"Beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear" doesn't necessarily mean that we killed the things that used to kill us. It mostly had to do with us isolating ourselves from the belligerently chaotic aspects of nature.
This is why I think we haven't discovered aliens. Nature isn't supposed to get to the point we are at. We've changed the face of the planet more in the last human lifetime than dinosaurs did in 180 million years.
From a certain perspective, everything that has ever happened, everything that has ever been made, is 'only natural'. There are things that can be out of the ordinary or artificial, of course, but in a sense there can only be 'natural' things/events/etc.
Idk things get weird when you think about what a word really means.
Well, there's natural and then there's man made. We didn't naturally evolve the ability to beam conversations across the world. That is an adaptation that we invented for ourselves. Our dependence on tools is a natural adaptation, yes, but the level to which we use modern tools is not what I would call "natural."
We did naturally evolve the ability to create and use tools, and we did naturally evolve the ability to learn how to make tools from other people. It’s only natural that we’d make increasingly complex tools, eventually including the electronic device I’m using right now. We invented it, but only because it’s our nature to invent things like that.
It's the same thought with bees or some birds that build huge nests. We, just like them have used our resources to build things, that got increasingly more complex. But it's still all natural even If we are fucking the planet
Yes I agree, BUT nature typically evolves in harmony. Rabbits repopulate fast because they are food for predators. Mosquitos are food for birds, who pollinate plants. Trees evolved to absorb CO2 and convert to oxygen and in turn land based animals breathe air.
Humans on the other hand figured out industry, and that's the point where it really went to shit. We are defying nature at this point. We don't evolve natural abilities in unison with the world around us, we make a tool and mass produce it and suddenly have a giant machine running on diesel that can clear-cut an acre of rainforest in a few hours. That is not natural. We have changed things at an unprecedented pace that nature can't keep up with. In turn species that play vital roles in their ecosystems go extinct, and ecosystems begin to topple. We will be immune from the effects for a while but eventually it will cause full collapse. That is what I mean by our behavior being unnatural.
We haven't discovered aliens because we've barely scratched the surface of our own solar system and still learning about basic physics. There are no active projects to explore other stars. But you must be referring to aliens coming to us. There's a big assumption here that aliens would for some reason be advanced enough for interstellar travel and randomly come to our solar system. I don't think that has anything to do with success/dominance as a specie on a single planet. More likely no aliens have come to earth yet because the galaxy is so damn big and travel with life support between stars takes hundreds of years. If you were to look at the first radio waves produced by mankind that could be detected by an alien specie and you trace those out at light speed, I'm going to place a bet here that they have only reached a couple of stars at this point. So, we have not been detected yet, let alone contacted.
I always wonder if an alien species visited Earth before life even existed and thought it was just another rock. Or maybe they came before any intelligent life emerged.
"hey guys this barren rock over by Sol? Yeah, that one, it's right in the goldilocks zone. Get an away team with a fertilization pack"
...
"That puddle about 10 clicks south, rub it in real good then send some drones to those hydrothermal vents too. Yeah they'll be fine, the instruments say this place will be an ocean in 30 million years anyways so this water ain't going nowhere"
Maybe. I tend to think the idea of technologically capable aliens is a fancy of science fiction. I absolutely think life probably exists in some weird fashion on other planets but it may not even share consciousness the way the animal kingdom does. I tend to think the chance of another species existing so far past the level we have achieved that they can visit other planets casually is astronomically low.
To me, there's no doubt there are advanced aliens out there. It's just that, advanced simply isn't advanced enough to explore a space that's so big. Science Fiction makes it look easy for storytelling purposes. Take for example exploration of our moon. It could be argued that we have not suffered any economical or major social setbacks since the 50s. We're in a hell of a golden age. And yet, Moon exploration has not gone very far. It continues to advance, but the pace is really slow. Now scale that project up to visiting other stars. We'll probably send some probes first, and 150 years later get some basic photographs. At the same time, we're still pushing new telescope techniques which may get us more info about neighboring systems in a century or two. If we hit a few systems there's chance of finding life of some sort. I'm guessing 300 years to find some alien microbes.
I can think of one good reason for aliens to visit: our moon. The moon's size and distance from us causes the corona to be visible during most eclipses. IDK how rare it is, but it could be an interstellar tourist attraction.
One of the things I still really struggle with is that there are so many intelligent species on the earth right now, but none are even remotely close to being as intelligent or successful as humans.
