The standard Hollywood trope is that explorers entering the prehistoric past spend must be constantly on the run from various giant predators, and if not careful will within a few days find themselves turned into explorer McNuggets for whichever hungry reptile finds them first.
However in reality it was just a wild ecosystem just like any other over the past millions of years, presumably with a small number of predators feeding off a much larger set of plant eaters. There are potentially dangerous creatures around today have today: lions, tigers, bears, wolves, crocodiles, rhinos, Hippos, poisonous snakes etc… But while there is some elevated risk exploring and living in the wilderness, the is no sense that you would be constantly hunted.
Is there something about the ecosystem of the Jurassic or Cretaceous period that would make it more dangerous for a human explorer, than say the Amazon Jungle, Serengeti plains or the Alaskan wilderness.
If you weren’t specifically asking about danger to humans the answer would be that it’s about the same.
Predator-prey relationships are as violent today as they have probably always been, regardless whether that’s Allosaurus vs Stegosaurus, Gerbil vs Rhinoceros Beetle or Meerkat vs Scorpion.
The thing that made the prehistoric past really safe for humans is that we weren’t there.
Adult humans aren’t actually all that small as things go in the current era. Depending on where you went in the Cretaceous period there could potentially be quite a few predators that would have no trouble whatever taking humans as prey. And that’s just on land - you couldn’t pay me enough to go swimming in the Western Interior Seaway.
But you might end up in a dodo bird situation, where the animals having never seen humans don’t know exactly how to react to them.
Although sooner or later, one of those carnivore dinosaurs is going to try a nibble.
I thought the question was going to be about how ever dinosaur or time travel movie shows constant earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters that have to be constantly avoided. That’s just movie crap.
One thing you have to remember is that when you walk out your door in 2013 you’re looking at a world where most dangerous large animal species have drastically reduced populations, or are extinct.
This is because humans have pushed most of these species off the habitat where they once lived. Those lands are now farms and suburbs. Go back a couple hundred years before modern human population densities and you’ll see a lot more large animals roaming around.
But even then you’re looking at a population that is drastically reduced from the ice age. North America used to have several types of elephants, camels, short-faced bears, dire wolves, lions, sabertooths, horses, giant sloths, and so on. Then some combination of the end of the ice age and humans arriving drove these large animals extinct.
So go back to any time before there were humans and you’ll see a lot more large animals than you’d expect. Even today in Africa if you’re dropped into a game reserve you’re going to have to watch out for dangerous animals–Buffalo, lions, elephants, hippos, rhinos, crocodiles, leopards, hyaenas, wild dogs. Note that herbivores are just as likely to kill you as carnivores. Get near a hippo and they just might decide to stomp you to death just because they don’t like the look of you. And then the hippo might decide to eat you, despite being a nominal herbivore.
But were the predators more common, more aggressive, or potentially more dangerous to humans than animals today?
Walking around the Africa I know I need to avoid the Hippos and there is a chance that I could end up as lion chow. If I hike around Alaska I could run into a grizzly bear who could totally ruin my day. Is this less dangerous than the chance or running into a T-rex or Utahraptor? Was swimming in Western Interior Seaway more dangerous than swimming in crocodile infested waters?
I’m suspecting that traveling back then might be just camping out and keeping an eye out for rare predators rather than a constant struggle of trying to avoid being eaten.
I do understand NewLeafs point that in modern times we have made avoiding humans a survival trait. But without this would someone going on a back packing trip be risking his neck?
Note: I’m not trying to push the view that the two epoch were equally dangerous. I just want to know if my belief has some validity or if I’m full of it, and if so why.
I guess maybe I don’t understand your question. Are you asking if you’d be more likely to die from an animal attack if you had been camping in 135 million B.C. than if you were camping in modern Africa?
I think to a large extent, the answer depends on the behavior of the animals around then, and behavior is something that’s really hard to determine from fossils. If you’re lucky, the larger animals would ignore you in favor of their nominal prey. If not, they wouldn’t.
I don’t know how else to answer, or even if it can be answered without use of a time machine.
I was trying to make the point Lemur did- not that people are dangerous to other people, though that’s true.
We’ve killed all the big dangerous predators. Bears are a remote possibility in a faraway place.
BItD, there were bears and worse everywhere you went all the time.
You’d only need to encounter T rex once. You move, you are small enough to eat.
That’s all it takes to get eaten. You aren’t fighting back, you’ll be swallowed whole.
