• Re: Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size

    From Paul Crowley@21:1/5 to Paul Crowley on Thu Dec 16 05:09:35 2021
    On Thursday, December 16, 2021 at 1:04:52 PM UTC, Paul Crowley wrote:
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379121005230?via%3Dihub

    https://twitter.com/johnhawks/status/1471196707606171653/photo/1

    This paper is nonsense. Firstly, there's the sheer danger to
    any homo of getting anywhere near these animals, especially
    as a potential predator. Second, there'd be no point. How
    could a small group consume more than a tiny fraction of
    the meat.

    But, more fundamentally, IF homo had been an active predator
    on these massive animals 1.5 ma to 0.5 ma then the genus
    would have been a part of the ecology and left roughly the
    same number of fossils as any other major predator (such as,
    say, Homotherium -- the sabre-tooth tiger). Homo fossils are
    almost totally absent from the landscape -- present at most
    as one for every 10,000 homotheriums, probably closer to
    somewhere between one in 100,000 and one in a million.

    Yet the only likely cause of this pattern -- the fall in size over
    1.5 Myr of dominant herbivores -- can only be the result of
    homo behaviour.

    What was it?

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