would we survive?

[jimmy p]

My biology teacher has been known for his tall-tales and his variations of the truth...eg he talks a lot of BS but i was wondering, how unnatural are we?? i mean with a lot of animals, birth occurs in a matter of minutes whereas in humans it takes days in extreme cases, mainly hours though, and that would be easy pickings to a predator.

So i just want to know, would the human race survive if we had nothing that we have today, bar the knowledge that our ancestors have? or do our chances seem slim?


ps, i know that many native tribes and peoples (amazonians, masai, zulus, aborigines etc) have survived while having little contact with 'civilization' but then again they have clothes n other modernised items.

[Greg Bernhardt]

Originally posted by jimmy p
My biology teacher has been known for his tall-tales and his variations of the truth...eg he talks a lot of BS but i was wondering, how unnatural are we?? i mean with a lot of animals, birth occurs in a matter of minutes whereas in humans it takes days in extreme cases, mainly hours though, and that would be easy pickings to a predator.


I would think we'd just move to an area with smaller predators until we developed tools to defend ourselves.

[jimmy p]

So we would still use tools to defend ourselves. Ok, if we HAD no tools for defence..like apes, tools are only used to smash things? what about then? lol, changing the question, but who cares, its my thread!

[LURCH]

I would say we not only would survive such conditions, but we did. So long as we could have the same brain we currently have (without which we would not be "human" anymore), we would not only survive, but dominate any echosystem. There would be larger losses than we currently see, especially in the first generation, but the species would still thrive. If we started out with no tools, we would soon create them. It's what we do.

[selfAdjoint]

Our ancestors ran in bands. One of the functions of the band was for just such occasions. The males would gather to keep predators away.

And as for tools, they had tools before they were human. Before big brains became a problem. So the big brains ecolved into a system that was already able to handle the problem. If it hadn't, after all, we wouldn't be here!

[Phobos]

Originally posted by jimmy p
... whereas in humans it takes days in extreme cases, mainly hours though, and that would be easy pickings to a predator.


Human moms are still able to move about during labor. It's only for the few minutes that the baby is in the birth canal that movement is really restricted. But humans are tribal and the mom has many defenders.


So i just want to know, would the human race survive if we had nothing that we have today, bar the knowledge that our ancestors have? or do our chances seem slim?


As was said, humans have already passed this test. H. sapiens were without modern civilization for something like 150,000 years. Homonids (also can be considered human) were around for about 4 million years before H. sapiens.

[FZ+]

Not all of us. Primitive hunter-gatherer societies requires large tracts of land to sustain each individual, and we simply lack the resources for such systems on a large scale. But some humans will inevitably make it.