A Farewell to Alms

The Journey of William of Rubruck

Pavane

Quartered Safe Out Here

With the Old Breed

The Dying Earth

The Histories – Polybius

Between Silk and Cyanide

Rogue Moon

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Wasp

Lest Darkness Fall

The Classical Greeks

The Witches of Karres

The First World War

The Forgotten Soldier

Russia Against Napoleon

The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages

Worlds of the Imperium

The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 8th series

In Africa today, the carnivore guild is made up of lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, and African wild dogs – not counting humans. Lions are in first place, usually dominant, except sometimes when facing large numbers of hyenas. They end up with well over half of the kills – the “lion’s share”. Hyenas: a strong second, dominant over everything but lions. Leopards: avoid competition by hunting at night and from trees, but dominant over wild dogs and cheetahs. African wild dogs: regularly lose kills to lions and hyenas, and sometimes can dominate cheetahs. Cheetahs: fast but weak, must eat and run.

Different guild members do best in somewhat different landscapes. Cheetahs, fast sight hunters, prefer open landscapes. African wild dogs, cursorial hunters, need open areas to pursue. Lions prefer a mix of open plains and thicker vegetation. Hyenas are flexible. Leopards cache kills in trees to keep them from being stolen.

Stephen Churchill’s thesis, in his book “Thin on the Ground”, is that Neanderthals, who were largely carnivorous, were members of Pleistocene Europe’s carnivore guild – but not in first place. Cave lions and cave hyenas probably ranked higher. This means that Neanderthals were limited, more or less, to ambush hunting in wooded or hilly regions. Higher-ranking predators occupied most of the prime hunting grounds and got most of the kills.

This explains why Neanderthal population density wasn’t very high, why much of Europe doesn’t have many Neanderthal artifacts or fossils, and why Neanderthals didn’t cause any mass extinctions in their territory.

Pure predators don’t tend to drive their prey extinct, since when they over-hunt, their food becomes scarce, and their populations crash. Omnivores don’t tend to wipe out their prey, because they, being less specialized, tend not to have top rank in the predator guild… so their numbers are limited by other predators. Now, if you had an omnivore than was a better predator than any other, that was first in the predator guild – that species would be a hyperpredator, and would likely go on to cause mass extinctions. This is particularly the case for megafauna, which are very valuable targets, but also reproduce slowly.

Although not originally really effective at hunting, humans gradually became more formidable, as their tools improved, they learned how to make fire, and developed more complex behavioral strategies. By 400,000 years ago, they were routinely taking down elephants, but were not yet able to deal with the toughest African and Eurasian carnivores. How can we be sure of that? Because there were no megafaunal extinctions that early, or, any rate, not many.

A point: being #1 in the predator guild depends upon geography – on how tough the local predators are. It was pretty difficult in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas: it was easier in Australia, and would been almost trivial on some islands.

So.. Neanderthals were not hyperpredators, and back 100,000 years ago, humans in general weren’t . except possibly on some islands that had few or weak predators.

There are hints that a population of modern humans (Population Y) arrived in the Americas before the Amerindians: if so, they were not hyperpredators, because there were no noticeable extinctions of megafauna back then. It also appears that they weren’t very numerous: they seem to have been “thin on the ground”, like Neanderthals.

Humans arrived earlier in Australia and megafauna extinctions soon followed. Those early Australians did not, as far as we know, have very advanced weapons, but they were still hyperpredators in an Australian context, because the local predators were really not up to the standards of lions, sabertooth tigers, and short-faced bears.

Probably the early Amerindians were the most clear-cut hyperpredators. They had stand-off weapons (atlatls) combined with long experience hunting fairly tough prey ( and dealing with tough predators) in Beringia. While the fauna of North America was not adapted to humans at all. Once the Paleo-Indians showed up, the megafauna didn’t have a chance.

This pattern was most dramatic when humans were encountering fauna that have never seen humans before – where the hand of man had never set foot – and had had no chance to evolve defenses. So megafaunal extinctions were rapid in Australia and the Americas, slower in Eurasia, incomplete in Africa.

Undersea Victory

In the Shadow of Man

A Short History of Medicine

Helicobacter Pioneers

Past Master

The Merck Manual

A New Voyage Round the World

Russia under the Bolshevik Regime

Africa, a biography of the continent

Reflections on Net Assessment

America in Vietnam

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Ancient Iraq

The Syndic

Not This August

Maker of Universes

The Economics of World War II

The Fatal Shore

Sweet Silver Blues

You might also be interested in my booklists from from 2014, 2016, 2017,  2018,  2019,  2020, 2021, and 2022.

