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My grandfather told me stories of how the plains were once home to mighty herds of Uhauls. How our ancestors learned to use every part. Even build houses out of them. Now days you might find the occasional Budget Van but the wind remembers.
I inherited the first headdress made from the front end dash from my father. Sometimes, in the midst of the night, you can still hear the truck's spirit guiding souls, telling them their destination is 100 feet ahead on the left.
Such woke bullshit. You mean to tell me a woman with a bow and arrow can take down Truckasaurus? Next you'll tell me a woman can raid tombs. What's next? Women astronauts?
Of course you never eat the battery \[out of respect\] and instead offer it to the Road God before burying it facing Detroit to honor the UHaul's spirit Mother ...
There's a sickening picture of there from the Wild West era. Initially, it looks like a photo of a pointy hill or rock formation, but when you look closely you realize it's just a unfathomably large heap of scalped off uhaul roof sections.... Just discarded in the desert. Piled higher than any scrapheap you'd find these days
Sadistic bastards would use detours and create traffic to corral convoys of uhauls, numbering in the THOUSANDS, into low clearance overpasses.
Makes me nauseous just bringing it up
Okay, a uhaul is set to roll at a fixed 5 or 10mh and the pedals are disabled, door is locked. Maybe it has a tracking self driving system. I would use the rocks to smash the window and pop the hood, throw a big rock into the engine. I bet that would do it
Jam something like a wadded up rag or a raw potato into the exhaust pipe, then hammer in a rock behind it to really lock it into place. With nowhere for the exhaust to escape, the engine stalls. Now the uHaul is helpless and we can dismantle it at our leisure.
Yep. Humans are optimized for pursuit predation. Lots of animals are faster and/or stronger, but not a lot of them can outlast us. Sort of like wolves - they don’t win because they can outfight their prey, they win because they “hound” their prey to exhaustion by trotting along behind them for hours.
That’s probably true. If you look at our other hunting buddies like hawks or (occasionally) great cats, they’re more “point and shoot” hunting partners, whereas dogs tend to keep up with us even on horseback.
The caracal, a lynx from north Africa and India, people have kept them for ages. There's a tradition of releasing flocks of pigeons and betting on how many get swatted down by them in one leap.
Have you seen the latest out of Yellowstone? One wolf chasing a cow elk. Running her ragged, until she got back to the herd. Then they took turns playing stomp the wolf. I think the wolf lived, maybe. It’s all about tactics.
And some people can't understand how moral systems evolve. 10 people with sharpened sticks, working together can hunt anything. 10 elk working together can protect each other from wolves
Some people can't get their fat asses off of couches just to go to the convenience store and therefore are unconvinced that their ancestors were actually fit AF, because if they weren't they would starve to death or get killed by a predator.
Right? Just because they had no giant shoulders to stand on, doesn’t mean they weren’t extremely smart and savvy. They were 100x more competent at that kind of thing than any of us would be.
I think people are dramatically overestimating the strength of a U-Haul truck as well.
Throw that spear through the windshield and I'll show you exactly how early humans took down a woolly mammoth.
In a few thousand years if humanity hasn't wiped itself out people will claim tanks can't have been real because how could one man with a toob kill a 70 plus ton killing machine
From my understanding, this was how it was done. Hunters would injure the beast just enough to cause strategic bleeding, then just follow it around for 2-3 days until it gave out.
Really it was not even that hard, humans can more or less keep on the move for days non stop. We didn't even need to hurt it first just chase it till its body failed and kill it well it was not even able to stand. So in a way I expect ops post is kind of right in a way we'd most likely not have killed something that was 5t in one big battle using sharp sticks we'd have used fire and sound to scare the shit out of it and not stop untill it wasn't able to run any more and then killed it with sharp sticks.
Yep I said days and not indefinitely due to our inability to carry unlimited amouts of food and water. Still we could carry our own water and food the stuff we hunted couldn't.
Op has never seen the film of pygmies taking down an elephant in the jungle. Forensic analysis of the skeletons of early man showed many healed injuries similar to the ones rodeo clowns commonly get nowadays.
We fought our way to the top and we are good at it.
Humans have always been aggressive. We didnt evolve with giant claws or hard skin but we are smart and tough. We have unmatched endurance in the animal world.
We literally hunted apex predators to death or hunted their food supply to the point they went extinct. We battled the environment and each other for thousands of years till we conquered the land.
Once we started just fighting each other we realized we are hard to fucking kill so we had to make new weapons, those advancements led to todays modern society.
The funniest shit i ever hear is folks saying people are so violent these days. No, we have always been violent by nature. Its the reason we didnt go extinct.
When I was in school that was a bit of a meme: humans are so weak, not good at anything: slow, not very strong, bad eyesight bla bla bla. Which is ridiculous. Humans are terrifying, we might not be fast, but we can outlast everyone, outsmart everyone and our eyes are pretty good for guessing distances which allows our hands to throw stuff pretty precisely. You are telling me the ones who came up with nukes and AR-15s are the weak ones?
See humans are worse than any specialist animal in a 1v1 in that specialist animals field
Too bad humans find ways to pick the field
You might be number one tree climber, but buddy this is a baking competition now, good luck using your tree climbing skills
>You might be number one tree climber, but buddy this is a baking competition now, good luck using your tree climbing skills
And so it was that a leopard came to be a contestant of _The Great British Bake Off_
A human spends 20% of their calorie intake on thinking, and it’s a far better investment then faster legs, stronger muscles or sharper eyes ever would be for us.
