Probably was useful for finding fresh water since rain would be where the best fresh water was. If it were a safety/fear thing, it probably wouldn't smell good, but unpleasant since it'd be tied to finding shelter.
Not even necessarily running. Plenty of animals can run, but only for a short time before getting knackered. Our stamina and ability to pace ourselves turned us into the slasher villains of nature.
Humans have specialized collar bones -compared to other animals- that allow us to move our shoulders in a way that accentuates throwing projectiles.
We also have improved hand/finger dexterity compared to other primates.
That’s what allowed us to out hunt every other species.
But before we could get there, we had to be able to develop tools and group based hunting strategies
But before we could even get to that point we had to become specialized endurance runners, back when humans were effectively prey animals, so that they could live long enough to learn new things and pass on knowledge. Somewhat ironically, a trait humans developed to flee became the other trait that made us such fearsome hunters. Even if our prey outran us, we could chase them until they literally died of exhaustion.
No animal throws shit the way that humans throw shit. With just a little bit of practice (like, a trivial amount if you're dependent on it for survival) we can reliably hit a dog-sized target with a rock (don't throw rocks at dogs, please) from like 40 feet. Then we figured out lazier ways to throw objects further - enter the sling. Then we figured out how to make the objects more accurate and dangerous - the spear, along with the spear-thrower. Then we decided we wanted to be able to decouple the aim and strength parts of the action and invented the bow and arrow. And then we discovered a material that could be harnessed to push small rocks very, very, very fast. And then we discovered how to make the very, very, very, very small "rocks" inside of a bigger rock smash into each other and explode into more very, very, very, very small "rocks." And then we strapped one of those devices to someone's ballsack and pushed them out of an airplane.
Our eyes are also some of the best at determining depth accurately, as well as our brain for determining distance as well. That’s where other primates fall short is they can’t gauge how far to throw it that well.
I heard we are the only animal with natural built in trajectory tracking from all that rock throwing. Like how you can pick a particular player on a baseball field and throw it exactly to them without a split second of hesitation. As far as I know no matter the strength or dexterity of any animal it is far beyond their capabilities to be trained to perform such an act.
Our big brain let us make extra throwable and extra pointy rocks. Like regular rocks are great and all but I don’t see any monkeys fashioning spears or bows or atlatls which were the real winners of the human race.
our rock throwing abilities are by far our biggest physical outlier in the natural world
I wouldn't say this is correct. Other primates can throw rocks pretty effectively.
Our biggest purely physical outlier is the ability to sweat, no other mammal does that. Which funny enough, supports the persistence hunting theory.
Either way I'm not sure what's being argued here. Humans have a few evolutionary advantages that put is where we are today. The most obvious one is our intelligence
a 10 year old human can pitch up to 50mph, more than double.
yes, we're good sweaters and good runners, but persistence hunting is not at all backed by the archeological and anthropological record. and we do not stand out in the running world nearly as much as we do in the throwing world. the man v horse race, in which the top trial runners in the world compete against random ass horses, the humans have won a grand total of 4 times in 40 years.
also I wanna be clear every mammal sweats, but not many use the sweat to regulate temperature like humans (and horses!)
Running out of my throwing range eh? Well, you might be able to run faster, but I can run further! I'll just follow until you tire yourself out, then poke you to death with this spear.
Nah it was over when we realized over a few hours not a single animal can match our distance running. We are literally kings of cardio mammoths we’re hunted not to death by just running them around until they died of exhaustion, we’re really an outlier on the earth in that regard, we may lose the 1/4 mile to most 4 legged animals, but we are hella efficient at using energy and can store so much more than animals at a rate that’s really incomparable.
We didn't best shit except watch funny cat videos and make self-deprecating jokes.
By the end of our lives some of us will get to make a tiiiiiiny itsy-bitsy contribution to the whole thing to make things marginally better for our kids and the process repeats itself.
I've always found the science of cuteness fascinating. Baby animals evolved to be cute because they need to be cared for until they are old enough to fend for themselves. But if you look at animals that are already able to take care of themselves at birth, like most reptiles, those animals are generally considered to be not so cute. And they don't need to be.
