[MUD-Dev] Git out the boar spear, Martha!

[Nathan Yospe]

On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Chris Gray wrote:

:[Chris L:]

::Several "primitive" tribes continue to hunt this way to this day.

:Hmm. That may work with a number of prey species, but it clearly isn't
:going to work with trying to hunt a horse! Probably not a buffalo either.
:I was going to suggest that it wouldn't work with anything that massed
:much more than a human, but I seem to recall that it works not bad for
:elephants and giraffes. Interesting.

cf horses: you might be surprised. According to some of my texts here,
this was the very method used on pre-modern horses by several tribes (not
to mention on several relatives of deer, rodent (rabbits, for example),
bird (pheasants, at least, I can attest to myself. I've hunted them down
this way.) and so forth. A buffalo? Actually, they took advantage of fire
to catch bison, if that's what you mean. But it was still an exhaustion
method. Humans had three advantages over other life forms back then. We
were better climbers than anything but a few cats and primates, we had
more endurance than _anything_ before we started tinkering with selective
breeding, and we had these swollen foreheads full of clever squishy stuff.

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Nathan F. Yospe - University of Hawaii Dept of Physics - yospe at hawaii.edu