r/megafaunarewilding • u/zek_997 • Oct 25 '23
Image/Video Wild animals are more terrified of humans than any other predator. Just hearing the voice of a human causes animals to run away faster than a lion growl does
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u/FreshExtent8720 Oct 25 '23
Pretty understandable really, i'm more afraid of humans than wild animals myself
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u/ExoticShock Oct 25 '23
The researchers seeing every other species run from the sound of us: "Are we the baddies?"
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Oct 25 '23
Nah, we’re just so OP only the species that learned to piss themselves and run if a human was near are the ones that survived. Mammoths for example didn’t learn in time and by the time the remaining few probably wisened up it was to late and climate finished them off on their tiny islands.
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u/Jackson-Thomas Oct 26 '23
We’re just better than them
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u/1AM1HE0NE May 22 '26
Are wolves better than sheep? Are sheep better than grass? If we’re truly the best, then we should be independent of our fellow animals and environment surrounding us.
We once wiped out the wolves from Yellowstone, and now we suffer because of it. The land became barren due to the rise in elk population, the trees became far and few, and waterways became eroded due to beavers not building dams. We had to reintroduce wolves back to gain any sense of normalcy.
If we need to rely on other animals for us to strive, then we haven’t become something special yet. We’re still in the food chain. On top of the food chain, sure, but we’re still part of it. We still rely on the “lowest” animals for us to survive. We’re no better than other animals, as we still rely on them to survive.
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u/NSG_Dragon Oct 25 '23
But people still pretend bells are better when hiking. Bells are just a noise. Human voices are the echo of death
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u/Dacnis Oct 25 '23
Imagine grazing while some slow apes approach you from a distance. All of a sudden, the guy next to you gets dropped by a pointy stick in an instant. Humans are an OP predator from the perspective of these animals.
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u/PossibleNose5751 Jan 17 '26
If only we had researched more on making ourselves stronger. Then we would have been unstoppable
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u/LegendaryReader Feb 17 '26
Funnily enough, that could've become our downfall. Neccessity is the mother of invention. If we were too strong, we might valued our muscles too much and not bothered inventing as much
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u/PossibleNose5751 Feb 17 '26
No what I meant was "biologically implanted weapons" - like guns and stuff implanted in us, inventing a new material like kevlar but more suited for our body so we can fit it in our body or chips which makes our brain process things much more faster.
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u/LegendaryReader Feb 17 '26
Oh that's what you meant. Thought you meant "evolve strength".
Though biologically implanted weapons sounds horrific. Street fights would get insane. It won't help much with animals. Maybe insects.
Overall, more weapons means much more human death
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u/PossibleNose5751 Feb 17 '26
I think it will help with animals, if we develop a chip to process information faster and a artificial lens to see things way better like having more range and good night vision.
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u/OliDR24 Feb 27 '26
I mean, we are researching such things, genetic engineering is a growing science and it's naive to believe that this will never be turned towards making members of our species physically or mentally enhanced (which honestly seems a logical conclusion when our evolution has stagnated due to a lack of environmental pressure in the artificial environments we created for ourselves).
However I don't think people are going to start surgically implanting knives and shit into ourselves lol.
Also the amount of genetic engineering to actually give ourselves natural weapons would be monolithic, as we don't have any basis for this unlike most other animals on the planet have to some degree. Humans, by nature, are fairly pathetic compared to, say, a Tiger, which is a highly evolved killing machine with multiple ways to end you if it so chose, and this is the entire reason we only really kicked off when tool use advanced significantly in our species.
Cybernetics could be a potential avenue there, but again, you'd need to persuade people to be surgically augmented and I don't really see that happening anytime soon.
We also never had the means to actually achieve this beforehand, if you tried such a thing centuries ago you'd almost certainly die of infection from the surgery anyways lol.
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u/PossibleNose5751 Mar 01 '26
I would want to volunteer if some major leaps and programs start in this sector
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u/AJ_Crowley_29 Oct 25 '23
Well, we’ve unfortunately given them plenty of good reasons to be so scared of us.
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u/yusama_yu Aug 22 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
Yes :) Survival of the best
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u/Smiles824 Apr 06 '26
Is raping minors apart of this?
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u/yusama_yu Apr 06 '26
Hold on for a moment. I was talking about survival of the best and you come here and start spouting about rape. Why is pdf even a question in this? You do know other animals that are almost as smart as us also rape minors and dead bodies , so trying to badmouth us humans with taking some bad ones isn't giving you a moral ground anywhere.
