Evidenced by a growth in brain volume, our higher cognitive abilities developed because we hunted and we extinct the megafauna, according to a new study from Tel Aviv University.
This would occur about two million years ago, until the arrival of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. The reason: we had to develop our brains to hunt smaller animals.
Megafauna in decline
The megafauna They are "giant", "very large" or "big" animals. The term is especially associated in current scientific literature with the megafauna of the late Pleistocene and Holocene that have been becoming extinct in a process known as Quaternary mass extinction.
In Africa, 2.6 million years ago, when humans emerged, the average size of land mammals was close to 500 kg. But then, just when the agricultural revolution began, that figure had been reduced by more than 90%, up to several tens of kilos.
For the sake of getting calories, well, Humans were forced to hunt smaller, faster animals., which required greater cognitive abilities, more cunning, an evolutionary process that required a greater volume of the human brain and then led to the development of language that allowed humans to exchange information to find prey and collaborate to hunt them. More sophisticated hunting tools were also required, that is, greater intelligence to develop them.
As it explains Miki Ben-Dor, from the Department of Archeology and author of the study:
As the size of animals continued to decrease, the invention of the bow and arrow and the domestication of dogs allowed for more efficient hunting of medium and small animals. until these populations also decreased. Towards the end of the Stone Age, when animals became even smaller, humans had to put more energy into hunting than they could recover.
That's when the Agricultural revolution, which involved the domestication of both animals and plants, and which brought with it other side effects (many of which were negative).
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The news
Our higher cognitive abilities developed because we made large animals extinct
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.