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Originally Posted by Actor
I don't expect to educate one who is willfully ignorant and wishes to remain so. That said ...
Can you prove this claim? How do you know that early hominids were "vastly outnumbered"?
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Finally, we get a decent question from you. How do you know that early humans
weren't outnumbered? Did Mother Nature give mass birth to humans? If so, how many did Mother Nature evolve at one time? But if Mother Nature -- if natural forces produced humans large mass, then why don't human follow their "Mother's" lead and reproduce in large mass? But if Mommy Nature didn't "give birth" to a very large number of humans at one time, then it stands to reason that the population all the wild beasts of the world, who had a huge head start on human evolution, would have far, far exceeded early human population.
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Another claim! How do you know the predators were stronger. All the ape species (humans are apes) evolved from a common ancestor who may have been as big as a gorilla. And they lived in groups (called troops). Are you seriously suggesting a troop of gorillas could not mount an effective defense against a pride of lions?
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Because the early humans weren't apes? You see...at some point in the evolutionary cycle the "great apes" (to borrow Hcap's phrase)
ceased being great apes in order to "cross over" to become more like you and me. At some specific point in evolution,
the earliest humans became extremely vulnerable because the lost they had gradually lost the physical strength and speed of their ancestors, while at the same time were far from realizing their cognitive potential. In other words, they would have been "slow" upstairs (the head) as well as slow and weak downstairs (the rest of the body) in the infancy of their evolutionary development, making them easy targets for a world full of predators. So...what "may have been" doesn't exactly count as fact!
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Humans are an African species. All humans on other continents can be traced back to Africa. So what species were these predators? In Africa there are only two candidates, viz., crocodiles and big cats. Crocodiles live in rivers, fairly large rivers at that. Stay away from big rivers and the crocs are not problem. They may grab an occasional human who gets too near the river but are hardly a threat to the survival species. That leaves big cats: mainly lions, leopards and cheetahs. The smaller cats are unlikely to target a full grown human and probably prefer mice.
Cats are lazy, as are most predators. If their stomach is full they are not going to bother hunting down anything. With the exception of the cheetah they are ambush predators. Their success rate is rather low, something like one in four, and that's with prey that is not as intelligent as humans.
I'll close with a quote from the late Senator Moynihan. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."
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There's nothing factual about your post. It's all conjecture that you're attempting to back-fit into the model of evolution. For example, you have no idea how many species of predators existed gazillions of years ago -- probably far, far more than what exists today! After all, man wasn't on the scene to ruin the wild jungles, or the environment or to encroach on the environment of wild animals. Seems to me, all animals would have thrived greatly in a pre-human world, providing those at the top of the food chain had enough to eat, and those at the lower half of the food chain had sufficient natural survival mechanisms to protect them against their stronger predatory counterparts. And this is sound reasoning. Even God agrees with me.
Deut 7:22
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And the Lord your God will clear away these nations before you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them quickly, lest the wild beasts grow too numerous for you.
NASB
Perhaps later on today, I will unpack this passage and examine its implications. Recall the old adage, "Nature abhors a vacuum"? This is certainly one of the inferences to this text. And I'll explain why later.
Nor do you know that all life, including man, began in Africa. Why not the Middle East, which many believe is the "cradle of civilization"?
