Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Cleistheknees t1_j9r3b6v wrote

Large game is far more amenable to persistence predation, and non-fatal injuries are a vital part of that hunting style. It’s almost impossible to drop a large ungulate with a single shot, even with the most advanced compound bows available today, with carbon fiber shafts and titanium heads and all kinds of TactiCool gizmos.

8

snail360 t1_j9r6qtb wrote

actually I could easily one shot any large ungulate

12

Cleistheknees t1_j9raapp wrote

I don’t think your mom would appreciate you talking about her like that

12

A_Fat_Pokemon t1_j9rdhgi wrote

One-shot 100 ungulates to unlock a new camo for the bow

6

snail360 t1_j9seq9a wrote

1000th kill congratulations you have unlocked Peter Griffin Ungulate

2

rittenalready t1_j9ry6mo wrote

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-animals-like-moose-elk-deer-fall-and-die-immediately-when-hit-by-even-an-arrow-whereas-lions-bears-and-dogs-dont-and-can-be-alive-for-days-and-miles

Double lung shots drop them- 200 yards- moose elk and deer. Deer can be dropped almost immediately if you are in a stand and at an angle hit double lung heart shot. No tracking. Easiest tracking I’ve ever done is my father shot a deer as it bent down for some reason at a weird angle it put its head right in front of where it’s lungs would be-arrow pinned the head to the chest and it fell over backwards

4

rittenalready t1_j9ry8qa wrote

200 yards is about as far as they run the shot is usually 30 yards

3

huntt252 t1_j9rznd1 wrote

Not trying to argue but large ungulates are very easy to kill with a single shot from an arrow. Regardless of primitive or advanced archery gear. If something sharp passes through the lungs or heart of a large ungulate like elk or moose, then they tend to die rapidly. The vasculature is so condensed in this region that cutting it causes massive blood loss and rapid death. It wouldn’t happen with a wood tipped arrow. But with freshly flaked stone it absolutely would.

2

Cleistheknees t1_j9s1g9t wrote

Anyone is welcome to argue whatever point they’d like.

In this context, large ungulates = hippopotamus, bison, elephants, rhinoceros, large boars, etc, because the actual animals in this discussion are generally extinct Pleistocene megafauna, not white tailed deer, which I agree are not difficult at all to drop in one shot for an experience or lucky hunter. The ambiguity here is probably because “large ungulate” means something different to me as an evolutionary biologist than it does to hunters. I hunt, but I wouldn’t really call myself “a hunter”, if that makes sense.

> If something sharp passes through the lungs or heart of a large ungulate like elk or moose, then they tend to die rapidly.

Rapidly seems kinda relative. I’ve double lung punched a prairie elk and had to go over two kilometers to get it.

6

eMPereb t1_j9s6g72 wrote

Hmmm… But the “point” is the “point?”

0

AquaVada t1_j9w1ima wrote

They are injured or bled to death, I don't imagine a zebra walking away with a 1foot stick inside it's bowels, humans have evolved to hunt down their injured prays over long distances while inflicting multiple shots from safe distances. You spend your precious arrows but get rewarded afterwards.

1

Cleistheknees t1_j9wety8 wrote

> They are injured or bled to death, I don’t imagine a zebra walking away with a 1foot stick inside it’s bowels,

You would be amazed at what a wild animal is capable of in the most dire circumstances. I have personally shot a prairie elk through both lungs and had to track it about 2km before finding it. There’s all kinds of footage from various sources like wildlife documentaries and whatnot of animals with dramatic and mortal injuries pushing on for hours.

> humans have evolved to hunt down their injured prays over long distances while inflicting multiple shots from safe distances. You spend your precious arrows but get rewarded afterwards.

This is called persistence hunting theory, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it’s really just a theory at this point. There is virtually no material evidence of it being a consistent selection pressure across human evolutionary history. It was presented as fact in a book called Born to Run in 2009, and unfortunately got picked up by the lay public as if it was a settled question.

We do indeed have material evidence of consistent butchery going back ~2 million years, which much farther into our genus than sapiens, but putting a narrative of persistence hunting onto that is still a speculative leap. It could just as easily be opportunism, ambushes, scavenging, some mix of all three, etc.