Honestly, imagine being some primeval prey animal being perused by a group of humans. They can chase you for days or weeks without tiring, able to track you through complicated methods you don’t understand. It’s only a matter of time before you are too exhausted to run anymore and they’ll come to devour you. They can communicate and coordinate in ways that puts other pack animals to shame. They wear the skins of your dead friends for warmth and have fashioned their bones into strange, deadly weapons. At night, they gather around fires to laugh and sing songs celebrating the time they slaughtered your mother and siblings. You’re totally fucked and you know it because *you’ve see them do this before.*
We’re a truly spectacular species, but *damn* we’re scary. It’s no wonder we’ve never run into the same ecological or biological barriers that have stopped other animals from being as successful as us.
I don’t even know where the “humans are weak” crap comes from. Physical strength wise we are not very strong, but our strength is on par with large canines at least. Our endurance destroys them. Bad eyesight is also ludicrous, we have binocular vision in three colours… most mammals have neither of those. Our sense of smell isn’t up to a dogs, but it’s not bad by any means. Our hearing isn’t weak either.
Of course if you compare our eyes to a hawk, an animal known for good eyesight, we seem blind. If you compare our nose to a bloodhound, we seem crippled… but in general we are pretty tough animals.
Humans are smart, creative, hardy, and petty. Those are the characteristics that helped us survive for so long. And also the reason why I'm terrified of chimpanzees, they are like humans in all the bad ways. They are the only creature, that comes to mind, that has created weapons and traps to wage war against each other. They even do some of the same war crimes to each other.
You don't need amazing eyesight for good accuracy, just good enough. The smart and generous people have been carrying humanity for the most part, while the hardy reproduce and keep the population alive.
This reminds me of a quote, wherein the parents of a mild-mannered, *deeply* English mathematician are introduced:
*‘Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo–which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead. As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.’*
*-Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon*
Want to take a guess why? Through war we created the power of the sun in a tin can. Why would you want war when a nuke is the response.
Without the constant conflict of the last 1000 years the peace and technology of the last 50 would be a fever dream of a starving peasant.
Also. The gulf war, the Bosnia war, the troubles. Russia invading Georgia. Russia attacking Ukraine. The gulf war pushed out understanding of weapons tech because it was the first time we had a chance to use our new shot at that point. The tech we have no makes it all look like a calculator.
We literally have a supercomputer with wings for a fighter. Auto lock missle defense systems. Oh and you use gps right? The United States Military built it.
War drives us as a species. Its a sad and brutal truth but its undeniable.
You are obviously correct but I’d like to add that trade and especially ease of trade between rival nations has been just as big, if not more, of a deterrent to war. If it’s mutually beneficial to keep trade active, countries are much more likely to work things out or look the other way. China is a great example. The whole world knows about their human rights abuse, but we trade with them so…eh. North Korea also has human rights issues but we don’t trade with them, so we treat them differently.
The problem is the wealth inequality that has come with that power. It is worse now than it was in the French Revolution and not trending in a good direction. The masses are now controlled, and I think the trade could be less optimal than it seems in the future if it continues in the same direction. People controlled by extreme poverty and the powerful arsenal that the leaders have is not good for the lower brackets, which continue to get closer as the top continues to pull away. IMO
Imagine the ancient humans who worked hard and strategized to hunt woolly mammoths only to see their distant descendants deny it.
Also, the ancient humans without any education could clearly think better than them.
Thought the same thing. Go for the legs with spears. Or even set a trap like a 6 x6 x6 foot hole covered in branches and get it to run into it. It doesn't have to be big enough for it to fall fully in. Just deep enough that when running it causes it to fall and maybe even break its leg.
I have no sources so don't quote me, but I believe it wasn't uncommon to herd animals off of even small dropoffs, cause while primates can tank a 10 foot drop, elephants cannot.
I've heard of that before too. It's also well known that humans would chase animals to the point of exhaustion. (some tribes still do) While many animals are faster than humans, none can match our stamina thanks to our ability to sweat and run on two legs
We were even hunting at fucking *noon*. You know, when the sun is so hight that everyone just want shades and a nap ? Humans were strapping their boots and racing.
One of the reasons why we tamed wolf is that they are the closest species to hold the distance with us. Barely.
That and they were fairly easily domesticated "oh shit you angry 2legged things will give me food and warmth and all i gotta do is what i usually do just at your say so, duuuuude sign me up mans best friend right here my guy " or something like that
Before :
Boss say we go here and we hunt that. We kill it. We eat it. We sleep.
After :
Two legged boss say we go here and we hunt that. We kill it. We eat it. We sleep. We get belly rub and scritch scritch on the head.
Wolves are a social animal, it's not that difficult to convince them to work with us. We were not even the first non-wolf to propose a cooperation. Crows works in team with them too. They spot a target, circle around while screaming. Wolves hear the signal, come check and kill the prey. Crows come after to feast on the corpse.
I have been teaching my son about emotions lately, he is 6 so not very sophisticated yet. We haven’t gotten to quilty though ;)
Do I explain it as “that feeling when you realize a Reddit stranger is a sleepy hunter”?
We are designed for running hot too. For our given mass we have a huge surface area to mass ratio, we don't have fur and we have 4 times the density of sweat glands of the primate with the next most. Humans need far more water per pound of body weight than most other mammals but it's all in service of being able to push other animals to the breaking point, be able to kill them and then carry the kill back home.
Yes! Endurance hunting! Humans are the apex endurance hunters on the planet. While a gazelle or deer could run 30-40mph, they can only go so long before needing to stop for a break.
100%. Native Americans did this relatively recently. And no, they didn’t necessarily use all of the animal because there was an abundance. The evidence: a fuck ton of bones at the bottom of a cliff. Source: my anthropology teacher.
The same with most predators. Why risk getting injured or waste a lot of energy hunting a healthy adult when there's a weaker target that'll go down quick and easy?
To me that statement sounded right at first but I have to disagree after thinking about it.
The guy does not need to trust anything in that sience. He just does not need to verify the whole thing if finding one or more specific flaws makes the whole thing unbelievable.
If someone tells me that wood is soft and delicious I don't need to disprove that it is delicious. I just need to disprove one of the two to cast the other one into doubt. So I poke a tree instead of eating and poking it.
