A Fictional Biology Question

[sevenperforce]

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

22 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

An angry herd of elephants is about the only thing that can reliably beat a group of determined pretechnological humans

And a rhino. He's blind and stupid, but that's not his problem.

I love this.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Afaik, leopard is the most dangerous human-killer, and the main natural antagonist of them.
Hippos also. They're swines biologically and morally.

I have never agreed so much with utterly useless statements.

10 hours ago, Scotius said:

All our ancestors would have to do, was raise their heads above grass and bushes and look for gathering vultures. And then run fast - for which they were well adapted already, as fossil finds and preserved foot tracks indicate.

We can't actually run very fast. We can run very far, though. In a group, with spears, running far rather than fast makes you a better predator than a scavenger. I suspect that if our savanna ancestors had subsided by scavenging, we would be better-adapted to eat rotten crap than we are. As it is we can only eat a small, carefully-curated selection of rotten foods (cheese for example).

By the time the vultures circle, the food is kinda wasted. We want the good parts.

10 hours ago, Scotius said:

if a horde of Australopithecines found a carcass with useable meat? Heck yeah they would make good use of it

To a degree. But better to use our ginormous brains to stalk the megafauna, pick off the young, sick, and elderly, and dispatch efficiently. More meat to carry back to our own young, sick, and elderly.

8 hours ago, Scotius said:

It stands to reason big predators wouldn't bother with pursuit of a band of noisy apes fleeing with a handfuls of bones or scraps. Especially if there was still meat on the skeleton.

Two points. First, a band of noisy apes would not run away from a lion. They would kill a lion. Like I said before, there are no carnivores that can stand up to a band of determined athletic paleolithic dudes with spears. We kick feline butt. Second, if there is still meat on the skeleton, that band of noisy apes is going to strip it clean, because they figured out that drying it will make it last longer and give them a source of protein they can pass on to the rest of the tribe.

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

In a group, with spears, running far rather than fast makes you a better predator than a scavenger. I suspect that if our savanna ancestors had subsided by scavenging, we would be better-adapted to eat rotten crap than we are.

But why rotten? As "scavenger" I mean any species eating someone's else prey, as I described.
Are vultures and jackals scavengers? Do they eat only rotten meat or, as well, just killed or dying?
If we drive away the vultures and jackals (i.e. scavengers) from the polished bones of an animal killed by a lion an hour ago, we don't eat the rotten meat. But as we replace the scavengers, so we probably become scavengers instead of them.

9 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

By the time the vultures circle, the food is kinda wasted.

If they occasionally found some corpse lying in grass.
But they start gathering around the bigger predator's feast long before something can rot. They are just afraid to approach until the bigger ones get full.
So, it has no time to get wasted.

9 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

But better to use our ginormous brains to stalk the megafauna,

When we are facultative bipeds, 1 m high, 30 kg heavy, like Lucy? And have only sticks and stones rather than spears? It's 2 mln yeras ago.
I'm afraid, the megafauna wouldn't notice our presence.

9 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

First, a band of noisy apes would not run away from a lion. They would kill a lion.

Not that it happens often. And the aircraft carrier lion is accompanied by destroyers hyenas, so the apes would better keep away while they arre there.
Our (20+ kg) league are jackals and vultures (10 kg). And we should wait for our turn.

[sevenperforce]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

18 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

In a group, with spears, running far rather than fast makes you a better predator than a scavenger. I suspect that if our savanna ancestors had subsided by scavenging, we would be better-adapted to eat rotten crap than we are.

But why rotten? As "scavenger" I mean any species eating someone's else prey, as I described.
Are vultures and jackals scavengers? Do they eat only rotten meat or, as well, just killed or dying?

For a scavenger, rotten meat is far more likely meat than fresh, so there will be selection pressure to adapt to a broader range of rotten foods. Natural selection 101.

Vultures are not readily able to eat fresh meat. They will eat the eyes and other exposed organ parts from a recent kill, but they have to wait for nature to break it down before the rest of the carcass will become accessible. They have extreme rotten-meat adaptations, from a bald head (to reduce guts getting stuck in feathers) to extremely acidic stomach acid (allowing them to eat anthrax, botulism, and other deadly bacteria with impunity) to colonies of symbiotic bacteria living on their skin (fighting off other bacteria and preventing infection).

