Interesting reading. No idea exactly how accurate it is, but... Humans have a number of advantages over other animals. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase healthy as a horse to connote heartiness; but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. Theres mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; its called pursuit predation. Basically, were the Terminator. (The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. Thats why we use them for hunting. And even then, its only sort of.) Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we dont need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you; and by any other species standards, we just plain dont get tired. Its one thing to face down a cheetah, which will slam into you at 60 mph and break your neck, its another thing to run very quickly to get away from a thing, only to have it just kind of show up. To have it be intelligent enough to figure out where you are by the fur and feather youve left behind, your footprints and piss and shit, and when you think youve lost it and you bed down for the night, there it is, waiting, when you wake up; and you run again. But it keeps following you. Always in the corner of your eye. Until you just die. Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury thats not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isnt necessarily a career-ending injury for a human. We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results arent pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits. Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anaesthetics or life support. In extremes, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine, medical procedures that most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons. Our jaws have too many teeth in them, so we developed a way to weld metal to our teeth and force the bones in our jaw to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in our mouths to keep them in place. We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and we keep insects at bay from bothering us by death by using little traps. And by god, we will eat anything. We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food. We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin. We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favourite musicians live. We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out. We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground. Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places. We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights. We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them. On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 07:25:42 +0000
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