As evidenced by the development of the size of the brain, our higher cognitive abilities developed as we hunted We turn off the megapown, Step A new study From the University of Tel Aviv.
This would have been about two million years before the advent of agriculture about 10,000 million years ago. Reason: We had to develop our brains to hunt small animals.
Megapown is on the decline
The megafauna They are “giant”, “huge” or “big” animals. The term is particularly associated with the latent Pleistocene and Holocene megapavuna in the current scientific literature, which is becoming extinct in a process Quaternary mass destruction.
In Africa, when humans appeared 2.6 million years ago, the average size of terrestrial mammals was close to 500 kg. But then, just as the agrarian revolution began, That number was reduced by more than 90%, Up to several ten kilos.
In order to get calories, Humans were forced to hunt small and fast animals, It was an evolutionary process with greater cognitive abilities, which required a greater size of the human brain, which later led to the development of language, which allowed humans to exchange information to cooperate in finding prey and hunting for it. More sophisticated hunting tools were also needed, i.e. more intelligence to create them.
How do you explain that Mickey Ben-Dor, Department of Archeology and Author of the study:
As the size of the animals continued to decline, the invention of the bow and arrow and the breeding of dogs allowed medium and small animals to hunt more efficiently. Until this population declines. By the end of the Stone Age, when animals became even smaller, humans had to exert more power in hunting than they could recover.
That’s when The Agricultural Revolution, Which involves raising both animals and plants, and it brought with it other side effects (many of them) They were negative).