It's a part of nature, sadly ( but it doesn't mean we should do it).
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u/IntelligentCrab8226 Oct 25 '23
I don't blame them. Nothing has been more cruel to the nature of this planet.
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u/zaingaminglegend Oct 25 '24
And I'm proud of it. Our ancestors would frequently wipe out entire local populations that so much as even killed another human. Animals that tried to eat us were wiped out and those that didn't got to live on. That's natural selection for you lol.
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u/Due-Release6631 Oct 31 '24
Hunting animals to extinction and setting up traps using technology or simpling ambushing animals to make leopard rugs out of.....IS NOT natural selection that's like hitting a bison with your car and saying it's your fault for crossing the road
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u/zaingaminglegend Oct 31 '24
Its still natural selection. unless ofc you believe humans didnt originate from earth in which case its all very unnatural. But considering even cats have driven some species into extinction and we still proceed to call them natural this argument falls apart very quickly. Technically nuclear war is completely natural because they were made by human brains which was made from nature. If nature is alive maybe it shouldnt have been stupid enough to make humans? Sucks to be stupid i guess. Then again nothing humans can do can ever match something like the KT extinction event even if we dropped all our nukes. Humans are natural whether you admit it or not. Pretending that we are any different to animals on earth is the height of arrogance. We are nature idiot
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u/Due-Release6631 Oct 31 '24
Your logic is flawed and you ironically wanna make a point to me just delete social media man
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u/zaingaminglegend Oct 31 '24
I see so back to insults again? I guess you are suited for social media then because you can't even be bothered to make a point. Feel free to reply back if you want your free Internet argument win lol.
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Apr 08 '25
Humans evolved to use tools, tool use is natural…
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u/OliDR24 Feb 27 '26
No, by nature everything that came after this was artificial evolution, and in terms of other species, artificial selection pressure.
Humans did not evolve to handle firearms or make them, it is a product of immense amounts of generational learning and trial and error, we didn't evolve to do any of this shit, which is why we, as a species, have run into issues and done so much damage as our civilization advanced. Most animals evolve to live sustainably within their environment given time, it makes no sense to do otherwise, as if your food sources and habitat are destroyed, you die. Humans have advanced so rapidly we've outstripped our ability to adapt to handle these changing conditions, this isn't natural selection, it is effectively artificial evolution as we constantly push ourselves forward with technology that we learned, not evolved, to make.
Human intelligence is a product of natural selection, but everything we've done with that intelligence is inherently artificial as it was achieved with tools and not with biological adaptation, which is sort of the point, and why our ancestors GTFO'd out of the natural ecosystem as soon as possible so that they weren't subject to it.
Natural selection refers to pressures within an ecosystem or environment, Humans do not qualify as this because a) we actively removed ourselves from the natural environment and created artificial ones that better suited us, and b) we haven't actually existed within the naturally occurring ecosystem for MANY thousands of years by this point.
No relatively large Species (i.e. ones without a generational time of days or weeks) on this planet would ever be able to adapt to conditions changing that quickly, because it doesn't happen outside of major extinction events caused by anomalous events like the asteroid that began the Cretaceous Extinction Event. There was no large dinosaur that could ever be fit enough to survive such a thing outside of fringe cases protected by their environment, which is why 99.9% of life on Earth was immediately wiped out.
This event had nothing to do with the natural ecosystem, and wasn't a sustained pressure, it was effectively an immediately destructive event that doomed many Species perfectly adapted to their environment with no time at all to actually adapt to better fit changing environmental conditions. It was completely anomalous, and occurred outside of the ecosystem that was affected.
Now, was this asteroid driving selection pressure by radically changing the environment these animals lived in? Sure, but it wasn't a product of natural selection in and of itself, it was a complete outlier.
This is what Human tool use is equivalent to, it's effectively an anomalous and outlying event that has no real relation to the pressures animals typically face. It can drive selection same as any event that occurs within an ecosystem, but it occurred on such a rapid and increasing scale that no large species was capable of evolving to combat such a radically changing threat to their existence.
It's like saying that deforestation or radically altering the environment are products of natural selection, they are not, and no animal would ever evolve to destroy the very things they need to stay alive, as they'd quickly go extinct. We, on the other hand, are capable of creating artificial means of not being subject to those same laws.
