Unsupported Speculation

I wanted to share a stream of consciousness I was having a moment ago.

In India, there is a famous phenomenon that occurs there every now and then when the local monkeys go to war against the local dogs. This is usually spurred by one of the monkeys being injured or killed by a dog, and then all hell breaks loose.

This is probably similar to the mobbing that crows do when a specific someone is identified as a threat to crows, and then this someone is harassed everywhere they go within the crow colony’s range whenever they are seen. But for the monkeys, the identification is much more general, and the monkeys begin attacking and killing all dogs, including all puppies that they find.

This made me think that human beings are probably the same way, and in the time we’ve been on earth, we’ve probably eradicated a large number of dangerous species to the point of extinction, including possibly the Neanderthal, as well as sabertooth tigers. What I mean to say is that we have this same trait to collectively lump an entire species together into a threat category.

In the case of sabertooth tigers, I don’t believe the way movies and books depict how people coped with them is accurate. Many of these guesses about how life was like in the Stone Age assumed that people were barely surviving, drinking from puddles, trembling in the dark, and gripping a spear with shaking hands while they jumped at every sound that emanated from the darkness.

I think the reality about human life is that if you aren’t surviving well, then you don’t ever have long to live. For a single individual, as well as a community of people living in the Stone Age, to not deteriorate physically and psychologically, they have to utterly have their acts together, and have established very dependable ways to provide all the food they need for themselves. If they fail to do this, then they would have quickly reached a state they are much too distracted by failing health and the psychological bullsh*t associated with slow-starvation to solve their problems and get back to meeting all their needs.

THUS, prehistoric people were communities that had their acts together, and were hardly alone in the dark and terrified of animal calls, rustling foliage, and snapping twigs.

And back to sabertooth tigers, these animals are believed to have been solitary predators like some other species of large cats, and they only came together during mating season. When it wasn’t mating season, then they roamed by themselves and hunted prey, including people.

Considering all of this, I think the demise of sabertooth tigers is a story about a member of a human community getting mauled by one, and after that, like the monkeys going to war against the dogs, the entire human community went to war to track down and kill not only that single sabertooth tiger, but all those who’s tracks they found.

I imagine children being taught by someone what a sabertooth tiger track looked like by pressing his thumb into the dirt and shaping the track, and telling the children that whenever they are about, if they ever see that track, to head straight back home and tell someone. Then, whenever this actually happened, shortly afterwards a whole lot of hunters and trackers would leave the community with narrow eyes to find and kill the thing.

And after many hundreds of thousands of years of this trait expressing itself, the human race succeeding in completely eradicating many, many dangerous species.

To revisit a final tangent about all of this, depictions of life during the Stone Age is usually from the point of view of the advancement of technology making everything easier and better, and thus these depictions couldn’t portray people doing just fine back 250,000 years ago, even when they had to live without iPads and steamed lattes.

The truth about living well at all though, regardless of whether we are talking about prehistoric people or modern people, is that beginning to fail to meet needs can eventually cross a threshold that someone’s deterioration creates an increasing reduction on their ability to meet all of their other needs. In other words, you fall apart a little, you might fall apart too much, and then fall apart completely.

This is why I know that prehistoric communities did just fine back then. Human beings just can’t keep skipping breakfast before they are too busy being haunted by imaginary ghosts and hunted by imaginary predators to sit their asses down to eat a sandwich. It’s a psychological irony that if people get too messed up, not only can they not bring themselves to solve their problems, but it won’t occur to them either.

Knowing this, I think the image of a caveman as a solitary trembling mess out in the cold and darkness is unlikely.