Look up pursuit predation too, it’s wild. The idea is that humans aren’t faster or stronger than their prey but instead have endurance far beyond that of most land animals.
Imagine being hunted by a group of small pigs with sharp sticks. You run away and think you’re safe. So you lay down to rest only for them to turn up again 30 minutes later, just to harass you, so you get up and run again. You’re used to sleeping 18 hours a day and this shit is exhausting. 10 hours straight they have you on the run, wondering when these assholes are gonna give up. You’re terrified then your legs collapse because you can’t take it anymore. You just want to sleep. Then there they are, standing over you with their pointy sticks and all you can do is go to sleep, forever…
Then these motherfuckers spend the night hanging around a campfire, laughing and high fiving each other, just partying. And they still have the energy to have sex then go to sleep for like 8 hours then get up and do that shit all over again!
And then the wolves show up and the humans are like, “wut? You wanna catch this smoke too? Or you wanna join up and share in the spoils?” And now they got dogs which are *always* ready to party…
Humans are wild. What was this post about again? I got caught up in the moment
Not to mention, have you seen professional American football players throwing balls for hundreds of meters with pin-point accuracy whilst on the run? Or, similar sports where people throw things? We humans are made for hurling pointy sticks.
We take a lot of cool things for granted. Our dexterity & coordination are out of this world compared to what most other creatures can pull off.
It’s pretty crazy to think about sometimes, makes you feel like you’re really wasting your time lmao. I should be doing parkour or something.
>Then these motherfuckers spend the night hanging around a campfire, laughing and high fiving each other, just partying.
Idk why but this had me lol. Tiny annoying pigs: "woohooo we're gonna end this mothafucka HIGHFIVE!" and you're just laying there bleeding witnessing them having an orgy.
I once spent some time with a top Ultra Marathon runner. Dude had NO body fat. He was in his 50's but still runs a marathon more or less every day just for training so when he runs races where he goes over 100 miles without sleep it doesn't phase him. And he does this for FUN.
Imagine what he could manage to achieve if his LIFE was on the line, or his kids were going hungry?
Actual you can trace a lot of extinctions of mega fauna to around the time humanity turned up. We are the single deadliest animal ever known and have been that way for a very very long time.
Someone pointed out that mega fauna survived in Africa while they disappeared elsewhere shortly after humans arrived. One possible explanation is that African animals learned to avoid humans even before we became the deadly apex predator that we are now.
That, or evolved to eat them, kick them to death, or trample the bipedal death-machines into dusty paste.
There's a reason why lions, zebras and hippos never got domesticated, and that's not because they wouldn't have been useful animals.
Now I want a sci-fi nature documentary made by observing aliens where they talk about all the animals that evolved to survive past the mass extinction event known as "Humanity".
When you look at the animals that thrive in cities, I think you could make a solid case that we're encouraging the evolution of intelligence in other species. We've unwittingly created all kinds of traps and puzzles that reward high problem-solving capabilities.
Along that line, it always annoys me that early humans/neanderthals in tv and recreations are always unkempt with messy hair. By the time we had figured out flint knapping, spears, and sewing furs, we certainly had figured out how to brush, braid, dread, and otherwise style hair to adorn ourselves.
Alright, i'll bite.
Stab the gas tank with your sharp rock and watch as the uhaul spills its lifeblood across the next ~mile and a half. I'm sure you'll be able to catch up eventually.
Ooh, i just looked up how fast mammoths can run. Not only is this uhaul bleeding out, it's also stuck in a school zone.
I hear this and I remember a book called footfall. Elephant aliens invade earth and find out they're losing the battle when a spear gets launched by a guy that know what they're doing and as the elephant lays dying it thinks about the horror that is... our "thumbs". Truly terrifying
I'm currently writing a scifi book where the aliens are just as intelligent and dexterous as humans are, but they can't lift their arms over their heads and they have a bit of natural armor, so they never really developed ranged weapons.
Imo shoulders are just as important as thumbs are.
There's really no reason humans *can* lift our arms over our heads and it was entirely an evolutionary fluke, and the vast majority of animals on the planet can't, and therefore an intelligent alien species out there somewhere likely wouldn't be able to.
In addition, only two animals on the planet use projectile weapons to hunt as a primary means of hunting. Human beings and the archerfish.
A Uhaul truck doesn’t go fast with a couple spears through the tires, a spear in the fuel tank and the driver wounded by a spear which is how mammoths were hunted.
But that doesn’t matter to people like the OP because he has closed his mind to any facts he doesn’t;t like.
Ignorance is curable but only if you are open minded.
I used to bow hunt
A deer is a relatively fast animal, at least compared to humans. They also have incredibly good hearing, being able to hear twig snaps and plants rustling from pretty considerable distances.
I just sit in place, fire one arrow that punctures either the heart or lungs (or both!), give it a wait, then track a blood trail to find my game.
They are called TOOLS, we invented things like archery or spears to defeat animals that are bigger than us.
Also wait until that guy hears about humans hunting whales 10,000-15,000 years ago. We’re incredibly good at killing even the largest animals to ever exist on the planet.
Additionally, as I recall, one apparent strategy that archaeologists have worked out was to goad the mammoths towards cliffs and let gravity do most of the work.
Yeah conspiracy theorist's have no faith in their species, i find it insulting to assume ancient folks couldn't stack a bunch of massive rocks to built a pyramid.
Also just the general lack of understanding that large-scale constructions are made a lot easier when you have a huge amount of slave labor and a lack of concern for human life.
Bruh, the proto-human may not be as intelligent as current humans are (even then, I'm doubting that fact more and more as the day goes by) but they make up for that with pure physical prowess.
Sure, they can't solo a mammoth, but a bunch of them throwing relatively straight branches with pointed ends or sharpened rocks attached to the head at damn near anything that walks on land?
