Why Are Humans Not Considered As An Apex Predator – Humans are smart and strong, but we usually don’t rise to the top when we talk about top predators. According to the news, I was once at the top of the food chain. However, the answer to this question is not so simple.
This trait is shared by top predators such as lions, gray wolves, and great white sharks. They feed almost exclusively on meat and, apart from humans, these animals have no other natural predators.
Why Are Humans Not Considered As An Apex Predator
Does this indicate that humans are at the top of the food chain if we are predators of other top predators?
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That depends on how you define “predator”, whether you kill for food or kill other animals. Whether you’re looking at ancient or modern humans, the answer will vary, ScienceLive reported.
According to Sylvain Bonhommeau, a marine ecologist at the French marine research institute IFREMER, humans’ position in the food chain does not depend on what we eat or not, nor on what we destroy. Instead, according to Bonhommeau, it depends entirely on the food that is eaten and, given those criteria, the answer is no, because we do not eat all the animals we kill. So humans are not predators.
However, it is not that simple. Using other values, humans can be superpredators. Some reports also claim that humans were once apex predators.
Homo sapiens and their ancestors abandoned lettuce in favor of a meat-rich diet about 2 million years ago, propelling them to the top of the food chain.
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The balanced diet of berries, grains, and steak that comes to mind when we think of “paleo” food is not entirely true. But modern hunter-gatherers have given us the wrong picture of what people once ate, according to anthropologists at the University of Minho in Portugal and Tel Aviv University in Israel.
The comparison doesn’t make sense because hunter-gatherer tribes had access to elephants and other large creatures 2 million years ago, while modern hunter-gatherer civilizations did not, according to Miki Ben-Dor of Tel Aviv University. In Israel. The conditions are incomparable because the entire ecosystem has changed.
According to hundreds of studies on everything from modern human anatomy and physiology to isotope measurements found in ancient human bones and teeth, we were basically the top predators, ScienceAlert reported.
Another possible evidence that humans are top predators is their physiology. We have larger fat reserves and can use them by quickly converting fat into ketones if necessary. Our fat cells are small and numerous, like those of a predator, unlike other omnivores whose fat cells are few but huge.
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Additionally, our digestive system appears to resemble that of animals higher up the food chain. Maybe we need extremely strong stomach acid to break down proteins and kill the dangerous bacteria you’d find in a week-old mammoth steak.
Even our genome suggests that we rely more on a diet rich in meat than sugar. For example, according to geneticists, parts of the human genome were unlocked to allow a high-fat diet, while parts of the chimpanzee genome were unlocked to allow a high-sugar diet.
The team’s case covers many topics, including evidence of tool use, trace elements and nitrogen isotopes in Paleolithic remains and tooth wear.
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Orcas (orcinus Orca)
SPACE A rare galaxy with a polar ring looks like a giant eye in space; Similar clusters may be more common in space than previously thought. In an article published in the Yearbook of the American Anthropological Association, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were the top predator for about two million years. Only the disappearance of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world and the decline of animal food sources at the end of the Stone Age led humans to gradually increase the amount of plant elements in their food, until finally They preferred domestication. both plants and animals, and became farmers.
“Until now, attempts to reconstruct the diet of Stone Age peoples have largely relied on comparisons with hunter-gatherer societies of the 20th century,” explains Dr. Ben-Dor. “However, this comparison does not make sense because two million years ago hunter-gatherer societies were able to hunt and eat elephants and other large animals, while today’s hunter-gatherers do not have access to such reward. The entire ecosystem has changed and conditions cannot be compared. To reconstruct the diet of Stone Age people, we decided to use other methods: examining the memory stored in our own body, our metabolism, our genetics and our physical structure. Human behavior changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers.”
In a process of unprecedented scale, Dr. Ben-Dor and his colleagues compiled around 25 lines of evidence from around 400 scientific papers from various disciplines that address the central question: Were Stone Age humans specialized carnivores or were they generalist omnivores? Most of the evidence has been found in contemporary biology research, specifically genetics, metabolism, iology and morphology.
“A striking example is the acidity of the human stomach,” says Dr. Ben-Dor. “Compared to omnivores and even other predators, our stomach acidity is high. The production and maintenance of strong acidity requires a large amount of energy, and its existence is evidence of the consumption of animal products. The strong acidity provides protection against harmful bacteria found in meat, and prehistoric humans who hunted large animals whose meat would last for days or even weeks often consumed old meat that contained large amounts of bacteria, so it was necessary to maintain a high level of acidity. Another sign that they are predators is the structure of the fat cells in our body. In omnivorous bodies, fat is stored in a relatively small number of large fat cells, while in predators, including humans, the opposite is true: we have a much larger number of smaller fat cells. The evolution of humans as predators was also found in our genome. For example, geneticists concluded that “regions of the human genome were closed to allow a high-fat diet, while in chimpanzees, regions of the genome were open to allow a high-fat diet. “High sugar diet.”
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Evidence from human biology was supplemented by archaeological evidence. For example, studies of stable isotopes in the bones of prehistoric humans, as well as hunting practices unique to humans, show that humans specialized in hunting large and medium-sized animals with a high fat content. Comparing humans to today’s large social predators, all of which hunt large animals and obtain more than 70% of their energy from animal sources, reinforced the conclusion that humans specialized in hunting large animals and, in fact, , they are hypercarnivores.
The evolution of HTL during the Pleistocene as we interpret it based on all the evidence. Recognition: Dr. Mickey Ben Dor
“Big game hunting is not an afternoon pastime,” says Dr. Ben-Dor. “It requires a lot of knowledge, and lions and hyenas acquire these skills after many years of learning. It is clear that the remains of large animals found in countless archaeological sites are the result of the great skill of human beings as hunters of large animals. Many researchers who study the extinction of large animals agree that human hunting played a major role in this extinction, and there is no better evidence of human specialization in hunting large animals. Most likely, as with today’s predators, hunting itself has been the focus of human activity for most of human evolution. Other archaeological evidence, such as the fact that specialized tools for obtaining and processing plant foods did not appear until later stages in human evolution, also supports the centrality of large animals in human nutrition for most of human history.
The multidisciplinary reconstruction carried out by UAT researchers for almost a decade suggests a complete paradigm shift in the understanding of human evolution. Contrary to the widespread assumption that humans owe their evolution and survival to a dietary flexibility that allowed them to combine animal hunting with plant foods, the picture that emerges here is of humans evolving primarily as predators of large animals.
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“The archaeological evidence does not overlook the fact that Stone Age people also consumed plants,” adds Dr. Ben-Dor. “But according to the results of this study, plants did not become an important component of the human diet until the end of the era.”
Evidence of genetic changes and the emergence of unique stone tools for processing plants led researchers to conclude that there was a gradual increase in consumption that began about 85,000 years ago in Africa and about 40,000 years ago in Europe and Asia. plant foods, as well as dietary diversity, according to different ecological conditions. This increase was accompanied by an increase in the local uniqueness of stone tool culture, similar to the diversity of material cultures in 20th century hunter-gatherer societies. Instead, during the two million years that researchers say humans were top predators, there were long periods of similarity and