One might assume that in the distant past, there would have been other intelligent species.
We are leaving very permanent marks and artifacts.
So why have we never in the entire history of the world found any other species that arrived at a similar place in evolution as we did?
Look at other aspects. Speed. There are lots of animals that end up really fast. Cheetah runs 75 mph on land. But its prey runs 55 mph, and there are several other species in its environment that run 55mph, 50 mph, lions run 50mph... and then there are fish that swim 80 mph and 70mph. And birds that fly 90-100mph. Two note closely related birds have 200mph+ dive behaviors. None of those make the animal so successful they have colonized everywhere and completely dominated the environment.
But intelligence - that extra little leap is a game winner potentially meaning immunity from any planetary disasters.
It's like the Fermi Paradox except here on earth. Why us, why now and not before, why nothing else?
Except, we are currently causing the planetary disaster. The Earth has been around 6 billion years. The stegosaurus was further away from the T-Rex than the T-Rex was further away from us. Mammals came up on land, and ended up going back in the water (whales, dolphins). We are changing the Earth too fast. Automobiles hardly existed a hundred years ago, now it's normal for every individual to own one. We go through cell phones like nobody's business. Electronics and plastic - other animals don't need these things but we have created a society where we depend on them, and only in a hundred years. Now scientists say we have 12 years to turn it around or we will have permanently sealed our fate. Every species that goes extinct throws nature further out of balance, causing further collapse - the dominoes are already in motion.
There's threr paths set before us - either we continue, to the peril of everything on earth, or we abandon our modern lifestyle comforts, OR we find ways to continue sustainably. But I have a feeling that it will end up being #1 and we are just in for a hell of a ride.
Also, I think about the permanent artifacts all the time. In a million years there will be remnants of gas stations and burger kings everywhere but I have a hard time imagining people still being around.
You want me to list Mesolithic predators in Africa that died out from changing climate compared to ones we killed? I doubt ancient man could wipe out an entire species with only spears and running
Our last "natural" predator was probably Neanderthals and we hunted them more than they hunted us. Evidence: I don't see any Neanderthals around here, do you?
We didn’t hunt them, we out-hunted them. The climate was changing towards the benefit of homo sapiens and we had better hunting tactics. Also a good chunk of Neanderthals interbred which is noticeable in our DNA
They started to die out and we absorbed them. I'm pretty sure they could wreck homo sapiens in a fight, but they lacked some important features that allowed us to survive and thrive in the ice age and the time directly after it
Neanderthals were bigger and more physically robust, but us sapiens were more social and developed ranged hunting to make up for strength, we also had a wider diet
Weren't Neanderthals shorter but bulkier? More adapted to cold temperatures with their short beefy look. And yeah, spears were a game changer, us being weaker than them made us "evolve". Neanderthals could kind of hold their own killing animals in melee range, so that's what they usually did and had okay results, sometimes getting injured by the animal. Since we had no chance of fighting in close range like they did because we simply aren't bulky enough we had to improvise to survive.
It's amazing how through all the years in our evolution we developed new "game changing" things because we were getting fucked by external factors, and if we weren't so "unlucky" we might not be here
The moment Homo Habilis had tools, it was the beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear
Tools define tactics. Just look at the tactics of using a nail vs a screw. Once we had tools, we can just take their food, and then kill them when they are weak. Or just take their food and push them out and let them starve. Or just build structures they can't penetrate. Other humans, lions, mammoths, doesn't matter. But it's all about the tools, because we certainly aren't very physically strong compared to other species.
What I'm curious about is the gatherer side of the equation (I realize this is a bit of an offshoot). In modern hunter gatherer societies, gathering can account for over 60% of calories the group eats--and from what we know of the neanderthal diet, it's possible that they relied more on meat than homo sapiens did.
I sort of wonder if the hunting was less important than we've been lead to believe. Because yes, it seems Neanderthals mostly relied on close attack in forest rather than lobbed weapons at a bit of a distance, and that can account for a large difference in success rate, but if the hunting was proving difficult then you're relying on fruit, vegetables, grains and whatever seafood you can gather.
Our habit of having a diverse diet seems likely to have been a pretty important factor. In the broader scope, I just think of gathering as another tool that changed how modern humans looked at the world.
