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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Tue Mar 25, 2014, 08:22 AM Mar 2014

Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/24/humans-diminutive-monster-destruction

You want to know who we are? Really? You think you do, but you will regret it. This article, if you have any love for the world, will inject you with a venom – a soul-scraping sadness – without an obvious antidote.

The Anthropocene, now a popular term among scientists, is the epoch in which we live: one dominated by human impacts on the living world. Most date it from the beginning of the industrial revolution. But it might have begun much earlier, with a killing spree that commenced two million years ago. What rose onto its hind legs on the African savannahs was, from the outset, death: the destroyer of worlds.

Before Homo erectus, perhaps our first recognisably human ancestor, emerged in Africa, the continent abounded with monsters. There were several species of elephants. There were sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyenas and creatures like those released in The Hunger Games: amphicyonids, or bear dogs, vast predators with an enormous bite.

Prof Blaire van Valkenburgh has developed a means by which we could roughly determine how many of these animals there were. When there are few predators and plenty of prey, the predators eat only the best parts of the carcass. When competition is intense, they eat everything, including the bones. The more bones a carnivore eats, the more likely its teeth are to be worn or broken. The breakages in carnivores' teeth were massively greater in the pre-human era.
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Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction? (Original Post) xchrom Mar 2014 OP
And sadly, meat is not even a requirement for us to survive. gtar100 Mar 2014 #1
We get a rush from killing pscot Mar 2014 #2
Yes. Try not to take it personally, though. GliderGuider Mar 2014 #3
Most(*) people go through a phase where that is true ... Nihil Mar 2014 #4
Bang on. +1 nt GliderGuider Mar 2014 #5

gtar100

(4,192 posts)
1. And sadly, meat is not even a requirement for us to survive.
Tue Mar 25, 2014, 10:17 AM
Mar 2014

Yet looking at how we revere the hunter and the warrior shows how ingrained the mindset of killing for food and sport has become. But I don't think it's the whole story of our heritage. Going back just 10,000 to 20,000 years ago could not possibly be the entirety of our history. We didn't just pop out of nowhere, unless you believe in the literal interpretations of our religions. Our classical ideas of what is "ancient" is very stunted. I wish we had a better understanding of our history of say 30,000 to 200,000 years ago. It's unfortunately a real blind spot in the knowledge of our development. We are ignorant of periods of time that make ancient Greece seem like only yesterday. So if we didn't experience some sort of God-induced birth, or some abnormal evolutionary growth spurt, we did exist in some human form along with all these magnificent animals mentioned in the article for longer periods of time than the time outlined showing us killing them off. Do we only assume that we were afraid of them, end of story? We must have learned to coexist in some way even if we were part of the food chain. And I'd wager that our minds and our lives were far more interesting than our mainstream interpretations of "cavemen" or "apemen" that we cartoonishly draw.

pscot

(21,023 posts)
2. We get a rush from killing
Tue Mar 25, 2014, 11:58 AM
Mar 2014

We're programmed for it. The degree of empathy routinely expressed on this board would have been thought simple minded as recently as 100 years ago. If our civilization fails, as now seems likely, we'll revert to type and end like the Kilkenny cats, by devouring one another.

 

GliderGuider

(21,088 posts)
3. Yes. Try not to take it personally, though.
Tue Mar 25, 2014, 12:25 PM
Mar 2014

Nobody we know personally could possibly be a "diminutive monster of death and destruction." Right?

Right???

 

Nihil

(13,508 posts)
4. Most(*) people go through a phase where that is true ...
Wed Mar 26, 2014, 06:11 AM
Mar 2014

... but then grow out of it on a personal level and use our learned talent for self-deception
to hide the fact that it now occurs indirectly rather than directly.

Most parents will *totally* understand the label "diminutive monster of death and destruction" ...





(*) The others either get caught & jailed as psychotics or become presidents of banks,
extraction companies, countries, etc., and be held up as role models for the next generation
of self-deceivers ...

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