3

Yrolg1 t1_jab011j wrote

> This is called persistence hunting theory, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it’s really just a theory at this point. There is virtually no material evidence of it being a consistent selection pressure across human evolutionary history.

There are numerous cursorial and thermoregulatory adaptions which make more sense within the context of persistence hunting, however. That being said, these made their appearance about a million years before h. sapiens was a glint in erectus's eye or definitive projectile weapons.

1

Cleistheknees t1_jabjzb8 wrote

That is unfortunately what we call a “just so” story, a common logical error when looking at traits and suggesting adaptive histories for them based on some trait interactions at a given point in time.

As for the timeline, bipedality is far older than one million years before sapiens, and in fact arrives around three million years before the earliest erectus. Australopiths are decidedly bipedal by 5mya, there’s a strong case for pushing this another million years back. Erectus dates back to just barely 2mya.

So, we’ll say bipedality arrives at around 5mya, the earliest stone tools at 3.2, the persistent presence of stone tools at 2.7, the diaspora of toolmakers out of Africa at 2.2, persistent butchery at 1.9, which are mostly small animals not really suited to persistence predation. Megafauna butchery arrives at around 1.5, a full 3.5+ million years after bipedalism.

Hair loss is a hazier picture because we still have basically all of the mammalian genetics for fur, and the adaptations seem to be substantially in hundreds of regulatory elements, which are harder to date as precisely. That said, the error bars don’t really extend back much further than 900kya, which is 1.1 mya after megafauna butchery becomes commonplace. What we’d need to see is hair loss happening during the transition from persistent butchery of small animals and into larger ungulates, etc, not over a million years after.

Remember, this is all a position again the actual hypothesis coined “Endurance Running/Persistence Hunting Hypothesis”, not the occurrence of persistence hunting in human evolutionary history overall, which is incontrovertible. The hypothesis frames persistence hunting as the adaptive roadmap for bipedalism and hairlessness, and given the timeline of these elements it’s basically unsupportable.

1

Yrolg1 t1_jack5ch wrote

> As for the timeline, bipedality is far older than one million years before sapiens, and in fact arrives around three million years before the earliest erectus. Australopiths are decidedly bipedal by 5mya, there’s a strong case for pushing this another million years back. Erectus dates back to just barely 2mya.

There are different kinds of bipedalism. Australopithecus was not an obligate biped. Early homo were unable to run even if they were obligate bipeds. Erectus was the first hominin that demonstrated modern capabilities. This is what I meant by cursorial adaptions, i.e. adaptations for running, which are not derived traits from earlier primates and novel to Erectus onwards. Nuchal ligaments, Long bone length, gait, narrowing of the hip, extension of the achilles tendon and arched foot, broader heel and short toes. I'm unsure of any others off the top of my head. These traits would have appeared around 1.8mya, but erectus was a highly variable chronospecies so I said "over a million years ago" because I wasn't positive if they appeared all at once. If they were present in African erectus or Asian erectus, etc.

> Hair loss is a hazier picture because we still have basically all of the mammalian genetics for fur, and the adaptations seem to be substantially in hundreds of regulatory elements,

I wasn't actually counting hair loss as a thermoregulatory adaptation, because it definitely is more of a recent feature. Hair vs body lice and all. There are other adaptations which may have, or were, present. These include evaporative cooling, larger body size and its corresponding metabolic benefits and greater surface area (to prevent hyperthermia). The changes in gait and obligate bipedalism mentioned above also conferred metabolic/energy conservation benefits. Bipedalism itself can be considered such an adaptation, but it clearly didn't evolved in response to selective pressure for hunting, and that's the rub with much of this. It very well might be that we just evolved a kit that could be repurposed for a hunting style - and we're misunderstanding the cause and effect.

> Remember, this is all a position again the actual hypothesis coined “Endurance Running/Persistence Hunting Hypothesis”, not the occurrence of persistence hunting in human evolutionary history overall, which is incontrovertible. The hypothesis frames persistence hunting as the adaptive roadmap for bipedalism and hairlessness, and given the timeline of these elements it’s basically unsupportable.