OP, you should read Tunnel In the Sky. It’s right on topic.
I’d guess the animal density would be higher back then, because humans have been so very good at reducing populations of predators and prey, but I somehow doubt it’d be the attack-a-minute of Hollywood.
You’re asking about such huge amounts of time and space that no answer is very meaningful. Some times and places were probably more dangerous, because there were more predators that might find slow-moving, unarmored humans to be easy prey or just more swarms of large beasts trampling anything in their migration path. Some times and places, the number of large predators were smaller and easily sated by their regular diets and could afford to ignore you.
It was probably very hot and with lower oxygen levels in most of the dinosaur era so just moving around for an unaided human would be more difficult than the norm today in some ways at some times, although you’re talking about way more than 100,000,000 years. Think about how much time that is. Our world today is not very much like the world of 15,000 years ago and we haven’t even had to worry about continents moving long distances.
Obviously, movies are going to stress danger. Given that much time and space I’m sure that a paleontologist could find a spot that would justify it. Asking about a random time and space doesn’t give any real answer. Asking about the whole period gives too many answers to process. Sorry, but it’s a really bad question.
There are very few predators these days that humans cannot coexist with by banding together and becoming skilled at using fairly simple weapons and survival techniques. I don’t know of anything that would work against big time dinosaurs, though.
ISTM that the question is being treated as “suppose a modern human with no familiarity whatsoever with avoiding or defending against any sort of predatory animal, was tossed into a modern jungle versus a prehistoric one, how would his/her chances at survival differ?” and many are arguing “not by much”.
But the question I would look at is “how different would humans fare in learning to cope with and survive a modern jungle versus a prehistoric one?” and the answer there might be “quite a lot”.
Very large pit traps. Or stampeding a herd off a cliff (not much use for a lone carnivore, though).
The problem with that, though, is the problem faced by many who have been attacked in modern times by, say, sharks - the shark might take only one bite then swim off, but one bite from a large shark is quite adequate to kill a human. Something like an allosaur or a T-rex would pose the same problem.
I think it’s the unknown nature of the threats that would be the problem. Yes, bears are dangerous, but we have a pretty good handle on bear behavior and know at least some basic techniques to minimize the danger. Walk in the woods/flot down the the river today, and you know where to look for snakes, and if you see them, you know which ones are poisonous and which ones are not. You have a general sense of what might be around the corner. If you didn’t, you would make a lot of stupid mistakes that would increase the danger.
I don’t see any reason to believe that the dinosaurs had any greater density of life than in modern times, because the density of animals ultimately derives from the photosynthetic efficiency of the plants. Warmer temperature and lower oxygen may have had a small effect, but I think it’s pretty simple math that follows the same ecological chain we see today: 100 units of plants supports 10 units of herbivores supports 1 unit of predators. Plus or minus a little bit, that equation is pretty reliable. You just can’t support the tightly-packed populations that Hollywood likes to depict.
Given predator patterns of today, it’s likely that something the size of a T-Rex had many square miles of territory per individual/family. The odds of just stumbling into that guy are pretty slim; even if he smells you from way off, it might take a day of walking just to get close enough to eat you.
As for humans dealing with large animals… people figured out how to kill mammoths, perhaps even to extinction. You can’t tell me that these same humans are incapable of killing or avoiding a T-Rex. If the time-travelers are a properly equipped and educated team, I don’t see them being unable to defend themselves. In no time, they’ll be just like our ancestors: disease and child-birth will be bigger killers than predators.
What Hollywood really doesn’t understand are two things about predators:
they don’t like fair fights. Even a T-Rex is going to think twice about a bunch of people with spears, especially if they’re willing to stand their ground.
they can only eat so much. Even if humans are defenseless against the T-Rex, how much can it really eat? OK, so we sacrifice half a ton of humans (5 or 6 people). Now you’ve bought yourself at least three days (and perhaps three months if we’re talking cold-blooded animals). That’s plenty of time to dig a pit and kill that bastard. I laugh at these movies where a shark or a bear kills a dozen people and is still hungry.
T. rex had a jaw six feet long- they would swallow humans whole and crush them with stones in their gizzards.
Five or six humans wouldn’t last two minutes, much less three months. Ever seen a heron eat a fish?
As for ‘life density’- humans have impacted that dramatically.
We are top predators and have had a huge impact on other life, especially large animals.
ETA- T rex could probably get up to 45mph or better at a full run. Typical cruising speed would be much lower.