People are really underselling spear heads and arrow heads. That shit was exquisitely crafted with highly functional form. These people were experts, and their artifacts were so robust that we still find them today.
Atlatl-thrown obsidian-tipped spear does more damage than modern folk understand.
That and running. Sure, big animal will outrun us. But for how many miles? Humans are relentless, they will injure and track for miles.
The last mammoths died roughly 4,000 years ago roughly 1,000 years after the pyramids of Giza were built. There were on isolated islands from roughly 10,000 years ago though.
It was an isolated population stranded on an island that was too small to support megafauna indefinitely. They gradually starved to death. Humans were not responsible.
Mammoths apparently weighed somewhere between 4-15 _tons_.
If I had to hunt and scavenge for every morsel of food that graced my lips, you bet I’d find every dumbass I knew to help me poke it until it pops. No way I’m letting that much food get away without a fight.
Why do conspiracy theorists think humans are incompetent and pathetic? Pyramids? No way, humans could’ve never built those. Mammoths? Nah, the aliens hunted them, dude. Humans could never.
They’re literally living in a world of magnificent and breathtaking human excellence and still can’t fathom that humans did crazy shit to get here.
Turns out humans are really resourceful, good at organizing together with other humans and good at making weapons and tools. Who’d have thought?! That’s kind of how we became to dominant species on the planet.
And they type that opinion on a glass touchscreen of a mobile device networked to the biggest library of knowledge in human history, made of minerals and metals from the far corners of the world and capable of billions of calculations per second. But big game hunting in groups with rocks and torches and spears, he thinks humans can’t figure that one out eh?
Or is it just that he, personally, wouldn’t be able to figure it out?
These people didn't just stand and poke animals at close range.
They fired on them.
A dart launched from an Atlatl travels at nearly 100 miles an hour with a stone arrow tip. It can travel 100 meters with prime accuracy at 20 meters (65 feet).
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If you show me a truck made of flesh and bone, I'll organise a gang to take it down with sharpened sticks.
Also, like, even a bunch of brawny guys with naught but muscles, rocks, and a *dream* could probably kill a Uhaul.
My grandfather told me stories of how the plains were once home to mighty herds of Uhauls. How our ancestors learned to use every part. Even build houses out of them. Now days you might find the occasional Budget Van but the wind remembers.
I remember eating my 1st distributor cap after a hunt.
I hope you followed traditional and striped your face with the oil of your kill or it’s not a legit first kill 🤷♀️
I still wear that spark plug wire in my hair.
I inherited the first headdress made from the front end dash from my father. Sometimes, in the midst of the night, you can still hear the truck's spirit guiding souls, telling them their destination is 100 feet ahead on the left.
The youth have returned to the old ways and started collecting catalytic converters.
In a small part of the tribes original homeland, they say you can still hear the fun facts written on the sides of the u-hauls
It’s a despicable practice. At least use the whole body. They just out one part and leave it to die.
Horizon Zero dawn be like
Such woke bullshit. You mean to tell me a woman with a bow and arrow can take down Truckasaurus? Next you'll tell me a woman can raid tombs. What's next? Women astronauts?
Women can be cyborgs choom
And a President to Cyborgs
My tribe made little necklaces out of the teeth of starter solenoids that we would catch as kids.
This is some Mad Ma- level world-building
Children don't realise they're being cruel
Of course you never eat the battery \[out of respect\] and instead offer it to the Road God before burying it facing Detroit to honor the UHaul's spirit Mother ...
My grandfather taught me how to symbolically bury the battery at sea.
Now that's good eating!
Ahhh...the days of distributor caps.. when the trucks were natural and not filled with all those artificial preservatives
Ta-tan-ka. Tatanka!
TaTonka Trucks. Built tough
Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew!
Now in order to see a uhaul, you have to go to a rental zoo to see their sad, domesticated descendants.
I heard scientist are trying to clone them.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
But Pepperidge farm ain’t gonna keep it to hisself
There's a sickening picture of there from the Wild West era. Initially, it looks like a photo of a pointy hill or rock formation, but when you look closely you realize it's just a unfathomably large heap of scalped off uhaul roof sections.... Just discarded in the desert. Piled higher than any scrapheap you'd find these days Sadistic bastards would use detours and create traffic to corral convoys of uhauls, numbering in the THOUSANDS, into low clearance overpasses. Makes me nauseous just bringing it up
Grandpa and his cousins didn't kill them, just tame and ride them for a while. Mostly around moving time.
Exactly. We already learned this from the Flinstones. 
I think my entire childhood just exploded.
Shit, I could solo a uhaul just trying to drive it down the highway.
Okay, a uhaul is set to roll at a fixed 5 or 10mh and the pedals are disabled, door is locked. Maybe it has a tracking self driving system. I would use the rocks to smash the window and pop the hood, throw a big rock into the engine. I bet that would do it
Jam something like a wadded up rag or a raw potato into the exhaust pipe, then hammer in a rock behind it to really lock it into place. With nowhere for the exhaust to escape, the engine stalls. Now the uHaul is helpless and we can dismantle it at our leisure.
I saw someone drive a U-Haul right under a low bridge… popped the top right off. Once ya pop, the U-Haul does stop.
I fucken love watching Arkansas police chases.
This guy Uhaul's
Step one, we find a cliff or a ravine we can herd it over or into.
Or chase it til it runs out of gas (is exhausted) and dig out the soft insides.
Yep. Humans are optimized for pursuit predation. Lots of animals are faster and/or stronger, but not a lot of them can outlast us. Sort of like wolves - they don’t win because they can outfight their prey, they win because they “hound” their prey to exhaustion by trotting along behind them for hours.
 Pictured: Early human hunters
This is it. Retire this gif.
Thats why us and wolves became friends. Together, we could eat everything!
