Surviving Extinction

African herbivores shaped humanity, and skills we developed from hunting them helped us survive humanity’s most desperate era

Genetic evidence indicates that the entire human population across the continent shrank to fewer than 40,000 individuals, spread thinly from Morocco in the north to the Cape in the far south.

Norman Owen-Smith, “Large mammals shaped the evolution of humans: here’s why it happened in Africa” The Conversation (Jan. 25, 2023)

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash. Early humanoids would have watched this lion hunting zebra closely. A lion might kill large prey, eat its fill, then head off to somewhere shady to sleep through the rest of the day, leaving the remains for scavengers like some humanoids. Later, our ancestors learned to hunt herbivores for themselves. Faced with extinction, we adapted those hunting tools to survive and thrive.

Nutcracker Man met Handy Man,
They fought over a carcass.
Nutcracker Man bit Handy Man
And gnashed right through his tuchus.
Handy Man died, his family cried,
And for a day went hungry.

Handy Man’s tribe returned one night
Each carried rocks and sticks.
They faced down Nutcrack in a fight
And extinguished his descendants.
Handy Man’s tribe often ate their fill
Of leftovers from a lion’s kill.

Handy Man shaved his hair off*
And walked naked through the plains
He scavenged by the water’s trough
For leftover herbivore remains.
(Sabre cats hunt, eat their fill, then sleep
Lest thick fur coats cause them to overheat.)

Handy Man walked with heavy arms
Upright enough to carry food away
Erectus took that trick, plus proto-farms,
And ran further, faster, for food to flay.
It might have taken a million years (or more)
But he wiped his cousins from Africa’s floor.

Tools, tools, which conquered fools -
Better tools of bone, stone, flint
Tools, tools, and social rules
Shaped Homo Sapiens’ hunt: “plan, stalk, sprint”
Erectus, Handyman, were potent scavengers
But lacked much means for hunting herbivores.

Yet a hundred thirty thousand years ago, our ancestors nearly went extinct.

Dwindling to 40,000 individuals,
Sapiens hid in caves, contriving rituals,
Fishing, hunting, planting, planning,
Sharing tales of fancy
Crafting complex tools socially.

One solo man might scout a land
But wars pit tribe verse tribe
And in the face of certain threats
Social bonds shift power to the human side.
Sabre cats might kill a few
But hundreds more human come
Neanderthal crafted spear and stone
But human tribes returned in coalition.

Homo Sapiens lived thus many thousand years,
Spreading forth from African soil
By eating from herds of herbivores
We emerged until the world roiled.

Shall we save the herbivores that made us “us”?
Shall we save ourselves, as our forefathers did?
The questions loom, but that scent of doom
Confounds invoking our heritage.

A poem about anthropology, inspired by Professor Owen-Smith’s article. I’d recommend that anyone read through his piece, and pause to wonder.

Apologies in advance for the sexism, oversimplification, and the hypothesizing.

Entire industries capitalize on generating learned hopelessness — for the plight of the real herbivores, but for our own prospects in the world. Humanity survived worse than we have faced. Collectively (at times). Our poetry — songs and stories of a hundred thousand years ago —a piece in the arsenal of our survival tools.

Note: Handyman didn’t shave; that’s poetic license. However, since I may have erred elsewhere on fundamentals of this story, I thought it appropriate to ask Prof. Owen-Smith if he had any corrections. Should he so kindly respond, I may try to edit this poem in turn.

© 2023, Tom Tordillo. All rights reserved.