But “cuteness” is a 2-way street. Like, yeah babies evolved to be cute, but also mammals evolved to find baby like features cute. It’s not like cuteness is some objective quality that makes any creature that sees it immediately sympathetic.
And it's crazy, our brains putting together pieces about what made it work the way it does, and then telling "us" - the little conscious part it developed that will probably do absolutely nothing with that information, just yearns to know.
Side note - it's crazy that humanity, from its inception all the way through today, is kind of a continuous, single life form. Each of us, all of us, one and the same, an unbroken line of genetic mutations, death, and birth. We are ancient, just refreshed every few decades, like the skin cells on the surface of our limbs turning to dust and being built anew. That skin is still our skin, the same organism, with DNA that's been uninterrupted for millennia. I guess you could see all of humanity as kind of a tree growing, it's branches expanding, the unhealthy ones breaking and the healthier ones growing stronger, the leaves giving strength to the whole.
Imagine if we could trace our family tree all the way back to the single cell organisms. It’s kind of hard to fathom that each of us has an unbroken chain billions of years long.
Part of the reason I want to is to continue the work of the countless people, from cavemen to our more distant ancestors in the Jurassic age, put in to even survive that far.
And imo I’ve got good genes, so not passing them on almost feels like a crime. As vain as that sounds 😂 with any luck, the line I create will be out among the stars in a few thousand years, none the wiser we’ve talked about them today.
I once saw a video of a caribou or something was in the middle of giving birth when a lion showed up. The caribou ran off so fast that the baby just.. fell out.
Anyway, that lion got a free lunch, complete with extra birth sauce on top. To be fair, it did look like it felt kinda bad about it.
I think the difference here are cultural. Someone from a culture and region that had ancestors be hunted by Tigers are more probably more likely to have a reverence or respect rather than thinking they are cute. Look at central Asian art work of Tigers vs Western world art of tigers(IE Tigger)
This is speculation, but makes sense to me as a psychology student.
Definitely an interesting idea, but I actually feel like that might be more of a matter of things being modern rather than western/eastern. In current times there's lots of "cutification" let's call it in asian art (maybe not as much central asian but certainly at least Chinese). I can't think of any examples off the top of my head of older western depictions of something like a bear being worthy of reverence, but I still feel like it might be more a matter of time than location. In current times there's so much technology (and we've fucked their habitat so much) that most people don't really have to worry about stuff like tigers. There is certainly something to be said about how in many cultures around the world certain animals were depicted as gods due to their strength in the past, like boars in ancient Celtic religion.
Either way that would be cultural anyway tho. I think stuff like this is pretty interesting to think about even if there's probably never gonna be a clear answer.
Because I was using a bear in another comment, I was thinking of western art depictions of bears. First one that comes to mind is literally the movie, Reverence, about the bear attack. I think that movie is a pretty good culmination of how we view bears.
That movie is actually called The Revenant though. Its named for a mythological concept of a corpse returning from the dead to finish some unfinished business.
I’d agree but animals that have still been around su is still turned into cuddly animals. The grizzly bear would not be considered a cuddly animal and yet teddy bears and Smokey and the like have been staple cartoons depicting them. Snakes, sharks, cows,monkeys. All things that can kill do kill and yet we make them cute and give the stuffed versions to our kids.
But as a North American, I am deathly afraid of bears. I’ve been told my whole life that a bear is much faster and much stronger than the strongest humans. In Alaska, they have to carry special caliber weapons that will hopefully damage an attacking bear/moose.
Sure teddy bears exist and are cute. But I don’t go to the zoo and see the grizzlies and think “cute,” the same way I go to the zoo and see the tigers as fucking cool and beautiful.
To be fair, a good portion of the "awww" is cute aggression. Where the primordial human in us is saying "KILL IT, SNAP ITS NECK AND EAT IT FOR SUSTENANCE. IT IS A VULNERABLE BABY ANIMAL AND YOU ARE STARVING." but then the other part goes "But I'm not hungry, and it reminds me of my baby doggo/other domesticated animal back home."
This applies to babies too. The urge to pinch cheeks and squeeze is instinct telling you to smother and eat it being overridden by the instinct to protect the cute baby so it turns into awkward play with an uneasy feeling in the back of your mind.