That’s probably true. If you look at our other hunting buddies like hawks or (occasionally) great cats, they’re more “point and shoot” hunting partners, whereas dogs tend to keep up with us even on horseback.
I need to know more about the great cat hunting buddies??
Cheetahs are more “tameable” than most great cats, and there’s some accounts of royalty using them for hunting in Egypt and Arabia.
They are super family orientated. Some of the most successful captive populations have emotional support dogs.
The caracal, a lynx from north Africa and India, people have kept them for ages. There's a tradition of releasing flocks of pigeons and betting on how many get swatted down by them in one leap.
Have you seen the latest out of Yellowstone? One wolf chasing a cow elk. Running her ragged, until she got back to the herd. Then they took turns playing stomp the wolf. I think the wolf lived, maybe. It’s all about tactics.
And some people can't understand how moral systems evolve. 10 people with sharpened sticks, working together can hunt anything. 10 elk working together can protect each other from wolves
Some people can't get their fat asses off of couches just to go to the convenience store and therefore are unconvinced that their ancestors were actually fit AF, because if they weren't they would starve to death or get killed by a predator.
Hey now I hunt for my food. Just the other day I had to hunt the hot pocket out of the freezer cuz my wife put a bunch of other crap in front of it!
If it was in the freezer, wasn't it a cold pocket?
Like the mammoths, it was entrapped in ice. So technically, yes?
The cursed Woolly Hot Pocket
I had to run to catch the ice cream truck! I know what our ancestors went through.
Todays kids will never know
And sleep inside it to keep warm.
 Edit: gif instead of words
Right? Just because they had no giant shoulders to stand on, doesn’t mean they weren’t extremely smart and savvy. They were 100x more competent at that kind of thing than any of us would be.
Fuck I'll hunt the truck the same way they hunted the mammoths, I will just follow it till it runs out of gas then kill it at my pleasure.
I think people are dramatically overestimating the strength of a U-Haul truck as well. Throw that spear through the windshield and I'll show you exactly how early humans took down a woolly mammoth.
Or one front tyre.
Or the radiator.
I'll join your uhaul hunting gang
A flesh truck with hamstrings, the classic weakness of nearly every animal that walks on legs.
you misunderstood the message here. Early Humans didn't hunt Mammoths with spears, they used assault rifles and RPG's, obviously.
In a few thousand years if humanity hasn't wiped itself out people will claim tanks can't have been real because how could one man with a toob kill a 70 plus ton killing machine
Its called a panzerschreck… which schrecked panzers
It’s gotta run out of gas and/or blood at some point
A TASTY truck! There's your motivation!
I mean yeah, I toss a spear into the truck's radiator then just follow the tracks until it bleeds out
Its also easily visable and slow, runs out of gas eventually whether its injured or not. Humans are distance runners for a reason.
From my understanding, this was how it was done. Hunters would injure the beast just enough to cause strategic bleeding, then just follow it around for 2-3 days until it gave out.
Really it was not even that hard, humans can more or less keep on the move for days non stop. We didn't even need to hurt it first just chase it till its body failed and kill it well it was not even able to stand. So in a way I expect ops post is kind of right in a way we'd most likely not have killed something that was 5t in one big battle using sharp sticks we'd have used fire and sound to scare the shit out of it and not stop untill it wasn't able to run any more and then killed it with sharp sticks.
Humans sweat, we can keep relatively cool while running and keep going almost indefinitely
Yep I said days and not indefinitely due to our inability to carry unlimited amouts of food and water. Still we could carry our own water and food the stuff we hunted couldn't.
Well the important part is our prey would collapse long before we did. Obviously not literally indefinitely
Op has never seen the film of pygmies taking down an elephant in the jungle. Forensic analysis of the skeletons of early man showed many healed injuries similar to the ones rodeo clowns commonly get nowadays. We fought our way to the top and we are good at it.
Humans have always been aggressive. We didnt evolve with giant claws or hard skin but we are smart and tough. We have unmatched endurance in the animal world. We literally hunted apex predators to death or hunted their food supply to the point they went extinct. We battled the environment and each other for thousands of years till we conquered the land. Once we started just fighting each other we realized we are hard to fucking kill so we had to make new weapons, those advancements led to todays modern society. The funniest shit i ever hear is folks saying people are so violent these days. No, we have always been violent by nature. Its the reason we didnt go extinct.
When I was in school that was a bit of a meme: humans are so weak, not good at anything: slow, not very strong, bad eyesight bla bla bla. Which is ridiculous. Humans are terrifying, we might not be fast, but we can outlast everyone, outsmart everyone and our eyes are pretty good for guessing distances which allows our hands to throw stuff pretty precisely. You are telling me the ones who came up with nukes and AR-15s are the weak ones?
See humans are worse than any specialist animal in a 1v1 in that specialist animals field Too bad humans find ways to pick the field You might be number one tree climber, but buddy this is a baking competition now, good luck using your tree climbing skills
>You might be number one tree climber, but buddy this is a baking competition now, good luck using your tree climbing skills And so it was that a leopard came to be a contestant of _The Great British Bake Off_
I can almost see the Gary Larson comic panel.
r/leopardsatemyfocaccia
_You might be number one tree climber. But what if I just cut down the tree?_
Or start throwing rocks
Or build a stair and tie it to the tree and go up with a sharp weapon
Or set the tree on fire
A human spends 20% of their calorie intake on thinking, and it’s a far better investment then faster legs, stronger muscles or sharper eyes ever would be for us.
Honestly, imagine being some primeval prey animal being perused by a group of humans. They can chase you for days or weeks without tiring, able to track you through complicated methods you don’t understand. It’s only a matter of time before you are too exhausted to run anymore and they’ll come to devour you. They can communicate and coordinate in ways that puts other pack animals to shame. They wear the skins of your dead friends for warmth and have fashioned their bones into strange, deadly weapons. At night, they gather around fires to laugh and sing songs celebrating the time they slaughtered your mother and siblings. You’re totally fucked and you know it because *you’ve see them do this before.* We’re a truly spectacular species, but *damn* we’re scary. It’s no wonder we’ve never run into the same ecological or biological barriers that have stopped other animals from being as successful as us.