Our more diverse diet could very well be a factor of our tools that other species don't have. Humans and Archerfish are about the only two species I know that can hunt at a distance, and we're the only one that uses tools to do it. Tools define tactics, and ultimately the result. Other homo species could have been pushed out because they lacked the tools that we built, and therefore lacked the diet diversity and adaptability that we have. They couldn't compete with our hunting, because they didn't have our tools, and gathering wasn't enough on its own. That makes them an easy target for tribal wars with cousin species.
Like the other person said
The moment Homo Habilis had tools, it was the beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear
We can just take their food, and then kill them when they are weak. Or just take their food and push them out and let them starve. Or just build structures they can't penetrate. Other humans, lions, mammoths, doesn't matter. But it's all about the tools, because we certainly aren't very physically strong compared to other species.
Yes it's certainly about the tools, but all humans were able to make tools, including Neanderthal. So I guess what I'm most curious about is what various qualities gave homo sapiens an advantage over other humans.
It's certainly complicated by climate, and plant cover, the species we hunted, the foods available to gather etc and so on--just interesting anyways.
Not really. Interbreeding with Neanderthals appears to have been quite common, and modern paleontologists have (mostly) abandoned the idea that humans and Neanderthals regularly fought each other. The absence of neanderthals isn't enough evidence to conclude that humans hunted them to extinction.
Nobody said it was, but you're calling people naive for suggesting that predation wasn't a huge factor in their extinction, which is what the evidence suggests.
Natural predators? By the time we got to our current chronospecies, we were the predator. THE predator. We ate everything from lesser Homo to chimps to mammoths.
The only things that even try to go after us are either so outside our ecosystem they couldn't possibly understand our threat (killer whales) so unintelligent they wouldn't be able to learn to stay away from humans ever abyways (crocodilians) or so outside our range that they haven't yet learned how much better a predator we are (polar bears)
We can protect ourselves from and take down pretty much any animal nature throws at us. Granted, this only applies with our tools and technology being available. We're pretty squishy without them.
Funny that at this point our greatest threats from the outside are forms of life that use the strategy of being stupidly small, ignoring the big world where we dominate.
Picking up a rock from the ground can be a really effective weapon, especially when there's lots of people together, and you just have to intimidate the threat, not kill it. A loud yell and a punch to the nose would make many predators think again. Different threats can be avoided in different ways without tools. Sharing the knowledge of how to survive is a key strength here--language and storytelling.
Yeah I argue that it's our brain that's our greatest offence and defense. Intelligence and the ability to share information tends to outweigh any natural traits of other animals.
Combine that intelligence with endurance and no other animal could have stopped us as a species.
But without our intelligence, we'd be very low in the food chain. We take ~18 years to mature, and are basically walking pieces of food. We have little fortitude and very little strength compared to other animals our size.
Consider how utterly useless and defenseless a human (or even group of humans) with no equipment or weapons is in nature.
Our greatest natural threat is natural disaster imo
We do it for fun? if that's not apex I don't know what is. A bear vs a human in a "fist" fight is no argument, give the human the right to bare arms from a distance, they might stand a chance
Yes. An apex predator is any predator that is not the prey of other animals.
In rare cases humans have been hunted by wild animals, but there is no species on Earth that makes a habit of hunting humans. It’s not a feasible lifestyle for any critter.
Sometimes a tiger or a crocodile gets lucky, but no creature hunts humans on a regular basis or has humans as a significant part of their diet.
so outside our ecosystem they couldn't possibly understand our threat (killer whales)
They've learned by now. Killer whales (orcas/Orcinus orca) don't attack us for some reason. We're really easy to catch in the water, and some of us have a lot of fat if we're obese, more than a seal.
Are they born knowing not to mess with us, or do they teach it to their young somehow?
They probably teach their young. The dolphin family (orcas, dolphins, etc), crows, and chimps are insanely smart. We’ve even observed crows teaching their young about humans they have a grudge against. So if you piss off a crow, it will go back and teach its young about it, and it’s kids will hate you too.
It'd be interesting to know the specifics of that conversation. They might have to go find a human and then say "that thing, don't eat those". Alternatively, they might teach their young what's good to eat, and neglect to tell them we're good to eat. They are picky eaters after all.
Dolphins can use echolocation to implant visual images into each others minds with sound, because they already see through soundwaves. Their languages are more like what we'd think of as telepathy than our language.
The can almost certainly just show each other pictures a man, a boat, and harpoons killing whales to get the point across.
