Social carnivores are carnivores that live in groups. These animals had found that cooperation in hunting and food sharing brought great benefits. Both for the individual animal and for the entire group. The same advantages could apply to the first hominids (the hominids) to venture into the open field. The article below shows the development of those first humans and their path to perfecting hunting and food sharing.
Further away, greater chance
Those very first humans discovered that the further they ventured into the open field, the more likely they were to encounter small prey (hares, nestlings, and newborn young of large herbivores). Herbivores are herbivores. The discovery of a greater reach and, with that, a greater chance of loot, stimulated their ambitions.
Continuous stimulation
Not only was the hominid increasingly stimulated to hunt and kill this food, but (and more importantly) it was also encouraged to watch out for those prey animals and to think more and more about how and where to get it. she might find. His ambitions gradually increased when he realized that disabled or older prey of even larger species was coming within his reach and he found a way to kill them more easily.
Cooperation
The bigger the prey, the greater the need to cooperate. If that cooperation is successful, relatively larger quantities of meat will become available. That will lead to a greater opportunity and a stronger incentive to share those portions of meat.
How positive feedback works
We see here how positive feedback works, after all: the more successful a particular behavior is for an animal that is intelligent enough to remember and choose it, the more that animal will be inclined to revisit what turned out to be earlier. to try. So every animal caught increases the urge to look for more animals.
Note
This phenomenon was noticed by the chimpanzee connoisseur of choice, Jane Goodall. She noticed this in the early stages of hunting activities among the Gombe chimpanzees. A chimpanzee happened to catch a young baboon. That unleashed a lot of hopeful yacht energy. However, because the chimpanzees had little success as hunters (they were confused and not focused on enthusiasm), but also because there was a wide variety of alternative food sources from which to eat, the chimps were quickly discouraged. For example, hunting was no longer ‘in’ for them, until the next fluke revived interest in that hunt.
Conclusion
Because the hominids were stimulated by:
- frequent success in the open field;
- perhaps also because there was a greater need for hunting and bait, due to lack of other food sources,
the hominids could have converted something that was of no importance to the survival of chimpanzees into something that was important to the hominids.
Improved survival rate
As well as hunting together, sharing food could also have improved a hominid’s chances of survival.
To abandon
In baboons, an injured or sick baboon will try to keep up with the pack. The other baboons do not feed the injured or sick animal. They don’t even consider him in any way. That’s because they mainly eat seeds, grass, fruits and roots. As a result, they are busy all day with their own food supply. The result is that a sick or injured animal has to take care of itself. Even if the other animals move slowly during the day, the disabled or sick animal often cannot muster enough energy to search for food, as it needs all its strength to follow the group. This will make the injured or sick animal progressively weaker, have more difficulty staying with the group, then become even weaker, and so on.
Return food to a permanent place
When the food is returned to a permanent place, an injured or sick animal does not have to move. That can mean the difference between life and death. That is also the case if it only concerns a few days. Returning food to a permanent place is especially important for the hominids.
Food of the early hunters
The bones found in the hominid habitats of the Olduvai Gorge tell us what those early hunters ate. They were mainly six prey species:
- 1. the Oryx antelope;
- 2. the Sivatherium (a primitive giraffe with a short, thick neck and curved horns);
- 3. the Porcupine;
- 4. the Okapi;
- 5. the Dinotherium (an elephant-like with a shorter trunk than the modern species and a strange lower jaw with bent-down tusks);
- 6. the Waterbuck.
Four of these prey species still exist in Africa, namely:
- the oryx antelope;
- the okapi;
- the porcupine;
- the waterbuck.
The Sivatherium and the Dinotherium are therefore extinct.
Survival rate
The hominids’ maturation and learning processes are very slow, and experimenting these hominids with a diet of meat can expose them to unknown parasites, which can make them sick. If a baboon with a broken leg or dysentery is almost certainly a dead baboon, a correspondingly affected hominid could survive.
The path to an efficient hunter
If we add to the peculiarities of the hominid the cooperative hunting and food sharing of the social carnivore, then the sum of these in the earliest stages could lead to a Australopithecus. The Australopithecus is a hunter who does his business on one new way (namely on two legs and with weapons), his mind constantly being sharpened by that new way until he eventually becomes a truly efficient hunter.