From: Randall Parker 

In <62docs0m9v43qajkhj6m16ir254qidibc4{at}4ax.com>, the sagacious
modavis{at}bellatlantic.net Monte Davis perspicated:
> Point taken -- but to be persnickety, I don't think it took any
> "technology" more advanced than social cooperation, language, and
> pointed sticks to make us top predators -- collectively.

Do you happen to know anything about current thinking about Neanderthals in
this regard?

I was trying to convince a friend of mine that the domestication of wolves
was one of the factors that gave our ancestors an advantage over
Neanderthal (I find the theory very appealing personally so I may not be
objective here ). But he wasn't buying.

He argued that we cooperated in hunting and they didn't. I don't buy that.
It doesn't take that large a brain to do cooperative hunting. Lots of
species do it.

But obviously, complex speech could make that hunting cooperation more complicated.

OTOH, how complex does speech need to be on the hunt? Prairie dogs have
complex signals for describing invaders to their territories and their
brains are quite small compared to ours.

So what I'm left wondering is what exactly were the adaptations that our
larger brains initially enabled. I don't know.


>From then on,
> while any single lion, tiger or cave bear might nail any single unwary
> human, the human "pack" was more than a match for all the
> lions/tigers/bears in the neighborhood.
>
oh my>
>

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