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

19 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

But better to use our ginormous brains to stalk the megafauna,

When we are facultative bipeds, 1 m high, 30 kg heavy, like Lucy? And have only sticks and stones rather than spears? It's 2 mln yeras ago.
I'm afraid, the megafauna wouldn't notice our presence.

Our investigation of facultative bipeds indicates they were primarily herbivores, eating nuts, roots, and seeds. Not so much meat. The first protohumans to eat meat in any large quantity were likely Homo erectus and their relatives; that's when we see a decrease in gut size and molar size. Without the massive jaws of predators like hyenas and lions, we needed tool use before we could effectively butcher larger animals and break apart bones.

Hunting small animals is a low-reward, high-energy activity, and small animals would have been much faster than us and difficult to catch. There may have been a little scavenging at the start, but once we had tools to effectively scavenge megafauna carcasses, we had the tools to hunt.

[sevenperforce]

Following on...

Quote

Soon after butchery marks were recognized on Early Stone Age fossils, articles on the ‘hunting or scavenging debate' in which hunting is implicitly viewed as behaviorally superior to and more ‘modern' than scavenging increasingly proliferated in the literature, especially centered around interpretations of the FLK 22 Zinjanthropus site at Olduvai Gorge. ...it is not likely that these modes of carcass procurement - hunting and scavenging (whether passive scavenging or active/confrontational scavenging) - were mutually exclusive behaviors, but were both employed depending on a variety of behavioral and ecological variables (e.g., available hominins in the group for carcass procurement, butchery, and transport; prey size, age, and species; habitat, other available food resources, and presence of other predators).

 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

...it is not likely that these modes of carcass procurement - hunting and scavenging (whether passive scavenging or active/confrontational scavenging) - were mutually exclusive behaviors, but were both employed depending on a variety of behavioral and ecological variables (e.g., available hominins in the group for carcass procurement, butchery, and transport; prey size, age, and species; habitat, other available food resources, and presence of other predators).

Did I say that they didn't hunt?

Apes are omnivorous facultative predators. When they can - they hunt, when they can - they kick a weaker predator and rob his prey.

Say, our closest bro - chimps:
https://www.google.com/search?q=chimpanzee+hunting&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVhcS6w4jnAhWHposKHe_7CjsQ_AUoAnoECAoQBA&biw=2133&bih=1087

Lions, hyenas, vultures have a feast in turn.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lion+hyenas+vultures+eat&oq=lion+hyenas+vultures+eat&aqs=chrome..69i57j33.6671j1j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Then-we.

Spoiler

(Including Lucy.)

Spoiler

Oops, wrong slide.

Spoiler

Look at the carcasses in the videos at another angle.

Spoiler

Or modern one, sold for money, for aspic.

Spoiler

 

Our turn there is between the lion and others. Preferably before/after hyenas, when just the birds are in game.
And as we can see, while the vultures like the rotten meat, they thankfully appreciate the fresh and even alive one as well.

So, no need in rotten meat. Just look at the birds, and when they start gathering, take a look, isn't it a fresh buffalo being eaten by a lion.

P.S.
Maybe the "scavenger" term has more narrow sense, only for rotten meat eaters.
But it's defintely that what the bird on the picture screams to the monkeys: "You! Scavengers!"

Edited January 16, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Terwin]

The bones of a 2-3 hour old carcass are not polished, they are covered with sinew, bits of flesh, tooth marks, claw marks, dirt, saliva, etc.

If you want 'polished' bones, you need to wait for the ants to finish cleaning the surface, but ants are quite good at finding any sort of crack, r opening so that they can not only clean off the outside of the bone, but the inside as well.

The animal I was arguing against being viable was a humanoid obligate scavenger with suction-cups on their hands to facilitate handling bones(as that was the only argument for suction-cups on a terrestrial animal).