The Balance of Tomorrow

Stirling’s Desert Raiders

Among the Elephants

Adventures of a Mathematician

Sociobiology

States of Matter

Parkinson’s Law

Brothers in Arms

Muqaddimah

Admiral of the Ocean Sea

The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century

Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in South Africa

The Big Con

The Global Seven Years War

Barrayar

Beyond This Horizon

Legacy of Heorot

The Day Before Forever

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel

The Ultimate Resource

You might also be interested in my booklists from from 2014, 2016, 2017,  2018,  2019,  2020, and 2021.

Defeat into Victory

Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges

Go Tell The Spartans

Don Quixote

A Fire Upon the Deep

A Deepness in the Sky

Scientists Against Time

Days of Atonement

The Mythical Man-Month

Island in the Sea of Time

The High Crusade

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

This Kind of War

The Measure of Reality

The Jews of Islam

The Vinland Sagas

The Chronicle of Theophanes

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942

The Crusades and the Holy Land

Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake

Stopping publications on atomic energy ( which happened in April 1940) was a voluntary effort by American and British physicists. But that cessation was itself a signal that something strategically important was going on.

Imagine another important discovery with important strategic implications: how would you maximize your advantage ?

Probably this is only practically possible if your side alone has made the discovery. If the US and the UK had continued publishing watered-down nuclear research, the paper stoppage in Germany would still have given away the game. But suppose, for the moment, that you have a monopoly on the information. Suddenly stopping closely related publications obviously doesn’t work. What do you do?

You have to continue publications, but they must stop being useful. You have to have the same names at the top ( an abrupt personnel switch would also be a giveaway) but the useful content must slide to zero. You could employ people that A. can sound like the previous real authors and B. are good at faking boring trash. Or, possibly, hire people who are genuinely mediocre and don’t have to fake it.

Maybe you can distract your rivals with a different, totally fake but extremely exciting semiplausible breakthrough.

Or – an accidental example of a very effective approach to suppression. Once upon a time, around 1940, some researchers began to suspect that duodenal ulcers were caused by a spiral bacterium. Some physicians were even using early antibiotics against them, which seemed to work. Others thought what they were seeing might be postmortem contamination. A famous pathologist offered to settle the issue.

He looked, didn’t see anything, and the hypothesis was buried for 40 years.

But he was wrong: he had used the wrong stains.

So, a new (?) intelligence tactic for hiding strategic breakthroughs: the magisterial review article.

By which I mean multi-step causal chains that are part of a complex plan – something intended by some individual or group. In the strong form, one for which the initial push is sufficient, so that the ball ends up in the right place without any continuing guidance. In practice, we’re talking patterns like that in human affairs.

They don’t exist. And when someone says ” Group X must have intended Y”, invoking that kind of logic – he’s an idiot. Pay him no never mind.

What would happen?

There is good evidence ( stable isotope data) that Neanderthals were highly carnivorous, and that they used thrusting spears, which are effective but not as generally useful as atlatls – standoff weapons. Churchill suspects that with their thrusting spears tech, Neanderthals were _not_ the top dogs of the predator guild, and that they may have been dominated by cave lions and scimitar cats, while having approximately equal status with hyenas. In practice, this would mean that Neanderthals often lost kills to high-ranked carnivores such as cave lions. The majority of calories from animal kills would go to higher-ranked carnivores ( not to Neanderthals) . Neanderthal population size would be limited, and some environments ( like open plains, where kills are highly visible) might be effectively closed to them.

Neanderthals don’t seem to take much advantage of the Atlantic salmon runs – maybe da Bears didn’t let them.

We think of Man as #1, and generally that’s the case nowadays, but it wasn’t always true.

So imagine that the Predecessors, the population that left those footprints at White Sands, didn’t have the atlatl. They may have arrived as fishermen, and may have been gradually re-inventing and improving their hunting techniques. They had to compete with short-faced bears, sabertooth tigers, the American lion, dire wolves, the American cheetah, grizzly bears, and wolves. Their diet was not as limited as that of the Neanderthals – North America was warming and plant foods were available – but they may have been dominated by some of the larger predators. if so, their cut of the herbivores may have been limited, they may have been limited to certain kinds of terrain, etc. They may have been thin on the ground, like Neanderthals.

Third example: we know that modern humans arrived even earlier in Australia/New Guinea ( then joined as Sahul), and those humans _were_ ecologically dominant, even though they did _not have atlatls ( until fairly recently), as far as we know. They became common enough to leave noticeable numbers of artifacts and skeletons, and they drove most of the Australian megafauna to extinction.

Why would human domination be easy in Australia and hard for Predecessors in the Americas?

I would guess because the dominant predators of Sahul were reptiles and marsupials.

They’re dumb.