We’ve concentrated on how useless humans are with their natural offensive weaponry – teeth, fingernails, fists, feet – but aren’t we equally bad at defenses?
I could try all day to rip my cat’s skin open with my nails (assuming the cat is drugged unconscious before hand) and I don’t think I’d have a chance except maybe its eyes or the like. OTOH, without it trying or wanting to, any number of little kittens have left me bloody (No! Do NOT climb up my bare legs!) and I have often scratched a mosquito bite until my arm is bloody with the same pathetic nails.
And that’s not even something with protective scales or a shell or just really tough hide.
Is our skin as fragile as I think, or is it just our lack of a reasonable layer of fur?
Monkeys and apes don’t have claws either. Chimps can absolutely destroy other animals with their teeth.
If we’re talking about something as small as a housecat, your teeth could deliver a disabling crush injury to any of its limbs, especially if you can get a limb far enough into your mouth to recruit your molars and the massive mechanical advantage they have (due to being closer to your mandibular joint than your incisors and canines). And I suspect that you could deliver a nasty skin avulsion by clamping an animal’s skin with your canines and incisors and then pushing the animal away with your hands/arms.
Article here:
Quote from the article:
In this list of records, males showed an average of 150 pounds with the molars and 83 with incisors, and females 108 pounds with the molars and 57 with incisors.
Note that this is voluntary bite force under laboratory conditions. If you’re in a fight for your life, you’re likely going to bite even harder.
Yeah, in a 1-1 random encounter a human will likely do fairly poorly with most other mammals. Most small ones will get away and most big ones will hurt us. On the other hand, don’t discount the human brain. Bison are one of the more dangerous animals on the planet and native Americans were able to kill them by stampeding them off of cliffs.
But after he killed a leopard by thrusting his right hand into the animal’s mouth and choking it to death with his left, he was forever to be remembered chiefly for that 1896 encounter.
It was on this trip that Akeley came face to face with a deadly 80-pound leopard which he strangled with his bare hands.
Yes, it could happen - just as it sometimes happens to other animals, whether they’re in a fight for territory/mating privileges or trying to subdue prey. Nature red in tooth and claw, and all that. Possessing offensive weaponry/tools does not mean you’re invulnerable to damage, it just means you’ve got a shot at inflicting it.
One big advantage humans have is that we co-operate so well, much better than other animals. It’s the main thing what we use our brains for, for interacting with other people. Our technology would not last without teaching, without learning from other people.
I wouldn’t say humans co-operate with each other better than social pack-hunting animals, like wolves, wild dogs, hyena, orcas, electric eels and vultures. Lion prides often band together for very effective hunting.
Even cheetah sometimes form coalitions to take down large prey. I have no doubt, if there was selection pressure to do so, other cats could quickly learn to hunt together, too, even house cats. I’ve witnessed my 6 cats show signs of cooperation to achieve goals, like coercing me to fill up their bowls with Lil’ Friskies, or just driving me crazy. <
Sure, they do cooperate, in the sense of all having the same general goal of subduing the target animal. But they don’t communicate, delegate, and strategize before or during the attack to nearly the same level that humans are capable of doing.
Well, your assumption is that the animal will run from you but remain in sight so you can walk up to it, and this is going to happen over and over again in a very convenient fashion until it finally succumbs to your superior stamina. The reality is that an animal would leave you in the dust and get out of sight. It could then hide, circle around or do any number of things that would make it impossible for you to find it.
Well, they don’t talk to each other, but I believe they non-verbally communicate, delegate, and strategize quite effectively. As an example, here’s a video of orcas hunting dolphin:
All of human civilization and technology derives from our incredibly sophisticated cooperative behavior. We are the apotheosis of cooperation, critically enabled by language.
If you have an accident and (say) break a leg, think about what then happens.
You use a phone to call for help. How many people throughout history were involved in developing the technology to manufacture that phone? Start with just the first most basic steps - extracting ore and producing metal, for example. How many people (many of them thousands of miles away) are involved in the production process today?
