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A comment on The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper.

Re:The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of lar... by sgt101 on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @02:46PM (#26495271)
Ok - so how does this account for the hunter gatherer cultures in North America and Africa into modern times? Bison do not count as small game.

Also, if you kill an elephant how much of that beast can you (and all your tribe) hope to eat?

I'm not even sure if this is a causal inversion or just a co-incidence; humans may well have had nothing to do with big game until they were anatomically modern. Where is the evidence that Little Foot and Lucy killed anything bigger than a mouse?

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Re:The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of lar... by Schmools on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @03:04PM (#26495494)
There's actually some evidence (though also some debate) that early human hunting led to the extinction of megafauna in North America in the late Pleistocene age. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5693/70.full
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Re:The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of lar... by sgt101 on Thursday March 18, 2021 @06:57AM (#26501398)
But these were anatomically modern people - the North American Megafauna were around 50k years ago... There is no evolutionary pressure there!
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Re:The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of lar... by Schmools on Thursday March 18, 2021 @09:19PM (#26509339)
Yeah, I realized that as soon as I posted, an interesting paper nonetheless. I thought I had also read a paper discussing protohuman hunting practices earlier in the year but I couldn't find it here. Certainly anatomically modern early humans had much more of an impact on our environment then we often give them credit for.
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