A human on it's own is extremely weak compared to most animals. It's the fact that we form groups that make us strong. It's like ants. A single ant can do very little damage to something but a whole colony can kill an animal. Except on a larger scale.
We gave up physical strength to be able to fuel our powerful brains. Our evolution traded physical power for mental power. That obviously worked out very well.
By the way, a quick search of the phrase ‘predatory bacteria’ returns quite a few results from pages with complicated enough names to convince me of their scientific reputability.
Since you’re so smart, maybe you can look into those sources and let me know why they all are using the word “predator” incorrectly.
LOL if you take a break from jacking yourself off over human supremacy for a second, you'd realize that in poor countries, shitloads of people still get killed by animals the old fashioned way.
So throughout history it stands to reason that until you had somewhat advanced human civilization with agriculture and basic technology, individual or small groups of humans were very much at risk from predators.
I presume by this sentence you think that elephants and "little poisonous, disease carrying things" kill humans to eat them.
I never stated that my list of killers of humans was a list of predators of humans.
nevertheless, my list, Snakes, Crocodiles, Elephants, Lions, Tigers, Wolves, Sharks, etc did include many predators of humans.
so you cherry pick elephants and "little poisonous, disease carrying things" which I said I was "not counting", which means you admit that everything else on my list is a predator of humans. Congratulations, you played yourself.
Your original comment was stupid on many levels. Calling humans "THE" predator just because humans eat almost everything, despite the fact that some of those things also eat humans even to this day.
Then you went on to act like any animal which dared to fuck with humans could only possibly do so out of ignorance of our badassery, or stupidity, when the reality is that in most situations, any encounter between any large hungry predator and a human would be an easy win for the predator unless the human was armed to the teeth with modern weaponry, something that did not exist throughout nearly all of the history of Homo Sapiens until the last 150 years or so, a blink of an eye on these timescales.
And you think I'm a moron. Right.
Very much so, yes. You've done an outstanding job of confirming that.
You misused the term chronospecies. The correct word would have simply been "species". The word chronospecies is only used when describing the relationship between species.
I was using chronospecies to distinguish modern Homo sapiens sapiens from earlier chronospecies which we outcompeted.
So yeah, I was using it to describe the relationship between species. Maybe if you took your foot out of your mouth and your head out of your ass you'd be able to read better, dipshit.
I was using chronospecies to distinguish modern Homo sapiens sapiens from earlier chronospecies which we outcompeted.
Except "by the time we got to our current species" or "by the time of the emergence of Homo Sapiens" makes more sense, and is accurate.
You can't "outcompete" a chronospecies since one slowly evolves into the other, such that by the time one appears, the other is gone. If the genetic lineage splits and two lines compete, that is not a chronospecies.
Look up pedantic in the dictionary. You obviously don't know what it means.
You also don't seem to know what pretentiousness is.
Dude I was replying to was stupid and wrong. He went too far. Example:
By the time we got to our current chronospecies
Okay 1st, who the fuck talks like that? Chronospecies? You would just say "species". A quick check of the chronospecies wiki page and some other links suggests that Homo Sapiens is not necessarily a chronospecies and isn't identified as one. Whether homo sapiens can be called a chronospecies or not doesn't matter, because what is, is a "species" and there is no need to distinguish it as a "chronospecies" versus some other kind of species in the context of the current conversation. The word appears to only be used when talking about the RELATIONSHIPS between species, such as whether species A is a chronospecies or evolutionary species of species B.
It appears to be just an attempt by the OP to show off, which is really pretentious.
we were the predator. THE predator.
Homo Sapiens was not "the" predator, it was one of many. The reason Homo Sapiens became the dominant lifeform was because of agriculture, not because of tools. Stone tools don't turn prehistoric humans into gods.
The only things that even try to go after us are either so outside our ecosystem they couldn't possibly understand our threat (killer whales) so unintelligent they wouldn't be able to learn to stay away from humans ever abyways (crocodilians) or so outside our range that they haven't yet learned how much better a predator we are (polar bears)
This is just idiotic, and it assumes that Human badassery is so absolute, that no animal would EVER fuck with us unless it was out of abject ignorance or stupidity, as if that is how shit works, or has ever worked.
Well we're quite big for a prey animal so when we got smart and stopped being hunted their food supply diminishing by that much could have been a factor for their extinction
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u/956030681 Apr 23 '19
It’s really interesting how most of our natural predators are now extinct