Could pure carnivores create a technological society? Pure Herbivores?

Great Debates
1

This question has been floating around in my mind since I finished reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. For those Dopers who haven’t read the books, a large section of it is dedicated to looking into how the environmental factors of available domesticable plants and animals contributed to the rise of Europe and Asia as the central powers in the world, who were then able to invade and conquer the civilizations of the other continents. Diamond points out that the Eurasian continent had all the significant advantages in terms of domesticable staple crops, which allowed Eurasia to support a larger population, and large animals, making manual labor and war more effective.

Could a purely carnivorous species create a technological civilization? It seems rather unlikely to me, for a couple reasons:
[ul][li]Many carnivores have bodies that can be used very effectively as weapons (claws, jaws, venom, etc.). This seems like it would inhibit tool making and use, especially when it comes to weapons.[/li][li]Carnivores seem very unlikely to domesticate crops. I could imagine carnivores finding a way to herd animals for food, which may serve the same purpose, but might be limited without knowledge of how to grow crops. Humans domesticated plants (and animals) basically by accident, but crop domestication would likely need foresight when dealing with a purely carnivorous species.[/li][li]Animals take much more energy to raise than crops do. This seems likely to keep down population levels, inhibiting technology advance, though it may not stop technology entirely.[/ul][/li]
A better case can probably be made for a species of herbivores, but there also seems to be a problem of animal domestication. Domesticated large animals gave an advantage to Eurasia in our own history. Would herbivores also domesticate animals? Their primary use seems to be for food and for hunting, neither of which would happen with herbivores. On the other hand, being herbivorous may help to prevent mass extinctions of mega fauna such as those that happened in early human history. Perhaps these two factors will somehow balance out long enough for someone to realize the potential uses of domesticated (or tamed) animals, allowing civilization to prosper.

What does the Dope think?

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Its possible as long as the carnivores have the necessary physical and mental tools to construct tools. They would be at a marked disadvanatage versus herbivores or omnivores becuase it takes more energy and space to get food out of an animal than a plant. For example you may get enough food out of a field of crops to feed 100 people for a year. That same food might only feed 20 cows for a year and those cows might only feed 5 people for a year. In this example the society would need 20 times the space and effort plus whatever effort goes into raising the cows to feed each person.

There is also a significant lead time needed to raise a cow from infancy to adulthood. You need a fairly large herd of cattle to continue to raise calfs to adulthood. If for example you lose 95% of your cows to disease its going to take you several generations (of cows) to rebuild your herd. Compare that with losing 95% of your crops. Instead of eating the other 5% you can use that to replant your field and be back up to full capacity in a relatively quick time frame.

Another key factor to consider is that typically grain can be stored for much longer than meat. A society’s likelyhood of surviving a harsh winter or a drought is much better with a surplus store of grain. In your average climate meat might only last a couple of weeks while if you store grain properly you can get months out of it at least.

In short it is possible for a carnivorous society to arise but they are at a severe disadvantage against an omnivorous or herbivorous society. If these society’s ever came into competition the carnivorous society will be quickly defeated.

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Most carnivores do not rely on cattle as their food source. :rolleyes:
Insects, rats and a whole source of vermin fulfill that role. :stuck_out_tongue:

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:rolleyes: yourself. A technological society is going to require intensive food production. You can’t have cities in which the population goes out to the surrounding forrest to hunt during the day. There simply aren’t enough calories to feed everyone that way.

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My point was that the cultivation of insect and rat farms could easily supplement cattle ranches and the like. If you can convince people to eat them! :dubious: :eek: :smiley:

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Neanderthal man were within a functional definition of carnivore and they had technology.

7

And of Neadrethals and Humans, which species survived?

8

That depends on who you ask.

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I’d be more inclined to vote for the carnivores. It’s been a while since I read much in the field, but IIRC no evidence of tool use has been found among pure herbivore hominids, especially where the configuration of the teeth and jaws strongly indicate a pure vegetarian diet. Gorillas have not been seen to use tools of any sort, while the slightly more carnivorous chimps are well known to use simple tools, like stripped twigs to fish for termites. Vegetable food just sits there until picked; carnivorous food has to be stopped and killed, and to do that tools are needed.

