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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

There also seems to be a somewhat self evident natural+sexual selection here. Imagine you're going after some sort of prey, and fail to catch it immediately. The guys capable of continuing to pursue it, and ultimately succeeding where another might fail, are simply going to have be much more likely to live and procreate. They're also going to be the ones coming back with all sorts of game likely raising prestige, increasing odds of procreating, and so on.

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I remember learning about this in grad school 20 years ago (so this isn't exactly a new theory), what I remember is that the modern human "package" has a lot of interlocking parts.

There's the sight advantage from the upright posture, along with the ability to use our hands since we aren't running with them (for spears, gourds of water, etc.), a brain powerful enough to engage in 2nd-order thinking ("the gazelle will want to catch back up with his herd", etc.), less sun exposure so better heat endurance, an efficient jogging gait (humans have beaten horses at marathons[1]), and probably most importantly social organization and comms that allow coordinated pack hunting (this may even get to why small irises and white sclera in our eyes were selected for).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

> small irises and white sclera in our eyes were selected for

For anyone wondering:

Contrast in eyes can be better seen over longer distances than pigmented eyes, allowing for communication from eye gaze alone.

https://news.asu.edu/20230313-new-research-indicates-whites-...

That's a cool piece, thanks. I see the research has advanced since the pleistocene (a.k.a. grad school).

Seeing the recent Planet of the Apes Movies advertised, I wondered about the reality of Humans vs Smart Apes.

Absurb as it is LOL

I havent seen all the movies, but from memory they show Apes using their physical advantages vs Humans that have no tech or weapons.

But Humans clearly have some physical advantages over other apes.

I think most apes would fuck you up in direct 1on1 combat without weapons.

Which is why our evolved ability to fashion and use weapons is such an advantage. Though if you start out on open terrain outside of sprinting range no other primate can catch you. Which is why we left the trees.

SUPER offended you put “a brain capable of second order thinking” in the middle of the list. And your brain is probably offended, too! I more see humans as gangly hairless apes who walk weird but managed to evolve inference, not finely tuned machines — but to each their own!

Now I don't have any references to back this up but my personal experience has been that walking on 2 feet is a more common trait then 2nd order thinking amongst humans.

Which reminds me of a anecdote from a park ranger I was chatting with once. Apparently the challenge with designing a bear proof garbage can is the overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.

At least bears have "hands", I seem to remember crows pose a similar challenge, defeating garbage can locks that could be straight out of a Myst puzzle.

Positive that a non-negligible portion of the human population would be hopelessly challenged by such contraptions.

One thing I learned in the Mojave is that both crows and coyotes will learn the range of your rifle and stay just outside of it and wait for you to fall asleep. If you have a blind they will also count how many of you go into and and come out of it, and not approach the rations depot until the blind has zero people in it.

> Which reminds me of a anecdote from a park ranger I was chatting with once. Apparently the challenge with designing a bear proof garbage can is the overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.

If HN had a Quote of the Day feature, I would definitely nominate this.

(Yes, I realize there's a large motivation difference between a hungry bear which can smell the food in the garbage can, and a human whose alternative is "meh, just drop my trash next to the stupid trick garbage can".)

Just for clarity/your reference, this is a very popular and very hilarious quote that is seemingly sourced from a 2020 tweet (?), and likely adapted by every ranger in the country that guards bear proof trash cans. While looking this up I also found a 2018 study about black bears being some of the smartest non-primate mammals, which makes the quote that much more believable!

Eh, I would say anyone who’s not capable of second order thinking isn’t meaningfully human. I guess it gets fuzzy with babies and the extremely disabled, but that’s life

I remember reading that humans can catch up with a lot of animals by simply walking (and tracking them), because we're extremely efficient and capable of losing heat easily through sweat

Also, there are horse vs man marathons and the times are very surprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

> They're also going to be the ones coming back with all sorts of game likely raising prestige, increasing odds of procreating, and so on.

Or more simply, the actual food to feed one's mate(s) and offsprings, further fostering that particular gene pool over generations.

Why do you think it's sexual selection? You are assuming something which has been proven as anachronism before.

could be that endurance is good for mating, or unfit suitors can't keep up :)

I meant the presumption there always has been a (male) sex associated with hunting thousands of years ago. This sex based role attribution would be necessary for sexual selection.

However, there is quite a bit of archeological evidence which suggests gender role inequality first started with human settlement and agriculture practice. The presumption of sexual divide in these activities in hunter gather societies may be anachronistic.

Eg.:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/women...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-h...

We're currently in a local max on topics related to identity politics, so I'd take any such publications with extreme skepticism. For instance your first article casually makes the rather extreme claim that women were more suited for endurance activity, by citing physiological differences, critically - which still exist, like wider hips and vastly higher estrogen levels. They then claim such things would enable women to run further and faster than men. This is contradicted by marathon (and all other forms of running) records since they've ever been kept. Furthermore I'd observe that they have gotten closer in modern times largely due to a greater ability to find women with genetic abnormalities bringing them closer to being genetically male that, in some cases (such as Caster Semenya) has even required sex testing to ensure they "really" were female.

There are also countless other issues that make all of this highly improbable. For instance people often frame these things like you just run towards an animal, it runs away, eventually passes out, you bop it, and you win - like a video game. In reality animals fight back. And, to this very day, animals like elk manage to kill hunters, using modern weapons and knowledge, with some degree of regularity. And elk are child's play relative to things like the mammoths and other animals our distant ancestors were hunting - with primitive weapons! This makes other issues like raw strength critically important - if that arrow or spear isn't going extremely deep - it could well be the last thing you ever do. Heck, even for much smaller game like boars - they've killed enough famous people (almost invariably during hunts) that Wiki has an entire category dedicated to it. [1] And then there are the countless societal factors.

Getting injured and even killed on hunts would not have been especially irregular. Yet in society men are vastly more replaceable than women. A single man can father tens of children in a year, yet a woman can only give birth to one. Lactating women are absolutely critical for the health of young children and are completely irreplaceable in that role. Similarly, in the past infant mortality rates were extremely high. We compensated for this by having large numbers of children. So women being regularly pregnant or breastfeeding is very much a reality. And going on a hunt in this scenario is obviously completely out of the question. And there's so much more one could write about the inanity and nonsensicalness of all of this, but this post is already far longer than intended - just to scratch the basics of it all!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deaths_due_to_boar_at...

No point to argue, if your world view dismisses every contrary argument upfront as fake, a result of the political climate.

No, you. And I'm not saying it's fake. I'm appealing to an overwhelming amount of falsifiable evidence. You are appealing to random articles in pop media which are hyperbolizing fringe studies that are aiming to create sensationalist generalizations based on scant evidence that is exceptional (as in being the exception) relative to the vastly overwhelming amount of what is available.

This is then taken to the next level to make broad statements like wide hips and estrogen would make somebody a physically superior runner in both terms of speed and endurance while ignoring the fact that females still have wider hips and higher estrogen than males, yet clearly are not superior runners in any way, shape, or fashion. Such arguments can only be made in the complete and utter absence of skepticism.

It's akin to phrenology, astrology (which was indeed a science at one time), and every other pop-sci phase that society has gone through only to look back a half century later wondering 'wtf were they even thinking?' The evidence at large just does not support the stated claims in any way, shape, or fashion, and relies exclusively on trying to turn the exception into the rule, to satisfy whatever's trending at this time or that.

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