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by upsidesinclude 951 days ago
>Among large-bodied mammals, humans are especially pathetic, weak, and vulnerable

This alone is such a wildly unfounded statement. Maybe the author is a typical, academic soft body.

I couldn't really keep reading beyond this point as the author is comically uncritical of their own beliefs

Humans are wildly dangerous, vengeful, intelligent and resourceful.

1 comments

> Humans are wildly dangerous, vengeful, intelligent and resourceful.

We spend the beginning and end of our lives pathetic, weak and vulnerable. There is a limited window of time in which we are dangerous, vengeful, intelligent, and resourceful enough to be threatening.

We have no armor, no fur, no claws. We freeze to death in the cold and burn in the sun. We can't breathe underwater, nor can we fly. Being bipedal we can't hunt anything by chasing it and beating it to death; we leverage deception, surprise and traps and are quickly fucked when anything uses the same tactics on us.

We're good at leveraging technology. That's the only reason we're apex. If we can't exploit some other creature in time to adapt to the current situation, we're dead.

Intelligence is not the only physical attribute we excel in. Humans are frequently cited as the best endurance runners among the animal kingdom[0]. Some extant (and probably many prehistoric) tribes hunt via exhaustion, running down even large mammals until they collapse.[1] Humans also have excellent manual dexterity for tasks like grabbing, pulling and digging. Humans also seem to have better vision than most animals excluding birds of prey, with good performance across a number of attributes like color perception, depth perception, motion perception, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Or perhaps not [0].

> But the idea is a supposition. It was formulated as a way to explain characteristics humans possess. The best evidence for humans engaging in persistence hunting is merely that we have physical traits that suggest we could do so.

[0] https://undark.org/2019/10/03/persistent-myth-persistence-hu...

> Being bipedal we can't hunt anything by chasing it and beating it to death

While some animals can run faster than humans, none of them can run for as long. That is exactly how we did it.

You have no armor, I do. Technology is an integral part of the human species and humans evolved along with it.