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Could? Sure to either. But it has been our plant-eating side that has been the driver of society and technology.

The creation of agriculture sparked the develpment of community centers which turned into cities and societies with division of labor and trade. Hunting groups stayed within tribal structures.

It was having flat arable land and the desire to grow edible plants efficiently on it which motivated the creation of the plow and the use of draft animals*, both of which provided a use for the wheel. Areas of the world without flat arable land may have created wheels but only used them as toys. The wheel sparked much of the rest of technology and much of the rest of math and science.

Now I could imagine a scenerio in which there was a centralized rich meat resource which could only be optimized with division of labour … say a particular section of coastline which in marine life best fished with nets made of cotton harvested (and later grown) elsewhere. Such a situation would also motivate the development of community centers and of trade and with that the development of technology. This may have happened in some sections of South America I believe (if I recall correctly) It could motivate agriculture and if flat arable land was available, such might inspire the wheel … or perhaps some fishing uses of wheels in managing nets would flash upon some soul.

*Which answers one question. It is likely that animals were domesticated for draft purposes long before they were used for food. You do not eat the one ox you got. Cows are too valuable as draft animals to eat the meat, you worship and protect them instead.

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Actually, I’d argue its the amalgamation of our herbivorous and carnivorous natures that drive society and technology, not one or the other.

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At best that is true for some places. For many other places it’s the opposite. It takes far less energy or space to get food from am herd of goats on most savanna than it does to try to get food from the plants that will grow there. People simply can’t eat leaves and grass whereas other animals can. It’s that simple.

Yes, an in converse on the plains of East Africa or Texas or Northern Australia you will, if you are very fortunate, get enough food out of a field of crops or an orchard to feed 1 person for a year. That same area under pasture might feed 20 cows for a year and those cows might feed 5 people for a year. In this example the society would need 20 times the space and effort plus whatever effort goes into cultivating and tendingthe crops to feed each person

And what are you going to eat? What you are overlooking is that in either case population will be at capacity. What that capacity is doesn’t matter. If you lose 95% of your food then 95% of the population is going to die. Whether 95% represents 950 people or 95 people doesn’t matter. Loss of your food leads to death.

Dried meat will last years. Of course this assumes that people are stupid enough to slaughter all their livestock in an autumn harvest. Why any sane person would do that I know not. Grain is stored because grain can’t be left on the plant in the fields over summer. Sheep don’t fall off the stalk and get lost on the ground or eaten by pigeons all that often.

Which is an interesting assertion because in Africa where herdmen and farmers come into contact almost invariably the herdsmen subjugate the farmers.

How do you explain that?

The big problem is that we have so few examples of mammals that are pure carnivores or pure herbivores.

Cat’s might be pure carnivores but they are about the only example that lives on the land. Dogs, hyaenas, etc are all omnivores.

I honestly can’t think of any purely herbivorous mammals. Sheep, rabbits, squirrels, kangaroos and so forth are al at least occasional opportunistic carnivores.

And because we have such a tiny sample size we really can’t validly extrapolate what a truly carnivorous or herbivorous species might be like.
So purely speculative how might either species arrive at agriculture, the starting pijtn of civilisation? Maybe a carnivore can follow nomadic herds and in that way produce a society similar to that of the Lapps who follow nomadic reindeer herds. That’s plausible, after all it’s not a huge jump from what some social carnivores do today. So we have a transition from nomadic herdsmen following and guiding semi-wild species to nomadic herdsmen with now-domesticated herds living the life of the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. From their we progress to the more sedentary lifestyle of the Masai with fixed villages and clearly defined though still communal grazing lands thence to the European style fenced properties etc.