People are standing by to answer your 911 call, and to relay the message to highly skilled paramedics who have a specialized vehicle ready to drive to pick you up. If you’re in a remote place, calls may be relayed by satellites orbiting the earth, and a helicopter may pick you up, perhaps in under an hour. Dozens of other people with a wide array of specialized skills are available to treat you at a hospital. If you track back through all the technology and supply requirements to develop and run all this, literally millions of people are involved in the complex network of cooperation that gets your broken leg fixed.
Orca predation is pretty cool, but are you really suggesting it is remotely comparable to what humans do? I realize that you’re thinking about early human hunting strategies rather than (say) modern medical care - but the sophisticated human capacity for cooperation has been similar since we developed language. The eventual development of modern human civilization just demonstrates how much better it has always been than other species.
I’m suggesting that when it comes to hunting prey, or evading predators, social pack-hunting animals are just as, if not more adept than humans at that task.
I’m aware of humans super-predator reputation, but I also agree with this article, which posits that early humans were more often prey, not killers.
I’m not suggesting that animals are better at other tasks that require high intellect. Obviously, we have an evolutionary leg up in those areas. I’m not going to, for example, hire an animal to do my income tax. But, I may hire a shark to be my lawyer.
Lack of a reasonable layer of fur. Your skin is thicker and tougher than your cat’s (you can consider the mouse a decent stand-in for a cat here). Cat skin is basically paper thin and shorn of fur, very easy to damage. It’s why no non-professional should ever be messing around with scissors to free up fur mats on your pet cat - they cut very easily.
But the fur makes all the difference. It cushions, it is slippery and it impedes slashes and to some extent penetration. Basically thin cat skin + fur beats your thicker human skin + minimal hair. Also sharp claws beat Lee Press-On nails .
Then why did humans come to utterly dominate the world?
I’m not sure why you think implies anything about cooperation. A lot of human cooperative behavior is certainly protective against predators that would easily kill isolated humans.
The most critical human characteristic that defines our evolutionary niche is not general intellect, but specifically cooperation facilitated by the use of language. In either early or modern human civilization, what factor has the greatest impact on survival and fitness?
(a) whether your IQ is 90 or 110;
(b) whether you are isolated or part of a community.
Both are needed by us. I’d rather take the risk of surviving on my own than be in a community of humans with an average IQ of 30. Better still, I’d become part of an orca community.
We have superior intellect and cooperation as our strong points. Social pack-hunters have superior physicality and cooperation as their strong points. In both cases, the cooperative tactics each employs work for them.
In the end, it can be claimed that humans triumphed as Earth’s apex predator. But, that wasn’t without a bit of luck (thanks to a bolide collision ~66 million years ago, and we weren’t decimated by other top predators when our numbers were small, and we don’t live in the orca’s domain). And, if house- and feral cats were 200lbs each, I wouldn’t bet on humans either.
That’s just counterfactual, that’s not within the normal range of human intelligence. We are discussing actual human capabilities. But human intelligence does have a significant range of innate variation, and if general intelligence were the critical factor for human survival since the EEA, we’d see continuing selection for smarter and smarter humans. I don’t think there’s any evidence that innate human intelligence has increased significantly since early hunter-gatherer societies that were equipped with language and used sophisticated cooperative strategies. Modern civilization is the outcome of those capabilities - language-enabled cooperation allowing culture and technology to take us further and further.
Humans might have gone extinct. But any way things had played out, orcas or wolves would not be making mobile phones and launching the James Webb telescope unless they evolved language and much more sophisticated cooperation.
By the same token, we may be too smart for our own good. Compared to many other top predators since the dawn of time, we haven’t ruled very long. At the rate we’re going, we could easily make our species go extinct (maybe all advanced civilizations do and that’s the answer to the Fermi paradox). I just hope we don’t take too many other species down with us.
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