Comment by Jeff_Brown
11 days ago
It all seems so unfathomable to me. Even plants! Wild almonds will kill you with cyanide. Even domesticated horses are scary as hell -- what would they have been like before that? Domestic goats can kill big men -- my uncle (huge, muscly, outdoorsy blue collar guy) almost got rammed to death by one.
The only instance of donestication I really get are cats.
The first domestication was fire. That made the others easier. Also, humans used to cooperate
And even then I think it’s more a case that cats domesticated people
Humans have co-domesticated along side everything else. We are less scary now as well.
Are we? We kill billions/trillions of other beings per year, far more per person than we did 300 ka ago when we came onto the scene.
Another Science News article(1), linked from TFA IIRC, says we are: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gene-facial-development-...
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(1) Plus another one linked from that: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesti...
The powerhungry warmongers are certainly scary, but think of the average contemporary westerner and then imagine the average Spartan..
We are fat, with hunched backs, stiff necks and wearing glasses.
Horses used to be smaller.
Przewalski's horse, the closest thing to a pre-domesticated horse, is about 660lb. A modern draft horse is over 2000lb.
50 mya, Eohippus was around 20lb - the size of a fox.