I can’t see any plausible reason at all why this couldn’t occur. The difference between a pride of lions following a migrating wildebeest herd and a village of Lapps following a migrating reindeer herd seems to be exclusively one of intelligence. If lions were intelligent they too could move the herds to preferred grazing ranges, protect them form other predators and so forth. And the transition from Lapp to Hebrew to Masai to Texas rancher doesn’t seem to produce any insurmountable hurdles.

So yeah, I think a pure carnivore could produce a civilisation. Populations would probably be smaller than omnivore populations but provided a carnivore could evolve intelligence I can’t see any hurdles.

Pure herbivores seems simple enough to develop a civilisation from.

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I’d like to thank everybody for the replies, I’ve already learned from this thread.

Certainly, but would evolution provide a path through which carnivores could develop the ability to use tools? Sevastopol mentioned Neanderthals, which certainly provides evidence of it having happened at least once. It seems to me that most carnivores would have little pressure to develop tool use, as their bodies are already so well adapted to catching prey. Weren’t early humans mostly omnivore or herbivore? Perhaps tool use would be most likely in a carnivore that evolved from omnivore ancestors due to environmental factors.

ouryL mentions insect and rat farms. Are there any examples of this happening in human society? Perhaps this would be rather easy to do, simply leaving enough trash and such around to attract small animals. Probably something that could easily come about by accident.

Spectre of Pithecanthropus brought up that herbivores have never been seen to use tools. This makes sense, now that I think of it; early tools would be most useful for hunting. Only after they have been used extensively would they be adapted for other uses.

However, it seems likely that an intelligent herbivore could learn tool use if other species discovered it. Something that has happened many times in our own history.

Thanks Blake for your informative post. Civilization is seeming more likely as this thread progresses. Having both options of food source available to us may have only sped up the process of civilization.

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Neanderthals were highly omnivorous and in no way carnivores. They ate a lot of meat but certainly ate a lot of vegetable matter as well. Moreover the direct ancestors of the Neanderthals had already evolved tool use and probably consumed even more vegetable matter. So Neanderthals weren’t carnivores and didn’t evolve tool use.

With a few bizarre exceptions like pandas all species have bodies that are already so well adapted to obtaining their food. That is no more or less true of carnivores as herbivores.

The pressure to use tools is presumably because they improve access, not because they open up access to new food sources. Aside from human animals don’t imagine a food source and then set out to make a tool to get it. For example a jackal doesn’t imagine the food in an ostrich egg and then set out to invent the hammer. Animals only reach that stage after they are already accomplished tools users. What animals do is have a food source they already exploit and then adapt tools to better utilise that food.

Early humans as with later humans were opportunists. They ate whatever they could get their hands on. As afr as we can tell animal material has always made up around 50% of the calories in a hunter gatherer diet. In some places that seems to have consisted mostly of small game but in places where lage game was abundant then large game made up the majority of the diet. IOW humans are omnivores in the truest sense.

It’s pure speculation. We have no idea what the first tool was that humans used. It’s been speculated that it was the termite rods of the chimps, or rocks used to crack bones for their marrow or rocks hurled as weapons. But I have never seen it suggested that the first human tools were used to obtain plant food. As others have pointed out, for the most part plant food just sits there for the most part.

Rats are like pigs, they are a lousy food source. That’s because they can only utilise food that humans could be eating themselves. It’s a highly lossy process to convert grain to rat flesh, much better to eat the rat yourself. Early societies produced relatively little in the way of waste that rats could use.

Pigs were advantageous in that they could forage for themselves and be supplemented with the limited waste material. Rats are such a nuisance and so prone to predation that it’s hard to see how they could be allowed to forage free, which means they would need to be fed fulltime, which is a waste of food.

That’s because meat is dense energy. It provides the greatest return for the minimum effort. Or to put it another way, the earliest human tools were used to obtain meat because meat provided the biggest impetus to tool use.

If a species were herbivorous then meat provides no impetus and the earliest tools may well have been nutcrackers or grindstones since nuts and grains represent the densest plant energy sources.

15

Neanderthals were around for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. How much longer do you think we have?