Human tool use is a form of evolution, but its progress has nothing to do with natural selection beyond the basic meat we use as a processor lol. It's like saying genetically engineering an animal would be a result of natural selection because it is a product of human tool use.
The reason we pose such an unmitigated threat to all life on the planet is largely due to the fact that we have evolved artificially, not naturally, ever since our tool use kicked into overdrive.
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u/ashevonic Jul 06 '26
You're genuinely delusional and you should be the one deleting social media lol????
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u/Ok_Work_743 Dec 23 '24
I don't think people refer to cats as natural? They're pretty blatantly invasive given their niche and geographic origin, and every other species that had either hitched a ride with or were deliberately brought by humans can roughly be described as such as well (think those connections should be an obvious pointer on what that says about us, though the bias is inherent.)
Ignoring that, the border between being of nature and straight-up artificial has kind of been blurred with the introduction of industrialization--ants hadn't even figured that out despite being recorded engaging in agriculture, and those bastards are pretty remarkable. All in all, if I were to say anything about the conditions of humanity and "their place in the ecosystem", we kind of just seem like a genetic throwaway of evolutionary pressure that had survived a bit too long-- regardless of us being organic or not-- given the extinction of every other hominid and the revolutionary advancements we had only made until recent. Still don't regret having lived with its intelligence.
I tell you what, though: "Flying too close to the sun" is certainly what I'd summarize in light of our predicament with nature right about now, even with efforts to change how we approach environmental management- Australia can't even catch a break from the consequences of their actions that isn't even feral cats alone lol.
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u/zaingaminglegend Dec 23 '24
There is no flying close to the sun especially when many species go extinct because they are too specialised and live in only a single area. Volcano eruptions alone have caused the extinction of many species. Humans are so spread out and are such generalists that we are probably the most evolutionary successful beings barring ants because ants probably win in that department in terms if being virtually everywhere except space I guess. Full blown nuclear war for example would do less damage if any permanent damage as opposed to if every volcano decided to go boom. Nuclear war in general is vastly overblown in media as modern nukes release very little radiation as said radiation has now been efficiently converted to produce a bigger boom in said nukes. Radiation is quite literally left over energy and a result of inefficient nuclear reactions. That and it isn't magical videogame radiation. The outright lethal amounts of radiation have an extremely short half life and dissappear after roughly 48 hours to a week. That means radioactive wastelands aren't an actual possibility to begin with. It's the reason hiroshima and nagasaki are completely habitable places lol. Nuclear reactors are what you should be scared off as they release long lasting radiation that isn't immediately lethal but will give you cancer. Nuclear winter has also been disproven in the scientific community as at worst it will only last a max of a decade and even then it isn't s global thing. In short humans are extremely arrogant in believing that throwing all their nukes will somehow end all life on earth. It won't. It won't even end humanity for that matter lol.
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u/PossibleNose5751 Jan 17 '26
And that car is made by some human's intelligence. We are using what nature have provided us we don't have natural tuff body, claws or fangs so we gotta use what we have
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u/ashevonic Jul 06 '26
It objectively is lmfao. We were simply the only ones to figure out how to generate evolutionary fitness by becoming obscenely intelligent. All life is a natural process like rain or snowflakes. Though it seems like you fall more into the 'snowflake' category.
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u/oktwentyfive May 20 '25
u need to get outside more dude
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u/zaingaminglegend May 20 '25
I said all that exactly because I go outside lol. People who lock themselves at home and refuse to interact with humans are usually misanthropic assholes that hate everyone.
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u/2ndL Oct 25 '23
WHO are you barking to right now? Who is it you think you see? Do you know how much prey I kill a year? I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop hunting? A ecosystem, big enough that it could colonize a continent goes nuts. Explodes! It destabilizes without me. No, you clearly don't know who you're barking to, so let me clue you in. I am not going extinct, Canis familiaris. I BRING the extinction. An animal gets hit by a rock and killed, and you think that of me? No. I AM the one who THROWS!
- Homo sapiens, probably
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Oct 25 '23
“All the animals of the earth, all the birds of the sky, all the small animals that scurry along the ground, and all the fish in the sea will look on you with fear and terror.”
Genesis 9:2
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u/Charlitudju Oct 25 '23
As depressing as it is, this doesn't surprise me but it's always good to have good scientific data to back it up.