Of course our brains are the most important reason why we can survive in so many different environments and situations.
I don’t even know where the “humans are weak” crap comes from. Physical strength wise we are not very strong, but our strength is on par with large canines at least. Our endurance destroys them. Bad eyesight is also ludicrous, we have binocular vision in three colours… most mammals have neither of those. Our sense of smell isn’t up to a dogs, but it’s not bad by any means. Our hearing isn’t weak either. Of course if you compare our eyes to a hawk, an animal known for good eyesight, we seem blind. If you compare our nose to a bloodhound, we seem crippled… but in general we are pretty tough animals.
Humans are smart, creative, hardy, and petty. Those are the characteristics that helped us survive for so long. And also the reason why I'm terrified of chimpanzees, they are like humans in all the bad ways. They are the only creature, that comes to mind, that has created weapons and traps to wage war against each other. They even do some of the same war crimes to each other. You don't need amazing eyesight for good accuracy, just good enough. The smart and generous people have been carrying humanity for the most part, while the hardy reproduce and keep the population alive.
This... is the best line I've heard about this in a while, and I love it.
Yeah, it's great and sad at the same time given the effect of our hard to kill characteristics.
We're the next evolution of the cockroach.
This reminds me of a quote, wherein the parents of a mild-mannered, *deeply* English mathematician are introduced: *‘Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo–which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead. As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.’* *-Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon*
Anybody who learned history in school knows, that the last 50 years in our history are the most peaceful ones.
Want to take a guess why? Through war we created the power of the sun in a tin can. Why would you want war when a nuke is the response. Without the constant conflict of the last 1000 years the peace and technology of the last 50 would be a fever dream of a starving peasant. Also. The gulf war, the Bosnia war, the troubles. Russia invading Georgia. Russia attacking Ukraine. The gulf war pushed out understanding of weapons tech because it was the first time we had a chance to use our new shot at that point. The tech we have no makes it all look like a calculator. We literally have a supercomputer with wings for a fighter. Auto lock missle defense systems. Oh and you use gps right? The United States Military built it. War drives us as a species. Its a sad and brutal truth but its undeniable.
You are obviously correct but I’d like to add that trade and especially ease of trade between rival nations has been just as big, if not more, of a deterrent to war. If it’s mutually beneficial to keep trade active, countries are much more likely to work things out or look the other way. China is a great example. The whole world knows about their human rights abuse, but we trade with them so…eh. North Korea also has human rights issues but we don’t trade with them, so we treat them differently.
The problem is the wealth inequality that has come with that power. It is worse now than it was in the French Revolution and not trending in a good direction. The masses are now controlled, and I think the trade could be less optimal than it seems in the future if it continues in the same direction. People controlled by extreme poverty and the powerful arsenal that the leaders have is not good for the lower brackets, which continue to get closer as the top continues to pull away. IMO
Thats an entirely different conversation. I agree but i dont have the knowledge to speak on it
Imagine the ancient humans who worked hard and strategized to hunt woolly mammoths only to see their distant descendants deny it. Also, the ancient humans without any education could clearly think better than them.
And mamouth carcasses have been found with embedded spear points. I guess they fell on the spears accidentally.
So we evolved from rodeo clowns? Didn’t see that coming
Into.
The one where the individual guy sneaks up and one shots the elephant by shoving a spear in it's ear canal? Some things you just can't unsee.
Here are some [Maasai Morans killing a lion with spears in 1908.](https://youtu.be/UPx5B3Z6YPY?si=TwLbBgtKvNpZk7aX)
It's why Homo Sapiens are the "dominant species" on Earth.
Okay \*Punctures tire\*
Thought the same thing. Go for the legs with spears. Or even set a trap like a 6 x6 x6 foot hole covered in branches and get it to run into it. It doesn't have to be big enough for it to fall fully in. Just deep enough that when running it causes it to fall and maybe even break its leg.
I have no sources so don't quote me, but I believe it wasn't uncommon to herd animals off of even small dropoffs, cause while primates can tank a 10 foot drop, elephants cannot.
I've heard of that before too. It's also well known that humans would chase animals to the point of exhaustion. (some tribes still do) While many animals are faster than humans, none can match our stamina thanks to our ability to sweat and run on two legs
It's called persistent hunting. Humans excel at it. As long as we could see the animal in the distance we can follow it till it is too tired to move.
The ol sleepy hunt....
We were even hunting at fucking *noon*. You know, when the sun is so hight that everyone just want shades and a nap ? Humans were strapping their boots and racing. One of the reasons why we tamed wolf is that they are the closest species to hold the distance with us. Barely.
That and they were fairly easily domesticated "oh shit you angry 2legged things will give me food and warmth and all i gotta do is what i usually do just at your say so, duuuuude sign me up mans best friend right here my guy " or something like that
Before : Boss say we go here and we hunt that. We kill it. We eat it. We sleep. After : Two legged boss say we go here and we hunt that. We kill it. We eat it. We sleep. We get belly rub and scritch scritch on the head. Wolves are a social animal, it's not that difficult to convince them to work with us. We were not even the first non-wolf to propose a cooperation. Crows works in team with them too. They spot a target, circle around while screaming. Wolves hear the signal, come check and kill the prey. Crows come after to feast on the corpse.
I want to believe that crows are smart enough to also give the good bois some scritch scritches
The crows living in the yellowstone park (who help wolf packs hunt) actually play with wolf pups
It's one of the many reasons humans are such good endurance runners
That's how I got my wife.
