Posted on 06/18/2010 7:27:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
There’s not much reason to suspect that older male cave lions didn’t wind up maneaters, as happens with older African lions today — in which case there’d have been a strong incentive to get rid of it, and as long as it was dead, fire up the barby.
On FB, when I posted it today, I suggested that it’s probably worthwhile to look for chunks of dead guys in cave lion coprolytes.
How many lions are found (outside of zoos) in Europe today? There’s not even much from Greek and Roman times about these critters, although they are known to have been hunted by the Assyrian kings (they went missing in the 7th c, a little misunderstanding with the Babylonians, Medes, and Scythians) in the Near East. The paleolithic people of Europe were ganging up on their prey, including mammoth, for a long while. Getting rid of lions would have the added bonus of the safety of the group.
They were a social bunch.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/humanity/evolutn.txt
[snip] Numerous fossils came from carefully prepared graves, some as old as 100,000 years. In several instances, the deceased had been old and crippled (like Boule’s specimen) and had received care for years before being laid to rest. In one grave, a youth had been buried carefully on his side, with one arm tucked under his head, as if he were sleeping; in one hand, he held a beautifully carved quartz knife. In another grave, archaeologists found the body of an elderly Neanderthal who had had his forearm amputated years before in his youth. (Surgery 60,000 years ago!) He had been cared for all his life. And in yet another Neanderthal site, researchers found evidence that the deceased had been buried with flowers. [James B. Stenson, Headmaster of Northridge Preparatory School in Des Plaines, Illinois]
Ironically, killing and eating a lion is a sign of not being pussies. ;’)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Pathology
[snip] Neanderthals seemed to suffer a high frequency of fractures, especially common on the ribs (Shanidar IV, La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 ‘Old Man’), the femur (La Ferrassie 1), fibulae (La Ferrassie 2 and Tabun 1), spine (Kebara 2) and skull (Shanidar I, Krapina, Sala 1). These fractures are often healed and show little or no sign of infection, suggesting that injured individuals were cared for during times of incapacitation. It has been remarked that Neanderthals showed a frequency of such injuries comparable to that of modern rodeo professionals, showing frequent contact with large, combative mammals. The pattern of fractures, along with the absence of throwing weapons, suggests that they may have hunted by leaping onto their prey and stabbing or even wrestling it to the ground.
:’)
People are people and the mind itself probably hasn’t changed too terribly much. I’d think that they could’ve used terrain, coordination, confusion, and maybe fire to corner and kill damned near anything. If food is the biggest problem to solve and mammals live nearby, that problem can be solved.
“that the big cats are practically inedible”
I dont know - did they have Chinese restaurants back then..?
If they did, must have been one hell of a huge wok.
Yep. The conservatives would have organized a group, formulated a plan, utilized a chain of command and each person would have been responsible for his role in the attack on the lion.
The liberals would have tried to appease the lion by offering it, oh, probably a helpless child.
liberals are a side effect of a prosperous society.
Consider their existance a ‘luxury’ of making it beyond the daily scrap for food, clothing and shelter. They have no place in the natural world - they only exist when they’re not directly faced with it.
.....the tasty viscera would have been long gone......
What a sentence to wake up to. Some hoe an omelet just isn’t going to do the job when I could have had tasty viscera
I wholeheartedly agree. John Anthony West, the water-erosion-Sphinx guy, joked that there’s “a spinoff of Darwinian theory, that there’s a progress from stupid cave men to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste.” Too bad JAW went around the bend during the WoT.
The cultural history of Europe is replete with lion references as well most notably of Hercules and the Nemean Lion.
Hold that tiger...
Lion. It’s the other white meat.
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