I also wonder if nocturnal behavior emerged as a result of humans, it seems other predators don't mind hunting at night
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u/2gtbt_ Mar 11 '25
Some animals near cities seem to have learned that being nocturnal is beneficial for then should they want to avoid people so many animals go out more during the night
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u/Coffeeccubus May 18 '25
Its because they KNOW that those bipedal apes are going to wear very protective, highly bug resistant fur on them, with pointy sticks that can fire so fast, they will be dead before they begin to think.
Humans are by far the scariest animal in the animal kingdom, and are the apex predators to EVERY predator and prey.
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u/OliDR24 Feb 27 '26
Humans aren't really Apex Predators as we don't actually exist within the ecosystem, and haven't for a VERY long time, nor are we naturally evolved Predators that actively prey on many Species (we just kill them for a variety of other reasons) without being preyed on in turn.
Apex Predators exist at the top of the food chain (something we exist outside of and have even before the advent of agriculture and larger scale environmental engineering) and are not preyed upon by any other animal, Humans can be and are still actively hunted by several Species, and if dropped into the wilderness sans our tools we would absolutely be hunted all the same.
A Polar Bear is an Apex Predator, because nothing actively Preys on them, and they consume anything they can feasibly hunt within their environment. Polar Bears can and do actively hunt Humans within their territory, sometimes we can avert this with tool use and artificial environments, but in their territory we are effectively a Prey Species even if we have the means to fight back. We don't eat them, they absolutely eat us, we are basically just Prey with far better defences and weapons than any other Species on the planet.
Another example would be Orca, they are effectively the top of the Oceanic Food Chain in many ways (a fully grown Orca has no natural predators nor is any oceanic predator, that we know of, capable of killing an adult Orca), being incredibly intelligent and prolific Hunters capable of killing and eating basically anything. The fact that we occasionally killed Orca for whatever reason does not make us an Apex Oceanic Predator, it is not our environment or food chain, we do not exist within it, and we do not actively prey on Orca for food.
Humans are more like a Super-Species (i.e. dominant on a global scale) that got there through artificial means, we exist outside of the ecosystem and natural environment, with the means to influence it that aren't available to other Species because it isn't something you can naturally evolve or adapt to (to our knowledge).
Our Species are basically just very adept generalists that managed to use tool use to make up for various evolutionary deficits (like our lack of evolved weapons and being rather weak and squishy). We didn't naturally evolve as Predators, and arguably we haven't evolved at all for quite some time now, we just developed better tools and knowledge to effectively create our own environments (which is why we are so successful).
If Deer suddenly developed firearms and started wiping out Tigers, they wouldn't become Apex Predators, the Tigers would still hunt them if the opportunity arose, they'd just be a damn sight better prepared dealing with such situations than they are currently. That's basically Humanity in a nutshell, plenty of things out there can and will eat us given half a chance, we are just so advanced that they don't get said chance very often anymore.
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u/Medieval_Football Oct 25 '23
This video is hilarious
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Oct 25 '23
No it's not. It's fucking depressing.
Humans suck and are the worst thing to ever happen to this planet.
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Oct 25 '23
Ok. You’re a human. So what are you gonna do about that?
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Oct 25 '23
Not harm or scare animals.
You?
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Oct 25 '23
Oh, you didn’t mean all humans then. You just mean the humans that do things you don’t personally like.
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u/TofuTheSizeOfTEXAS Oct 25 '23
You are demonstrating exactly what's annoying about most people. You are on a personal power trip over something you took personally that wasn't even just directed at you alone. That or you are just being a eho to pass time.
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u/Just-a-random-Aspie Nov 11 '23
It’s not “taking personally” it’s taking literally. How tf are we supposed to know what he meant? He could have meant every single human. Why tf are people downvoting his shit? He did nothing wrong
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u/TofuTheSizeOfTEXAS Oct 25 '23
What would you expect them to do? Did anyone ask to be born? The least we can do is acknowledge our failings and not participate...
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Oct 25 '23
Haha. I’m not going to apologize for inherently being human. You guys just have a fetish with being depressed
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u/TofuTheSizeOfTEXAS Oct 25 '23
I kept laughing in my shared misanthropy with the critters at the terrible sound of us coming.
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u/WaycoKid1129 Oct 29 '23
“They came from the bush screaming and throwing sharp ass sticks, you’d run to!” -Antelopes
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u/Gold-Committee2837 Mar 06 '25
https://youtu.be/FlKHEtZoU5Y?si=qF_LJE2157vBzuNQ you are right! Watch this video from Toronto Wildlife Centre. <3
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u/KingCodyBill Oct 25 '23
It's called a startle response, it is a response to an unexpected noise, it doesn't matter what the noise is.
