Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You Read Online Free PDF

humans that brought their numbers down, but even if humans vanished, the problem of theft by other animals, or perhaps something else altogether, might prevent cheetah or wild dog populations from ever recovering.
    Theft by the meat eaters of the African savannahs has special significance to us because we evolved as a species among them. If we could travel far enough back in time, we’d see lions and hyenas stealing food from other predators, but they’d also be battling with a third species for those carcasses, and that third species would be us.
    To early humans looking for meat, chasing some lions away from a wildebeest carcass would have been dangerous, but it would surely have been a much more appealing strategy than thealternative of hunting the wildebeest themselves. For early humans, that second option would entail chasing the animal on foot for eight hours or more in the searing midday sun.
    The fact that humans can run down a large animal that way sounds impossible at first, but persistence hunting, as it’s called, has been documented in traditional societies around the world, including the Kalahari people of southern Africa, the Hadza people of eastern Africa, the Tarahumara and Navajo people of northern Mexico and the American Southwest, and the Aborigines in Australia. 11 Humans are built for running. Even people who sit at desks all day but do a little exercise a few days a week can typically finish a 10-kilometer run without extraordinary effort. In fact, each year thousands upon thousands of people complete marathons of more than 26 miles, and some even go farther, completing ultramarathons of 100 kilometers (62.1 miles) or more. The idea that our ancestors could run for eight hours straight isn’t so far-fetched. And although big animals are faster than humans over short distances, even they can’t run as far as a fit human can. Over long enough distances, humans are some of the best runners on the planet.
    When a human chases a big animal under the hot sun, the animal being chased eventually overheats. Humans can cool themselves while running by sweating constantly, but large four-legged animals cool themselves by panting, and since those animals take only one breath with each set of strides, they can’t pant fast enough while running to cool themselves down. Without a chance to stop and pant in the shade, the larger animal eventually overheats, collapses from exhaustion, and is then easily killed by the humans who pursued it.
    In the 1980s, researchers spent a year living among a groupof around fifty Hadza people, who still subsisted off the land in eastern Africa, not yet having been swept up in the agriculture and urbanization around them. 12 What the researchers found was that the tribe did use persistence hunting but that members of the tribe always paid close attention to their environment for any signs of a fresh kill by other predators—circling vultures, or the nighttime calls of hyenas or lions. If such a clue was detected, the Hadza men would immediately run in that direction. Leopards and hyenas would run away as soon as the people got there, but lions were stubborn enough that they often ended up becoming part of the human meal. Over that year, 20 percent of all the dead animals brought back to the village had been scavenged from other predators, including meat from elephant, zebra, warthog, giraffe, wildebeest, and impala. Humans living traditionally in other parts of Africa, including Cameroon and Uganda, have also been observed stealing meat from predators. Assuming that those twentieth-century people used hunting methods similar to those used in the same places millennia ago, theft is probably a big reason for our success as a species. All the evidence points to humans being thieves for almost as long as we’ve been able to walk on two legs.
    Do animals really steal because they’re envious? That’s a tough question. It’s not quite impossible to determine whether or not an animal