>I find humans amazing. An adult mammoth is something even the more largest predators would not attempt to hunt. And yet, here is a band of puny 2 legged mammals armed with sticks with a flint at the end, hunting and killing masses of these mighty beasts.

Humans are the only animal with the ability to communicate complex abstract future plans (e.g. "today we all shore up the pit, tomorrow you guys wait over there and we'll drive them into this pit"). And it's not like animals can outrun us either. We're quite slow in a sprint but out cooling system is optimized for a very high duty cycle so we can just keep on chasing. Imagine being hunted by Terminator or Agent Smith. That's what the water buffalo or mammoth feels like

For completeness some languages do not have the concept of future or past tenses.

So even what you are taking for granted as inate in human language planning was also a social 'technology' that humans enhanced/improved on as a community.

Whales and orcas also seem to be able to coordinate in this way.

How much of an advantage is our cooling system in colder climates?

I first read about persistence hunting in an article about a family in Siberia [0], so I'd assume that it's still feasible (if difficult).

0: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...

Don't chimpanzees etc. also coordinate hunting/raiding parties?

I also recall a segment from BBC's Blue Planet, where an octopus and another fish whose name I cannot recall (grouper?), two entirely different species, communicate with each other via the color of their skin to surround and trap prey.

> Our most amazing ancestors were not kings and emperors, but rather these pre-historic hunters and gatherers who carved out a niche as alpha predators using brains, language, and primitive tech.

Of course. What profoundly intrigues me though, is trying to imagine what it must have been like to be -conscious- even before that primal epoch:

To be just on the cusp of awareness and intelligence.

To have thoughts and desires and fears and hopes and loves and hates and plans and dreams, but not knowing what to do with them, or being able to communicate them.

We spent tens of thousands of years being helpless against the environment, against hunger, disease, predators, against each other's instincts and urges.

Imagine being left behind during a hunt, broken and bleeding out.. All the individual suffering that has taken place on this planet, all the sentient thoughts that died alone and confused.

Then imagine how many other worlds out there must be going through the same development right at this very moment.

Orca whales and dolphins also will hunt larger prey.

One on my favorite examples is that of the orcas in Eden Australia. The orcas would shepard baleen whales to whaling vessels in the bay, then help the whalers kill them in exchange for the tongue and lips of the prey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...

Not larger, but it's also speculated that orcas will hunt competing 'apex' great white sharks.

Given your name I'd expect you to have an interest in dolphins. :)

> Then imagine how many other worlds out there must be going through the same development right at this very moment.

I guess we could argue this point against large swaths of the Earths animal kingdoms as well. Do we know where to draw such a line?

> I guess we could argue this point against large swaths of the Earths animal kingdoms as well.

Yes that's what I meant to say with "being on the cusp of awareness and intelligence." Many of them are going through what we must have gone through.

We don't know for sure that humans on our own planet are unique in having the qualities you described. Many animal species show advanced social structures and intelligence.

We are resourceful, that's for sure.

Certainly. Even as a causal observer it's easy to notice these things in other animals. Intelligence is not a boolean flag.

Humans are a comparatively new species disrupting the entire planet. The other animals simply weren't prepared for us. A good twitter thread about this topic: https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145

A lot of ancient myths about the origin of humanity involve some figure stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans (Prometheus being perhaps the best known example). Interesting how this aligns with this story: fire being the technology that distinguishes humans from other animals.

> An adult mammoth is something even the more largest predators would not attempt to hunt.

Not to dispute your larger point, but lions hunt African elephants, which are a similar size to mammoths (many mammoths were actually smaller).

And maybe the best "primitive tech" ever is fire!

They had larger brains than us.

The mammoth traps in question are from about 15,000 years ago. Neanderthals went extinct something like 40,000 years ago.

Neanderthals were more ancient to the people that made these traps than the traps are to us. (Also, I'm unaware of any evidence of Neanderthals in the Americas.)

I think the generally this sort of comparison is based on the brain:body size ratio.

I could be mistaken, but IIRC, Neanderthals had larger brains than homo sapiens sapiens even when taking body mass in to account.

Neanderthals had larger brain cases which suggests they had larger brains, though it's not understood why their brains would be larger -- what evolutionary advantage did it confer? Why wouldn't Homo Sapiens have a similar volume of brain case?

One speculative theory is that Neanderthals, with apparently better night vision and sense of smell (based on size of ocular orbits & nasal passages), had larger optic & olfactory centers in their brains. This seems a tenuous argument, however.

If brain size is directly proportional to number of neurons and neural links, then Neanderthal brains (and the larger brains of certain other mammals) would be more complex than ours, have more capacity, more memory, or other capabilities.

It's not clear why a mammoth or other elephant-like creature would have such large brain (the African elephant's brain is about 3 times as large as a human's). Perhaps there's some redundancy in the tissue, or legacy regions that are not used today.

Elephants are remarkably intelligent, and one can assume similarly the mammoths. Elephants have a sophisticated culture and have been observed to do a dance to welcome another elephant returned from a trip. They do have excellent memory; the saying "elephants never forget" seems to be true. They remember watering holes all over the savannah including ones that no longer exist on the surface, and they know to dig down and find the subterranean water in the exact spot that they hadn't been to for years. Social interaction is also important for brain development. So who knows? Maybe there's more to pachyderm intelligence than we are currently aware.

>It's not clear why a mammoth or other elephant-like creature would have such large brain (the African elephant's brain is about 3 times as large as a human's). Perhaps there's some redundancy in the tissue, or legacy regions that are not used today.

This, at least, I can answer, using numbers from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4053853/ . The elephant brain is massive, but 97%+ of those neurons are in the cerebellum, and is likely related to their somewhat unique use of a trunk. And while their cerebral cortex is twice as massive as a humans', it only contains one-third the neurons.