If you move away from the obligate scavenger who steals polished bones(which are somehow still filled with brains and marrow), then you lose the only utility for suction-cups on the hands and we move to just discussing early hominids.

I will agree that early hominids seem to have proven quite successful, just not in any way that would have been facilitated by having suction-cups on their hands.

 

[kerbiloid]

6 minutes ago, Terwin said:

If you want 'polished' bones

Nobody of them needs literally polished bones. It's enough to be meatless. The big predators have eaten all meat from top, got full, and escape from the loud smaller beasts to have a rest.

Here we get in, with sticks and stones.

Afaik, a clean skeleton of a bull contains up to two buckets of brain, spinal cord, marrow, and other soft tissues.
Well enough for a tribe of ~30 kg monkeys.

Edited January 16, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Terwin]

6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Nobody of them needs literally polished bones. It's enough to be meatless. The big predators have eaten all meat from top, got full, and escape from the loud smaller beasts to have a rest.

Here we get in, with sticks and stones.

Afaik, a clean skeleton of a bull contains up to two buckets of brain, spinal cord, marrow, and other soft tissues.
Well enough for a tribe of ~30 kg monkeys.

Perhaps one meal, but vultures are the only known vertebrate obligate scavenger(possibly some early proto-vultures as well), so scavenging monkeys does not seem like a sustainable ecological niche if no current or historical records indicate anything even vaguely similar.

Scavenging or stealing kills is a great source of bonus calories, but only vultures managed to make it work well enough to sustain a vertebrate metabolism. (and I can't imagine that soaring from thermal to thermal is anywhere near as calorie intensive as running along the ground)

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Terwin said:

Scavenging or stealing kills is a great source of bonus calories, but only vultures managed to make it work well enough to sustain a vertebrate metabolism. 

Hunting with dogs or falcons is the stealing kills. And is known since flintstones.

Spoiler

As well, hiring somebody to do a work, lol.

As we can see, it's our natural behavior.

Edited January 16, 2020 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Terwin said:

Perhaps one meal, but vultures are the only known vertebrate obligate scavenger(possibly some early proto-vultures as well), so scavenging monkeys does not seem like a sustainable ecological niche if no current or historical records indicate anything even vaguely similar.

Scavenging or stealing kills is a great source of bonus calories, but only vultures managed to make it work well enough to sustain a vertebrate metabolism. (and I can't imagine that soaring from thermal to thermal is anywhere near as calorie intensive as running along the ground)

Vultures has the benefit of air reconnaissance. 
Early humanoids was probably pretty flexible probably more so than Chimpanzee as they was smarter. Also throwing stones who is an pretty unique human skill was probably pretty effective espesialy if protected by an protective front with sharp sticks. 
So effective it was standard infantry formation until the US civil war. 
 

[magnemoe]

25 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Hunting with dogs or falcons is the stealing kills. And is known since flintstones.

  Reveal hidden contents

As well, hiring somebody to do a work, lol.

As we can see, it's our natural behavior.

Dogs are very useful in driving pray towards your position, their main benefit is that they can flush out prey trying to hide. 
Two reasons for small and short legged dogs is 1) they can enter burrows 2) they does not push the prey too fast. Last one is important if you hunt deer as you don't want them to sprint past your position. 
Never hunted birds they I assume you want the dog to flush then return catch. 
Also hunting is an sport, think falcons always was it, outside some edge cases. 

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Also hunting is an sport, think falcons always was it

You see, we even find the kill stealing funny!

***

The protohuman hunting.
The chimps can quickly run on their four and jump from tree to tree, so they are natural 3d hunters.

But whom can hunt a 30 kg heavy, mostly bipedal, proto-human post-ape in savannah where they lived?
It can't chase buffalos or antilopes, or even hares, they had neither spears, nor bows, nor slings. Only sticks and stones.
They (semi-chimps) couldn't run far, and any bunch of running apes would attract the attention of all cats and hyenas around, so only a short rush is appropriate.

So, I guess the parasiting on other hunting species is a very direct route in such situation.
So, then-we were parasiting scavengers.

Edited January 17, 2020 by kerbiloid