Like I already posted, we have stone spear tips from 200,000 years before that, even.
As noted, weapons pre-date our species. And, in fact, we probably would have gone extinct had our pre-sapiens ancestors not invented them. But they did.
We’re not necessarily more adaptable than other animals.
Same with bears, raccoons, pigs…
Absolutely false. We are one of the slowest breeding species on the planet.
Lots of mammalian predators work in packs.
Can you really have said to “invent” something if you just pick up a rock or a fallen tree branch and use that to clobber something? Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt, even sharpening the ends.
Its likely that using weapons in the sense of grabbing a nearby heavy rock or tree branches as clubs goes back to the first Hominini around 5 million years ago and is common across all Pan and Homo species.
There’s tool use and tool making. I think anything that falls under the 2nd category can be said to have been “invented”. One can, I think, reasonably argue that even the use of a raw tool (not altered form its natural state) can be said to be in invention.
Sure, the point I was trying to make is that even early hominids like Australopithecus would have been able to drive away a Lion if they were in a group and had crude clubs and rocks to throw. Big carnivores are risk adverse, if they break a leg they almost always die. As soon as something can fight back especially in a way they don’t understand, they’ll back off and look for easier prey.
Fighting Men: How Men Have Fought Through the Ages by Henry Treece and Ewart Oakeshaft
Master species. We have the power to extinct entire species with no opposition (by which I mean the animals couldn’t stop us).
Turducken. Any animal that can eat a chicken stuffed inside a duck that is stuffed inside a turkey, is by default, an apex predator.
Hell, that not just being an apex predator, that’s showing off! Spiking the ball in the endzone so to speak.
Could another distinct master species have coexisted with us? Or would we eventually fight them for dominance?
I believe the Cro-magnon dies out because of the “There can be only one” theory. That’s going off a vague memory, so I could be wrong about that.
The Cro-Mangons were the earliest modern humans in Europe, you might be thinking of the Neanderthals who they displaced, though there was a few thousand years of overlap. Whether or not our predecessors were directly responsible for wiping out our cousins is debated, recent research suggests that we were better able to withstand climate change and there was some interbreeding.
Sure, but the Deep Ones have very little interest or ability to act in the surface world.
Ah, thanks for that Mr. Kobayashi.
Other primates who lack our tool making abilities manages to survive, I don’t see why a tool making primate species would go extinct.
Also other animals that lack too making abilities hunt in packs
But we also absorbed some of the Neanderthal population into our own, so they didn’t get completely wiped out in that sense. The idea of two “master species” co-existing on the planet is an interesting idea, and more the subject of speculation than science.
Just to elaborate on this yet further: much of human physiology has evolved around the fact that our ancestors used tools. For example, our shoulder joint has a very large range of motion, which is believed to be mostly an adaptation to allow us to accurately throw missiles.
In pure hand-to-hand combat meanwhile it’s something of a disadvantage as it can be too easily dislocated compared to a simpler joint.
So saying “no weapons allowed” is akin to setting up a fight with a shark and saying “no water allowed”.
As others have stated, weapon use predates our species, and is pretty hardwired. Even moreso, we are a social species, and so have a big advantage over solitary predators - our direct competitors would likely have been wolf-packs, which we somewhat resemble, in being (i) social and (ii) dangerous.
This has lead to a lot of behaviours inherent to humans that would otherwise make no sense.
To give but one example: a distressed infant instinctively makes an incredibly loud sound - wailing and screaming. This would make no sense whatsoever if we were not apex predators, as such a loud noise would, of course, alert every animal - including every predator - that here is a helpless, tasty infant.
However, it makes perfect sense if one assumes that a baby’s cries would attract a band of armed human adults, capable of killing any other predator. In that case, other predators would eventually have learned to avoid human noises such as a baby’s cries, because those that didn’t ended up dead.
As an aside, it is fascinating to read Jim Corbett’s books on hunting human-eating predators, such as tigers, in India (for years, he was the guy that often got called on to exterminate dangerous human-eating animals). Fact is that even tigers, who are of course well able to kill and eat people, generally don’t. According to Jim, what causes tigers to turn to eating people is almost invariably some disability or injury that prevents them from hunting other prey (often, porcupine quill injuries). The reason: hunting people is very, very risky, a strategy only used when nothing else is possible - because humans can, and will, hunt down such predators (in these examples, by calling on Jim!).
If wolf packs were our competitors we defeated them