The human superpowers are basically throwing fastballs and jogging in hot weather. The ancestral hunting strategy is basically to throw stuff at the animals to get them to run, then jog after them. Repeat until the animal is too tired to move.
There are still humans who do this to this day, the most notable being the tarahumara tribes of South America. They will literally run down the local deer barefoot for their food.
Humans are insanely adapted to be endurance runners compared with the rest of the animal kingdom which, if you think about it, kind of makes sense. It takes a LOT less energy for a cheetah to sprint down an antelope in 3 minutes than to chase it for 3 hours, so they adapted to be great sprinters. Likewise, the antelope only has to outrun the cheetah for 3 minutes so they, too, became great sprinters. For small mammals it makes more sense to be able to run very fast and hide from predators than to run long distances in potentially dangerous territory.
Since there was no evolutionary incentive for animals to run marathons they never developed the biology to do so, and we see this not just in mammals, but in reptiles, too. Horses are an exception to this though as they, too, are well adapted to distance running although iirc their adaptations are more in the way of making it mechanically easy (long, strong legs, huge hearts, etc.) to run long distances rather than the cooling systems humans developed.
Humans just kind of lucked out or perhaps ended up filling an evolutionary niche due to our need to cover long ranges with scarce food sources in our early evolutionary development.
And here I am, a couch potato that can barely jog for over 90 seconds before feeling like i'm going to die.
The humans running down animals for hours also feel like that after a bit fyi. They are just hungry enough to keep running.
I have some friends who are into serious long distance running and they are constantly in a state of suffering while running. It's the feeling of stopping running that makes them keep wanting to go running, not the feeling of the actual running.
I'm a distance runner, and I don't know if you've captured running all that well tbh. I certainly don't go out for my Sunday long run looking forward to the finish. It's pretty enjoyable when you're training, but I concede that racing is difficult and can turn into prolonged suffering.
That's not true though. I used to run long distance all the time because I enjoyed running. It was really meditatitive. Plus if you run long enough you get a runners high, which is exactly what it sounds like.
I think the only reason we can keep running in hot weather (better than other animals) is because we're resourceful enough to carry water
Actually it's because we have sweat glands all over our bodies, which I think is unique among animals. Dog, for example, can only dump excess heat by heavier panting, whereas humans will just sweat more.
Some of us have more and more puissant sweat glands than others.
Additionally being bipedal means that as we run our breathing rate is separate from our gait. As four legged animals gallop the motion of their running expands and contracts their diaphragm, forcing them to breath at the same rate they run at.
Since they can't sweat like us, or breath like us, they have to stop running and start panting in order to cool down.
While humans can just keep going, relentlessly, like the It Follows monster.
You just taught me a new word! Puissant!
The word was so fun I decided to make a new community where people can share fun words they just learned. Thank you!
But that's not it. We've also got the social aspect that brought us, as a species, to the apex to be able to hunt animals that could kill us easily individually, some of us have the balls to dominate those animals even alone, and the intelligence to develop novel tools to increase our capabilities and effective cross-generational communication to enable iterating these tools over many lifespans.
Through this, humans or our descendants might one day hunt apex predators on other planets that maybe are better joggers and throwers than we are.
We invented the flame thrower. I know George Carlin did the bit best but... Imagine explaining that to a group of aliens.
"You... you throw what now?"
"Flames, bro."
"For what purpose...?"
"Well, We had these people called Nazis and they liked to hide in concrete fortifications so we figured the best way to make them not be in there would be to fill it with fire."
"Does that not harm these 'nazis'?"
"Oh yeah, it harms them. That was like, a bonus."
"Well, It was nice meeting you. Goodbye forever."
But wait! Let us tell you about the mustard gas!
Or white phosphorus! Wait, wait... how about the inquisition? Or the rape of south america or the roman catholic church...
Damn, why does everybody leave?
King Leopold and the Belgian Congo.
... however, flamethrowers were fielded by the Germans first, and already in the previous World War.
Monkeys have both force and accuracy when pelting humans with feces.
This is just inaccurate.
It's just a good rule of thumb to write off science memes as bullshit.
they do not
Seems like while on average a human can be expected to "naturally" throw better than a monkey, most monkeys are perfectly capable of learning to throw with skill comparable to a human.
Sources:
did you read your sources? "The researchers found no evidence for “aimed throwing."
I'm not sure how you're getting that impression. The quote you put there doesn't show up in the paper even once, and in fact if you search for "aimed throwing" you'll see several instances where they discuss the aimed throwing accuracy of the monkeys. Even in just the abstract there's a few places where they make it clear the monkeys are aiming (and additionally that's what they were measuring).
For both species we found positive correlations between target distances for throwing accuracy, direction and strength of hand preference, percentage of bipedal vs tripedal throws, and percentage of overarm vs underarm throws.
In fact, they go so far as to clearly state that the monkey throwing is a suitable model of human throwing, meaning that the way they throw is similar enough to us that we can actually learn about ourselves from it.
We believe that the capuchin monkey is an informative nonhuman primate model of aimed throwing in humans and that research examining the throwing behavior of capuchins provides insight into the neurological and behavioral characteristics that underlie coordinated multi-joint movements across the primate order.
Anyway, that's all the time I'm gonna spend on this mythbusting lol.
I made a humourous claim that seemed logical, and when some goof decided to claim I'm wrong, you swooped in with facts.
You're my favourite.
I’ve seen enough videos of chimps and gorillas throwing shit at people that I don’t want to test this claim.
Yeah, most species take FOREVER to get the hang of projectile weapons and us big brained humans only took like 5.5 million years to perfect it! That's practically no time at all!
The first wars were thought to be a bunch of people facing off and throwing rocks and sticks at each other. We've been throwing shit for as long as we could walk
I did read somewhere that our brains are really good at calculating where to throw to hit something in motion.
Granted you need practice to get good, but supposedly we are wired for it.
There's a correlation between eyesight and intelligence (in species, not individuals) - interpreting visual inputs takes a lot of brain power, and might be one of the factors pushing for greater intelligence. So, there's at least a decent chance that intelligent aliens would have good eyesight.
Also, they'd need hands, or something equivalent.
Once you have hand(equivalent)s, decent eyes, and intelligence, hand-eye-coordination isn't far off.
If elephants can figure out how to throw rocks with enough force to kill a child, then so can E.T.
Apes can't yell "Kobe" because they can't speak. Apes also can't throw with accuracy. Coincidence? I think not.
Inverse Kinematics is really cool. Whenever you move your hand to a position, you're only thinking of your hand moving to that position, but there's an order of operations you dont even think about. For your hand to be in the right spot your forearm has to be in the right spot, and for your forearm to be in the right spot your upper arm has to be in the right spot. Your brain subconsciously calculates those movements. This enables very accurate motions, your hand can follow a smooth, deliberate arc towards your target
Elephants can throw stuff fairly accurately. Not very far though.
I just spent several seconds trying to figure out if "kobe" is some imaginary alien word I'm supposed to know from Star Trek or something.
You shout Yeet for power and Kobe (RIP) for accuracy
This ability is what made us weaker apes the "apex predator" of the planet.
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