The human superpowers are basically throwing fastballs and jogging in hot weather. The ancestral hunting strategy is basically to throw stuff at the animals to get them to run, then jog after them. Repeat until the animal is too tired to move.
Actually it's because we have sweat glands all over our bodies, which I think is unique among animals. Dog, for example, can only dump excess heat by heavier panting, whereas humans will just sweat more.
Some of us have more and more puissant sweat glands than others.
Additionally being bipedal means that as we run our breathing rate is separate from our gait. As four legged animals gallop the motion of their running expands and contracts their diaphragm, forcing them to breath at the same rate they run at.
Since they can't sweat like us, or breath like us, they have to stop running and start panting in order to cool down.
While humans can just keep going, relentlessly, like the It Follows monster.
Haha, sorry! I didn’t share because as of now there is only the one post (about this word). Plus, I’m honestly unsure the best way to link a community so people can easily access it.
for people who just learned a neat word and might want to share it. Truthfully, I don’t super expect it to grow to be more than just me posting in there, but I think it would be a fun way to keep track of fun words I learn and a better way to learn words than a word of the day calendar. The lack of seeing words in use on those drives me nuts, cause the sample sentences are usually boring af.
There are still humans who do this to this day, the most notable being the tarahumara tribes of South America. They will literally run down the local deer barefoot for their food.
Humans are insanely adapted to be endurance runners compared with the rest of the animal kingdom which, if you think about it, kind of makes sense. It takes a LOT less energy for a cheetah to sprint down an antelope in 3 minutes than to chase it for 3 hours, so they adapted to be great sprinters. Likewise, the antelope only has to outrun the cheetah for 3 minutes so they, too, became great sprinters. For small mammals it makes more sense to be able to run very fast and hide from predators than to run long distances in potentially dangerous territory.
Since there was no evolutionary incentive for animals to run marathons they never developed the biology to do so, and we see this not just in mammals, but in reptiles, too. Horses are an exception to this though as they, too, are well adapted to distance running although iirc their adaptations are more in the way of making it mechanically easy (long, strong legs, huge hearts, etc.) to run long distances rather than the cooling systems humans developed.
Humans just kind of lucked out or perhaps ended up filling an evolutionary niche due to our need to cover long ranges with scarce food sources in our early evolutionary development.
The humans running down animals for hours also feel like that after a bit fyi. They are just hungry enough to keep running.
I have some friends who are into serious long distance running and they are constantly in a state of suffering while running. It’s the feeling of stopping running that makes them keep wanting to go running, not the feeling of the actual running.
I’m a distance runner, and I don’t know if you’ve captured running all that well tbh. I certainly don’t go out for my Sunday long run looking forward to the finish. It’s pretty enjoyable when you’re training, but I concede that racing is difficult and can turn into prolonged suffering.
That’s not true though. I used to run long distance all the time because I enjoyed running. It was really meditatitive. Plus if you run long enough you get a runners high, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Yet if you were to start walking today, and kept walking every day, in 6 months you’ll be able to jog half a mile, or a kilometer. There are literally humans out there that have gone from 600+ lbs, or about 275 Kg, to running and completing their first marathon in just over 18 months. That’s dangerously fast by the way.
Your body wants to move and stretch that’s why stretching feels so good. Master Sin Thé taught his Shaolin classes that if you get a good workout going as a youth, and you keep making it harder so you keep growing, that will keep you young and in shape till you are around 80, and will slow the decline of age after it finally starts.
Our endurance isn’t just for running. We are also one of the longest lived species on the planet, and we are about to use medical tech to become the longest living animals, I doubt we will be beating trees, sponges, and jellyfish for age any time soon
But that’s not it. We’ve also got the social aspect that brought us, as a species, to the apex to be able to hunt animals that could kill us easily individually, some of us have the balls to dominate those animals even alone, and the intelligence to develop novel tools to increase our capabilities and effective cross-generational communication to enable iterating these tools over many lifespans.
Through this, humans or our descendants might one day hunt apex predators on other planets that maybe are better joggers and throwers than we are.
If true, it’s probably because humans have mostly slow twitch muscle fibers (e.g., great for endurance and manual dexterity) while great apes are mostly fast twitch muscle fibers (good for raw strength). That’s why a chimpanzee, who is much smaller than a person, can perform feats pf strength that would embarrass most strong-man competitors. OTOH, humans evolved to run; the kind of long-distance running that some people do for fun would kill other primates.
Especially long distance running. Imagine a gazelle in prehistoric Africa running away from this weird ape until it is completely exhausted, just to turn around and see the weird ape still coming after it in the distance. We were the horror villains of prehistoric animals.
I mean, it didn’t hit anywhere close to where it came from. All the chimp had to do was get it out of the enclosure to hit someone. With the amount of people filming, I don’t think the odds were even that bad that there would be a video of getting hit by it.
There’s a correlation between eyesight and intelligence (in species, not individuals) - interpreting visual inputs takes a lot of brain power, and might be one of the factors pushing for greater intelligence. So, there’s at least a decent chance that intelligent aliens would have good eyesight.
Also, they’d need hands, or something equivalent.
Once you have hand(equivalent)s, decent eyes, and intelligence, hand-eye-coordination isn’t far off.
If elephants can figure out how to throw rocks with enough force to kill a child, then so can E.T.
That’s only because humans are too good at throwing balls to each other. They just use feet to make it harder. That’s the exception that proves the rule.
Is this written by someone not from the US? Basketballs aren’t unwieldy, they are perfectly made for bouncing and shooting. If you have trouble with it, you just need to practice.
A US football is pretty well made for passing accurately (up to 60 yards/meters). The problem is that people are trying to push you around and tackle you.
Eh, I'm pretty American, but I think I started the post with this image of what a "soccer-like" game would look like if hands could be used and the ball size was a baseball (i.e., the size of a rock you'd throw at an animal to get it run as part of hunting), and then think of deviations/restrictions to that. Yeah, basketballs are perfect for dribbling, etc., but unwieldly for what I had in mind. As to football, you're right: it's good for passing. For some reason, my mental image had players with mitts on, which wouldn't work well with footballs.
Eh, I’m pretty American, but I think I started the post with this image of what a “soccer-like” game would look like if hands could be used and the ball size was a baseball
Speedball 2 : Brutal Deluxe came to mind immediately.
Inverse Kinematics is really cool. Whenever you move your hand to a position, you're only thinking of your hand moving to that position, but there's an order of operations you dont even think about. For your hand to be in the right spot your forearm has to be in the right spot, and for your forearm to be in the right spot your upper arm has to be in the right spot. Your brain subconsciously calculates those movements. This enables very accurate motions, your hand can follow a smooth, deliberate arc towards your target
Oh I’m planning on getting a resin printer in the future. It’s just I’m renting right now, and have a toddler, so it’s difficult to properly ventilate the fumes outside currently. Once I buy a house, that’s going to be one of the first things I buy. Do you have any recommendations for something hassle free that I won’t have to tweak for 6 months before it prints well?
And most people actually suck at it. Source: I do martial arts. Also, my Grandma taught me knitting same principle applies: If you start doing it with your fine motor skills, letting those influence your gross motor posture, you’re going to cramp up in no time. Easy and relaxed does the job, move from the shoulders (or even belly), don’t even move your fingers just keep them static knitting doesn’t really require you to move them. Doesn’t matter when all you’re doing is opening a door or such but for repeated movements, or forceful ones, or ones that need to be stabilised against adverse forces (like a block) it becomes crucial.
