Saturday, October 12, 2019

Planet of the pigs

There's talk humans have taught monkeys to bathe in Japanese hot springs and to wash food in the water before eating it. There's even talk we've brought monkeys and apes into the Stone Age. Now we hear of pigs using tools too.

And we've long heard the argument that the reason megafauna have lasted so much longer in Africa than out in Eurasia and the Americas, is that the African megafauna have evolved amongst modern humans and learnt to be stronger. In Eurasia they evolved (or didn't) amongst our more-retiring and stagnant Neander-spawn cousins. And in the Americas, whose highest native(ish) primate is the capuchin monkey, the fauna simply fell before the Clovis hunters and the Younger Dryas.

We are training our future rivals. Should another Dryas event bomb us back to the Palaeolithic; in the next Eemian / Holocene warm patch, our degenerate descendants might be wrestling near-sentient baboons and bears.

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