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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