Jesus christ. I laughed, but now I feel quilty
I have been teaching my son about emotions lately, he is 6 so not very sophisticated yet. We haven’t gotten to quilty though ;) Do I explain it as “that feeling when you realize a Reddit stranger is a sleepy hunter”?
And most importantly, carry water over long distances
We are designed for running hot too. For our given mass we have a huge surface area to mass ratio, we don't have fur and we have 4 times the density of sweat glands of the primate with the next most. Humans need far more water per pound of body weight than most other mammals but it's all in service of being able to push other animals to the breaking point, be able to kill them and then carry the kill back home.
That comment just gave me a weird boost in confidence.
If it helps even more, you're probably the best animal in the world at throwing accurately:) Except maybe archer fish but not sure if they count.
Yes! Endurance hunting! Humans are the apex endurance hunters on the planet. While a gazelle or deer could run 30-40mph, they can only go so long before needing to stop for a break.
Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, in Alberta.
You are [correct](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump). It was one of the easiest ways for indigenous people to hunt buffalo.
100%. Native Americans did this relatively recently. And no, they didn’t necessarily use all of the animal because there was an abundance. The evidence: a fuck ton of bones at the bottom of a cliff. Source: my anthropology teacher.
Also don't go for the healthy adults. Wolves and big cats often go for the very old, very young or unhealthy.
The same with most predators. Why risk getting injured or waste a lot of energy hunting a healthy adult when there's a weaker target that'll go down quick and easy?
The picture in the meme shows hunters using mud and swampy areas to slow and ambush the Mammoth. So they basically did puncture its tires.
Guy trusts the science describing the mammoths weight and speed but not the science saying we hunted them. Nice.
Selective ignorance is on point these days.
$10 they also want to ban the books that teach stuff they don't understand, this being one of them.
Anti-Darwin technophiles be like
To me that statement sounded right at first but I have to disagree after thinking about it. The guy does not need to trust anything in that sience. He just does not need to verify the whole thing if finding one or more specific flaws makes the whole thing unbelievable. If someone tells me that wood is soft and delicious I don't need to disprove that it is delicious. I just need to disprove one of the two to cast the other one into doubt. So I poke a tree instead of eating and poking it.
Look up pursuit predation too, it’s wild. The idea is that humans aren’t faster or stronger than their prey but instead have endurance far beyond that of most land animals. Imagine being hunted by a group of small pigs with sharp sticks. You run away and think you’re safe. So you lay down to rest only for them to turn up again 30 minutes later, just to harass you, so you get up and run again. You’re used to sleeping 18 hours a day and this shit is exhausting. 10 hours straight they have you on the run, wondering when these assholes are gonna give up. You’re terrified then your legs collapse because you can’t take it anymore. You just want to sleep. Then there they are, standing over you with their pointy sticks and all you can do is go to sleep, forever… Then these motherfuckers spend the night hanging around a campfire, laughing and high fiving each other, just partying. And they still have the energy to have sex then go to sleep for like 8 hours then get up and do that shit all over again! And then the wolves show up and the humans are like, “wut? You wanna catch this smoke too? Or you wanna join up and share in the spoils?” And now they got dogs which are *always* ready to party… Humans are wild. What was this post about again? I got caught up in the moment
Not to mention, have you seen professional American football players throwing balls for hundreds of meters with pin-point accuracy whilst on the run? Or, similar sports where people throw things? We humans are made for hurling pointy sticks.
We take a lot of cool things for granted. Our dexterity & coordination are out of this world compared to what most other creatures can pull off. It’s pretty crazy to think about sometimes, makes you feel like you’re really wasting your time lmao. I should be doing parkour or something.
Don't worry. We humans also evolved socially to separate our workloads within our social circles. Other people are already doing parkour for you!
>Then these motherfuckers spend the night hanging around a campfire, laughing and high fiving each other, just partying. Idk why but this had me lol. Tiny annoying pigs: "woohooo we're gonna end this mothafucka HIGHFIVE!" and you're just laying there bleeding witnessing them having an orgy.
I once spent some time with a top Ultra Marathon runner. Dude had NO body fat. He was in his 50's but still runs a marathon more or less every day just for training so when he runs races where he goes over 100 miles without sleep it doesn't phase him. And he does this for FUN. Imagine what he could manage to achieve if his LIFE was on the line, or his kids were going hungry?
God bless our sweat glands.
Actual you can trace a lot of extinctions of mega fauna to around the time humanity turned up. We are the single deadliest animal ever known and have been that way for a very very long time.
Someone pointed out that mega fauna survived in Africa while they disappeared elsewhere shortly after humans arrived. One possible explanation is that African animals learned to avoid humans even before we became the deadly apex predator that we are now.
That, or evolved to eat them, kick them to death, or trample the bipedal death-machines into dusty paste. There's a reason why lions, zebras and hippos never got domesticated, and that's not because they wouldn't have been useful animals.
Now I want a sci-fi nature documentary made by observing aliens where they talk about all the animals that evolved to survive past the mass extinction event known as "Humanity".
When you look at the animals that thrive in cities, I think you could make a solid case that we're encouraging the evolution of intelligence in other species. We've unwittingly created all kinds of traps and puzzles that reward high problem-solving capabilities.
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"
One of my favorit insults "you are the reason bears can eat out the garbage cans in Yellowstone"
People have no faith in the ingenuity and grit of early humans and it's a damn shame. We're actually pretty fkin resilient and smart.
Even without tools and our ability to communication we are one of the greatest endurance predators ever.
And the only large predator to use projectiles due to our impressive throwing strength our ability to calculate trajectory
Along that line, it always annoys me that early humans/neanderthals in tv and recreations are always unkempt with messy hair. By the time we had figured out flint knapping, spears, and sewing furs, we certainly had figured out how to brush, braid, dread, and otherwise style hair to adorn ourselves.
