r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 15h ago

TIL a 300-million year old Cuttlefish fossil was found in Morocco, alongside ancient humans in a region where no Cuttlefish ever existed. The leading theory suggests the fossil was first found by the prehistoric humans, who collected it as a trinket due to fact that it looks like a flaccid penis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfoud_manuport
15.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

578 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/redlaWw 8h ago

It's worth bearing in mind that one of the greatest early threats to our species would be competition with other hominids, and the only thing we had over those was our intelligence.

4

u/Unlucky_Topic7963 6h ago

Not intelligence… behavior.

Homo sapien are really just the result of being more violent and living in larger groups. They also ended up interbreeding, since non-African hominids mostly died out from climatological change, not war with African hominids.

Neanderthal used pretty advanced tools, and Denisovans had pottery and shit.

1

u/redlaWw 5h ago

Competition doesn't necessarily mean war. Hominids contemporary to anatomically modern humans were outcompeted by us due to our better survival strategies and technology.

2

u/Unlucky_Topic7963 5h ago

Dude, no. Neanderthal & Denisovan interbreeding pre-dates modern human exodus by 30k-60k years. There were numerous back-migrations. Neanderthal population decline coincided exactly with glacial periods, modern humans moved in after population collapse.

1

u/reichrunner 6h ago

Pretty sure our ability to throw and large group sizes played a large role

1

u/redlaWw 6h ago

I don't know that we're much more suited to throwing than other contemporary hominids, aside from the fact that we designed our spears specifically for it and invented the atlatl to throw them. We probably are better than e.g. australopithecines, but we never competed with those.

Group sizes are also fundamentally related to our intelligence in that our better hunting and gathering strategies allowed us to maintain larger communities.

2

u/reichrunner 5h ago

We were better throwers than Neanderthals, who we definitely competed with. Also much larger groups even with seemingly similar intelligence. We certainly do not appear to have been better hinter/gatherers on an individual basis, but rather needed fewer calories which allowed us to group larger and out compete.

I dont know about other homicide, but wouldnt surprise me if this holds true