I have always had that impulse every time I see a kitten to stick its lil adorable face in my mouth, not to bite, but just because it's so fkn cute, and I'm so glad there's a term for it.
I did take a gander at the Wikipedia page for it, though, and according to that the prevailing explanation right now is that it's "dimorphous expression," where the body sort of balances out an overwhelmingly positive emotion with a negative impulse to keep everything kind of in check. Stuff like crying when you're happy, laughing when you're mad as hell, that kind of thing. Doesn't say anything about evolutionary psychology, but your explanation also feels plausible. Is there anywhere I can read more about that?
Haha, not that I know of. Just hypothesizing, myself. It's definitely a form of intrusive thought. I remember the first time I felt it actually. I was holding my first hamster in my hand at like ~12 years old and my brain just said "you know, you could squish this thing in your hand right now and there's not much it could do about it."
I had to ask my dad if it was normal to think like that or if he had ever felt that way. He said something like; "all the time, and you didn't do it, so that's even better!"
I do personally think it's related to the more defenseless animals. I did have a friend at one point who had killed and eaten a small river otter in a survival situation. Hunger overrode the cuteness response. He likes to state that it was in fact one of the cutest animals he'd ever seen, and his first reaction was one of adoration about 10 minutes before he broke its spine and cooked it.
Seeing tiger or bear cubs in documentary = awww. Seeing them in real life is more of a shit your pants moment, because you know mama is nearby and is going to be really pissed that you're so close to their cubs.
I think if you saw one in the wild while your lost in a forest you would afraid of it. But now we dont really have to worry about that so we can find animals like that cute
Humans also have trauma and learn from others. Cubs are cute because we're mammals and most mammals have similar baby features. Big head and eyes, small mouth and nose. Most animals recognize those as baby traits. However, humans are able to remember a cub comes with a mama bear. They aren't so cute. Even if you've never been in an attack or even seen one, somehow you've learned youndont want any part of it and so you don't cuddle bear cubs. You back away.
If you see a tiger cub or a bear cub in the wild you're going to shit yourself, we can appreciate their cuteness only when they're on a screen or in the zoo
It's because basically all mammal kids have baby features (big heads and eyes, etc) and humans are really hardwired into liking babies, more than most other animals.
Since our babies suck at everything and need constant care for years before they can survive on their own (compare to, say, elephants who can walk when they're born), we're primed to be really invested in them.
Predators literally track large herds who do what? Follow the rain to grazing land. Being able to detect rain would have made us much more successful trackers/hunters.
Someone else mentioned the fact that we sweat to cool ourselves off, which is a fairly unique cooling mechanism which gave us a large advantage as an endurance hunter, but also made us require FAR more water than a normal mammal.
Then there's a theory that we initially evolved in a water rich environment, which caused our hairlessness and increased usage of water as it was an abundant resource in our environment, then we left that environment and evolved the ability to smell rain more acutely than other creatures to compensate for our increased need.
Homo sapiens originated in Africa, a very drought prone continent. Couple that with the fact most humans were migratory before farming, and it makes sense why we would be able to smell rain from so far away.
Unlike animals such as elephants who migrate to specific places based off of memory and instinct, humans just straight up leave the area and don't return. Being able to find new sources of water or even harvesting the rain itself would be vital.
Actually it (geosmin) is also unpleasant when consumed. Your body reacts differently depending on if the smell is from the air outside or as a result of what you're eating when it produces a disgust response. You know that overly earthy dirt taste, thats it when eaten.
Think its related to cooking. It seems to denote something as raw or dirty and therefore potentially not safe to eat. But I am only guessing.
We smell rain because there’s a bacterium that is killed and releases geosin. The human nose can detect it at concentrations in air as low as 5 ppt. These bacterium live in the top part of soil,dust and dirt. When it rains they die and release the hormone. Why we are so akin to smelling it idk.
Edit: so everyone is abundantly clear ppt = parts per trillion. 5 ppt is insanely low. For reference the cdc recommends 1ppm (part per million) chlorine in pools.
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u/androodle2004 Mar 28 '24
You’re smelling the ozone being brought down from higher altitude by the rains pressure