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| Finally! Someone gets it! From Nautilus: How Scavenging Made Us Human  Our early ancestors were more like vultures than we might like to think You'll have to follow the link to see the lovely illustration of a vulture. Vultures, hyenas, and other scavengers tend to have less than stellar reputations. Yeah, well, so do certain politic- oh. Right. If you see vultures circling, you can probably assume that some creature is nearing its end or has just departed. Ugh. Wrong. And they were doing so well, too. Okay, technically, "you can probably assume" that, but you'd be wrong, too. And they’re freeloaders: They don’t work for their lunch as much as the hunters of the animal kingdom do, they just steal the spoils. That's not right, either. I mean, it is, in a way, but it's not like your moocher cousin who comes over and eats the food you were planning on munching on yourself. They clean up what the predators shun, and in doing so, they perform an important service. It's like the sanitation workers who clean fatbergs out of sewers: no one wants to be them, but someone has to do it, or things get worse for all of us. It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that early humans may have relied heavily on scavenging, even after they had the tools to hunt. It shouldn't be all that surprising. We don't have the strength or speed of some other predators, so it's reasonable to think our ancestors lived off leavings. What's not reasonable is to assume they did without evidence, and this article claims evidence. Earlier scholars thought scavenging was too unpredictable, and already-dead animals too scarce, for it to be a frequent approach to finding food for ancient humans. And the risks—of attack from a lingering predator or of catching a disease from the rotting meat—would have been too great. This is how science works. The scientists also suggest that humans are, in fact, well adapted to scavenge: They have defenses that could protect against disease from carrion, such as a particularly acidic stomach to help kill off potential pathogens. And when humans learned to use fire to cook, that would have added another layer of protection. Next question: was fire harnessed for that reason, or was it adapted to that activity? The new work suggests that scavenging persisted among humans long after hunting emerged. And whaddaya know? We still eat dead things. What? Eating live things is better? |
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