This is a fair point. There is of course the question of when it appears, and I'd argue that there is support for its appearance well before sapiens.

> which is incontrovertible.

I disagree about how emphatic this is. I think there's ample support for its occurrence, of course, and I do believe it, but the primary source for it in modern humans comes from a single author (I don't recall his name, but it might be Liebenberg) writing about the San, who are very much a removed population operating outside their indigenous cultural norms. Moreover, there are several criticisms of his work the greatest that out of the dozen or two dozen observed persistence hunts, the majority of them were induced by the researcher and not spontaneous. So there's weak evidence that it was a preferred strategy, although from my own reading it's actually very successful compared to traditional hunting in that the great majority of hunts are successful and on average the caloric efficiency does well exceed a traditional hunt when factoring in success rate. Maybe they're just picky.

Maybe projectile weapons are just much safer and preferred. One of the postulates of the hypothesis is that persistence hunting was a response to the general inability of a hominin to take down non-exhausted megafauna through other means. Even with handaxes and spears, it would be very difficult, unless you're (literally) a Neanderthal. Perhaps the adoption of projectile weapons (the oldest don't predate sapiens, I believe 90kya) is what ultimately ended the reliance, if any, on habitual persistence hunting. Could Erectus even throw a spear? I seem to recall hearing something about their wrist being unable to rotate.

1

Cleistheknees t1_jad9ny7 wrote

> There are different kinds of bipedalism.

Sure, but limb development is highly canalized even in quadrupeds. You have to look at this scenario from the paradigm of the selection pressure which started our lineage on the trajectory towards bipedalism, and it very clearly extends far back beyond the earliest signal of even the Australopiths. A change in a trait like major skeletal morphology takes an extremely long time to fix.

> Early homo were unable to run even if they were obligate bipeds.

I’m going to push back on this. It’s too confident a claim for the physical evidence base, which is scarce. Unless some major work was released and I haven’t heard about it, which I feel is unlikely because I attend most seminars from the major anthropogenic institutions like CARTA and Leakey.

> Nuchal ligaments, Long bone length, gait, narrowing of the hip, extension of the achilles tendon and arched foot, broader heel and short toes. I’m unsure of any others off the top of my head. These traits would have appeared around 1.8mya

All of these have a pretty clear developmental trajectories extending far back beyond erectus. Australopith tibias are notably elongated.

> It very well might be that we just evolved a kit that could be repurposed for a hunting style - and we’re misunderstanding the cause and effect.

This is basically “just so” stories in a nutshell.

1

Cleistheknees t1_jadx5yb wrote

> I disagree about how emphatic this is. I think there’s ample support for its occurrence, of course, and I do believe it, but the primary source for it in modern humans comes from a single author (I don’t recall his name, but it might be Liebenberg) writing about the San, who are very much a removed population operating outside their indigenous cultural norms.

Louis Liebenberg did the most detailed ethnography, but he’s certainly not the only source. As a grad student I personally interviewed people in East Tanzania who hunt local ungulates in a way we categorize as persistence hunting, but absent the endurance running aspect, which is something Liebenberg discusses as a limitation. Like, they jog of course, but it’s more of a 4-5 hour jog-track-jog-track etc.

You’re probably thinking of Pickering and Bunn’s critical response to him a couple years after that first paper, and while I don’t want to speak for other people, I would confidently say most people agree their retort stepped way over the bounds of what is reasonable. Louis was never making causal claims that endurance running and PH were the bundles of selection pressure that causally produced the capabilities related to endurance running, because this is a circular and nonsensical “just so”, and certainly not a mistake a staff associate at Harvard would make. His work is really more about tracking than endurance running, and it was before the wave of very clarifying research came out in the 2010’s which illuminated much of the transitionary period between Australopiths and early Homo, a lot of which was morphological, a lot out of Olduvai, etc.

Very important to delineate the version of persistence hunting in the capital-H hypothesis, with the actual anthropological definition, which in colloquial language would basically just be extended tracking at a pace the animal cannot maintain for a number of hours. Running a marathon chasing after a gazelle is a fantasy introduced by McDougall.

1