I suppose the question I meant was, how did we catch prey if not jogging after them forever? Or is that unknown? Just trying to update my mental model of what happened! Thanks for the info
Group hunting most likely, since that’s something all the other great apes (gorillas, chimps and orangutans) do. There’s plenty of footage of chimps surrounding their prey and catching them that way. Also we have omnivore dentition so we ate a lot of plants, and most likely scavenged quite a bit.
In more recent times (like the last million years or so) we used spears, and contemporary hunter/gatherers (like the !Kung who featured in the bit from the David Attenborough documentary that people like to link to as “proof” of the endurance hunting thesis) often used poison with their spears and arrows, which did allow them to leisurely walk after their prey. But only because their prey had been poisoned, not because humans have superior endurance.
I suppose the question I meant was, how did we catch prey if not jogging after them forever? Or is that unknown? Just trying to update my mental model of what happened! Thanks for the info
Group hunting most likely, since that’s something all the other great apes (gorillas, chimps and orangutans) do. There’s plenty of footage of chimps surrounding their prey and catching them that way. Also we have omnivore dentition so we ate a lot of plants, and most likely scavenged quite a bit.
In more recent times (like the last million years or so) we used spears, and contemporary hunter/gatherers (like the !Kung who featured in the bit from the David Attenborough documentary that people like to link to as “proof” of the endurance hunting thesis) often used poison with their spears and arrows, which did allow them to leisurely walk after their prey. But only because their prey had been poisoned, not because humans have superior endurance.