what pisses ME off about all this is that humans are not persistence predators. we're very sturdy travelers for being bipedal apes, but there are almost zero conditions in which humans willingly hunt by just... marathoning the prey to death. and exactly zero where that is the PREFERRED method. why? because it requires a stupidly expensive amount of calories and you end up with a dead wildebeest that's twenty fucking miles away from the rest of the tribe.
humans already have an expensive fucking organ that optimizes us to hunt more efficiently than any other animal on earth, and that's our brain. our other adaptation is our shoulder blades: while a chimp can rip a US marine in half, it can't throw a baseball any harder than our preteens. these two adaptations unlock the human thumb and let us throw spears.
In just about every human culture, we hunt from ambush, with lures and poison. We have bows, spears, nets, traps. If we were, biologically, built to be coursing predators, then our sport hunters would reflect that, and they don't. We do not end marathons by chasing even a symbolic horse to death, we don't go after rabbits like racing greyhounds. We compete with bows, guns, shotput, discus, javelin. We fish with lines and hooks just about anywhere there's water. When our kids play tag, the chaser doesn't practice steadily running their target into exhaustion: the kids take turns sprinting towards and away, stalking slowly, practicing sudden lunges, learning to lure their target close enough and then pounce.
We are not the mighty wolf or the noble lion. We are clever, opportunistic ambush predators that fashion a thousand kinds of trap, lure, and weapon. Our persistence isn't that of the dog, it's that of the monkey.
It really annoys me when people want to LIONIZE the human body, and the power of that body-- but ascribe to it the virtues it does have, because what we're really good at isn't 'heroic' enough. We are tricksters, omnivores, efficient liars, tool-users. We weave nets, we poison our spears, we lie in wait, and we eat so well we can spend a third of our calories just on thinking about our next trick.
I don't need to hear any more about man, the mighty hunter, charging relentlessly across the plane. Tell me about man, the cheerful fisher, sitting in his boat, weaving another net.