Cite please. I recall the Neanderthal diet as being meat 80% + . That’s functionally carnivore in my book. If necessary I’ll find a cite. The BBC online science section has some good information.

Other observations:

  • meat can be got from scavenging + kill thefts, and commonly is. You don’t need tools.
  • terrestrial carnivores - Tasmanian Tiger (now extinct) Tasmanian Devil (a little uncertain) monitor lizards, pythons, snakes, crocodiles (Ok amphibians), raptors and diet-specialized species like anteaters.
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Early tool use vis a vis meat.

It’s likely hammer stones were used to open scavenged skulls.

Most other bones are susceptible to a regular jaw and surrendered their contents that way. The skull may have been mostly a tools-only meal and so a big advantage to early homonids.

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Neanderthal diet:

Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals (BBC)

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Well first off Neanderthals as a species covered a large area over along time, from Palestine to Poland and through to France and over 20, 000 years or so. Their diet unsurprisingly was equally varied. Talking about a Neanderthal diet is like talking about an American Indian diet.

Secondly 80% may be functionally carnivore to you, but to a dietician or ecologist or ethologist that’s indisputably omnivore. I don’t need to even bother dragging out a reference because you agree that they were omnivores.

I assume by commonly you don’t mean commonly for humans. Because scavenging is never common for functional human societies.

If you are talking about non-human species this has already been addressed above.

Also addressed above was the use of the earliest tools to crack scavenged bones to extract marrow. So it is incorrect to say you don’t need tools to get meat form scavenging. You don’t need tools to get some meat form scavenging, but that is true of any food source, meat or other wise. You can always get some without using tools.

Let’s see.

Almost nothing is known about the thylacine. We have no idea where they lived, what their social structure was like, how long they lived. We certainly have no idea what they ate. We know they were blamed for killing sheep, we know they scavenged dead sheep and dead wallabies, we know they ate beef, mutton and bread, rice and potatoes in captivity and that is the totality of our knowledge of their diet. Perhaps you could tell us how you know that they were exclusive carnivores when zoologists and palaeontologists who have studied them for decades don’t know that?

Tasmanian devil. “Although the Tasmanian devil will eat any material of animal origin, ranging from corbie grubs to mammals larger than itself , it is particularly attracted by carrion. … Much of its reputation as a sheep killer is base don its having been seen eating sheep that died form natural causes but it has been known to take weak or cast lambs. Penned poultry are certainly attacked and a young Tasmanian devil, which is more agile than the adult, will scramble on bushes to take birds at roost. Juvenile Tasmanian devils are omnivorous with a diet commonly including insects, berries and grass seeds. Plant material plays the greatest role when young initially take up an independent existence in late November-December and declines in importance as the animals age. The Australian Museum Complete Book of Australian Mammals. Australian Museum. 1986.

The reptiles I won’t get into in depth because I only said that I could think of only the cats as pure terrestrial carnivores. I will however point out that monitors are huge group and by no means exclusively carnivorous. The edentate anteaters of all kinds would often be exclusively insectivorous it’s true. I had overlooked them. However it’s hard to see what this discussion might gain from consideration of such highly specialised creatures.

Could I please have a reference that suggests that most of the bones of say, a sheep, would be able to fit into a human mouth and then cracked open in this manner? Having broken down numerous animal carcasses I find this claim highly suspicious.

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Read the link.

The big advantage to early hominids is likely to have been that they could obtain by tool use the skull meat that other, jaw-reliant, scavengers could not get.

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I did. It says that they got around 1/10 of their protein from animal sources and makes no mention of what proprortion of their calories came from that source.

Nowhere does it suggest they were purely carnivorous. Does anyone except you think that 20% vegetable matter int he diet makes an animal an exclusive carnivore?

So yeah, I read the link. What’s your point? That you call 10% vegetable matter exclusively carnivorous when scientists don’t?

Do you have any evidence that lions or hyaenas can’t open a skull to get at the brains? That seems unlikely when I have seen domestic dogs easily open sheep skulls.