranged). It's also easier to surround a creature with a group of humans and box it in with spears. It's not the 'net animals harvested' that would be impacted, simply the time taken to hunt. Spears probably increased the percentage of successful hunts. You have to imagine to try to kill a deer or a gazelle with a hand axe...the only way to really do it (since you're far slower on foot than a gazelle) is to chase the animal down until it gets tired enough to quit (takes as much as 8 hours of chase). Then, you have to be able to successfully fend off any other creatures hungry enough to challenge you for it (lions, hyenas, wolves, panthers, etc...). The opportunities for the creature to escape or for another creature to intervene are numerous.

Imagine if spears improved hunting success rate by 50%. What do you do with that extra time? Maybe you take up painting, sporting, music making, etc. Maybe you venture further out into the wilds and succeed across a broader terrain (no longer reliant on savannas alone for success).

Maybe your spear technology and additional leisure time leads you to discover other uses for woodworking, etc. Maybe a few hundred thousand years of that (including sexual selection) leads to evolutionary improvements in brain power.

Hand axe's could be thrown as hunting projectiles in the stone age - several anthropologists have suggested this.
Rocks. Why throw a manufactured tool when any rock will do basically the same job.
> Similarly, dangerous game (e.g., Cape buffalo and long-horned buffalo; see SOM Table S2) are recorded in small numbers throughout the faunal dataset. Increased proportions of dangerous game within MSA assemblages have been argued to reflect improvements in projectile technology, which provides the ability to hunt game at greater distances (Klein et al., 2007). While the proportion of these species increases from the early (0.03%) to late Middle Pleistocene (4%), they never predominate.

Even in the modern era with high powered rifles, Cape Buffalo are still considered dangerous. I would not want to be anywhere near one with armed only with a spear.

Given that, a 100-fold increase in how much is hunted after spears are introduced, seems like a huge difference.

One thing that always striked me was the mad willingness of soldiers in WWI to jump over the parapet and plunge into the hail of enemy bullets. Where does such suicidal bravery come from?

But this article made me realize that it might be just preprogrammed in some of us, a legacy of the long forgotten ages when our forefathers regularly faced a ton of galloping angry beef with just spears. Possibly the tribes that would not even try died out from lack of food.

Well, refusal was considered desertion, and usually punished by death. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_French_Army_mutinies, soldiers were still in the trenches but refused attack orders.
They had two choices be shot by the enemy or refuse an order and be shot by an officer.
In the French army soldiers were served, before such assault, a fair amount of alcohol. Source: my maternal grandfather, who was a French soldier during WW1.
>Where does such suicidal bravery come from?

If that is something you're interested in, you would probably enjoy reading Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. Make sure to read the 1929 version. I believe there is only one english translation, by Basil Creighton.

All the other editions available in the market are subsequent edits the author made, each one with a more pacifist tone, as the author got older.

I can read German. Thanks for an intriguing suggestion, will do!
...that’s striking evidence that earlier Middle Pleistocene hominins had achieved the ability to efficiently hunt prey species in the proportions that made ecological sense for them. The fact that later hominins selected the same prey sizes suggests that this aspect of hominin hunting was near equilibrium regardless of the precise toolkits they used.

This makes sense phylogeneticly. Chimpanzees also hunt prey of various sizes.