Alright, i'll bite. Stab the gas tank with your sharp rock and watch as the uhaul spills its lifeblood across the next ~mile and a half. I'm sure you'll be able to catch up eventually. Ooh, i just looked up how fast mammoths can run. Not only is this uhaul bleeding out, it's also stuck in a school zone.
I hear this and I remember a book called footfall. Elephant aliens invade earth and find out they're losing the battle when a spear gets launched by a guy that know what they're doing and as the elephant lays dying it thinks about the horror that is... our "thumbs". Truly terrifying
I'm currently writing a scifi book where the aliens are just as intelligent and dexterous as humans are, but they can't lift their arms over their heads and they have a bit of natural armor, so they never really developed ranged weapons. Imo shoulders are just as important as thumbs are. There's really no reason humans *can* lift our arms over our heads and it was entirely an evolutionary fluke, and the vast majority of animals on the planet can't, and therefore an intelligent alien species out there somewhere likely wouldn't be able to. In addition, only two animals on the planet use projectile weapons to hunt as a primary means of hunting. Human beings and the archerfish.
There’s a lot of evolutionary selection for why we developed that ability though…
Primates probably developed the mutation to lift up the arms. That made it easier to climb the tree and stay up increasing the chances of survival.
A Uhaul truck doesn’t go fast with a couple spears through the tires, a spear in the fuel tank and the driver wounded by a spear which is how mammoths were hunted. But that doesn’t matter to people like the OP because he has closed his mind to any facts he doesn’t;t like. Ignorance is curable but only if you are open minded.
You're just making me want to replay Horizon Zero Dawn
I used to bow hunt A deer is a relatively fast animal, at least compared to humans. They also have incredibly good hearing, being able to hear twig snaps and plants rustling from pretty considerable distances. I just sit in place, fire one arrow that punctures either the heart or lungs (or both!), give it a wait, then track a blood trail to find my game. They are called TOOLS, we invented things like archery or spears to defeat animals that are bigger than us.
People can put a lot of force into a spear when throwing it. Mammoths were big targets. Definitely made it easier.
Also wait until that guy hears about humans hunting whales 10,000-15,000 years ago. We’re incredibly good at killing even the largest animals to ever exist on the planet.
Additionally, as I recall, one apparent strategy that archaeologists have worked out was to goad the mammoths towards cliffs and let gravity do most of the work.
I remember being taught that during middle school
That explains why conspiracy theorists are unaware of it.
Yeah conspiracy theorist's have no faith in their species, i find it insulting to assume ancient folks couldn't stack a bunch of massive rocks to built a pyramid.
Also just the general lack of understanding that large-scale constructions are made a lot easier when you have a huge amount of slave labor and a lack of concern for human life.
Bruh, the proto-human may not be as intelligent as current humans are (even then, I'm doubting that fact more and more as the day goes by) but they make up for that with pure physical prowess. Sure, they can't solo a mammoth, but a bunch of them throwing relatively straight branches with pointed ends or sharpened rocks attached to the head at damn near anything that walks on land?
People are really underselling spear heads and arrow heads. That shit was exquisitely crafted with highly functional form. These people were experts, and their artifacts were so robust that we still find them today. Atlatl-thrown obsidian-tipped spear does more damage than modern folk understand. That and running. Sure, big animal will outrun us. But for how many miles? Humans are relentless, they will injure and track for miles.
The Persistence Hunter traits. Also known as the "Chase That Motherfucker Until It Ran Out Of Gas" trait.
Humans living concurrently with mammoths were modern humans. The last mammoths died out after the Egyptian pyramids had been built.
Huh. I legit thought they died off before the first pyramids were built. Or was that something else?
The last mammoths died roughly 4,000 years ago roughly 1,000 years after the pyramids of Giza were built. There were on isolated islands from roughly 10,000 years ago though.
It was an isolated population stranded on an island that was too small to support megafauna indefinitely. They gradually starved to death. Humans were not responsible.
It’s so funny when these people are really this dumb.
"Human small, mammoth big. Human no claw. Human no sharp teeth. Impossible human kill mammoth. " - Human who didn't make the evolutionary cut.
Mammoths apparently weighed somewhere between 4-15 _tons_. If I had to hunt and scavenge for every morsel of food that graced my lips, you bet I’d find every dumbass I knew to help me poke it until it pops. No way I’m letting that much food get away without a fight.
But… wait, can you explain Bitcoin?
No one can.
Your profile pic. 😭 I hate you.
Good thing mammoths weren’t made of metal 🤦♂️
Humans have hunted whales for thousands of years. FUCKING WHALES.
Why do conspiracy theorists think humans are incompetent and pathetic? Pyramids? No way, humans could’ve never built those. Mammoths? Nah, the aliens hunted them, dude. Humans could never. They’re literally living in a world of magnificent and breathtaking human excellence and still can’t fathom that humans did crazy shit to get here.
One of the replies were “jam a pencil into your ribs, see how far you go”
I don’t understand science, so it must be made up.
Turns out humans are really resourceful, good at organizing together with other humans and good at making weapons and tools. Who’d have thought?! That’s kind of how we became to dominant species on the planet.
And they type that opinion on a glass touchscreen of a mobile device networked to the biggest library of knowledge in human history, made of minerals and metals from the far corners of the world and capable of billions of calculations per second. But big game hunting in groups with rocks and torches and spears, he thinks humans can’t figure that one out eh? Or is it just that he, personally, wouldn’t be able to figure it out?
These people didn't just stand and poke animals at close range. They fired on them. A dart launched from an Atlatl travels at nearly 100 miles an hour with a stone arrow tip. It can travel 100 meters with prime accuracy at 20 meters (65 feet).
I hate that the internet makes stupid people even more dumb but think they are smart on a conspiratorial level.
Not more than ten miles from where I write this, there is a mammoth scapula with a spear tip in it.