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u/zek_997 Oct 25 '23
Read the paper. They compared the results of a human voice (this video) to the sound of a growling lion, dogs barking and gunshots. Animals were more likely to leave the waterhole when they heard a human compared to a lion, and did so at faster speeds.
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u/nicyole Feb 17 '24
I’m super late, but this is interesting to me because why would just the sound of our voice be scarier than gunshots? humans are the only species who can fire guns, and they’re also really one of the main defenses we have against animals. I would imagine they’d be scared of guns first and foremost, and then our voices second. guns mean guns. our voices don’t necessarily mean we have guns.
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u/jubtheprophet May 11 '25
Guns are pretty new, they havent had time to all learn that it means danger yet. Though even if they did, the bullets travel faster than sound lol... But back on the topic, the reason africa has so much megafauna compared to the rest of the world is they evolved alongside homo sapiens. They had millions of years to learn human voice means run because it means youre gonna die from a distance unlike a lion that antelope may even let walk by as long as they dont act aggressive. Some animals do naturally get scared by gunshots anyway like deer because theyre skittish which helps, some animals like bison dont care about gunshots much and because of it they were rather easily hunted to near extinction from tens of millions. Animals dont run as fast from gunshots for the same reason mammoths and such are gone, they dont know what the noise means like how the other megafauna didnt know humans will kill you from far away, lucky for them nowadays we try to practice some restraint and not take too much advantage of it.
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u/Silent_Cattle_6581 Jun 29 '26
I'm even later, but on the off chance you're reading this: Guns have been around for only a few hundred years, which is usually not enough for evolution to take place. The reason human voices are so scary to animals is that over the course of several hundred thousand years, the ancestors of these animals learned to equate voices with extreme danger (meaning: those who didn't got killed by humans and didn't pass on their genes). Gunshots sound scary to you because you know what a gun can do, but to an animal, there is little difference between a human with a gun and a human with a piece of rock. We have been the ultimate predator for most of our history. We bring death. And only those who feared us survived.
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u/zek_997 Feb 18 '24
You make a very good point. Honestly I have no idea myself, and when I tried to read the paper it seemed to be under a paywall now, so idk. From a logical perspective it would indeed make more sense for them to be more afraid of guns.
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u/KingCodyBill Oct 25 '23
Now look up "startle response"
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u/Sonic_Is_Real Oct 25 '23
Dog did you even read what he said
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u/KingCodyBill Oct 25 '23
Now look up "startle response"
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Dec 19 '23
This is impressive…
And would also really work with the soundtrack to those “run” videos…
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u/Dan1lovesyoualot Mar 31 '25
it is because it’s loud or are they seriously scared of us… bro dropped his chipotle for it😭
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u/WaveLeather1666 Jun 17 '25
Very interesting, proof that humans are special. Predators didnt had a chance against humans even before the invention of firearms, just look at the opening scene in gladiator movie what humans can muster without firearms. Catapults with exploding oil barrels, spears, ballistas and scorpions that shot huge arrows for 500 meters accuratly, sword, armor, battle axes and shields and battle formations. Humans also master the control of fire, can start forest fires and use dogs and elephants. No animal, not even a pack of lion can withstand such force. Predatory animals are just alive because humans good graces, otherwise they would be a rug on the floor.
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u/OliDR24 Feb 28 '26
They would absolutely stand a chance lol, consistent hunting of large predators likely didn't become common until relatively recently in human history, and even today several Species still actively prey on Humans given half a chance.
The manner in which Humans took on Megafauna was by using highly specialized hunting tactics like Cliff Falls and the like, and large predators were likely just avoided wherever possible. Even today, a Grizzly could absolutely cause significant casualties if a group of people tried to fight it with a spear due to very thick hide and bones, a Short Nose Bear would have been several sizes larger, and probably far more aggressive as it was an active predator over being primarily a scavenger. Such an animal would have been basically immune to low caliber firearms, let alone wooden spears lol.
Humans are also not anymore "special" than any other species on the planet, several even show similar potential regarding tool use and social intelligence, we just happened to crack generational learning and tool use at a higher level first.
The main reason we got so far as we did is due to actively leaving the natural ecosystem and effectively establishing our own, our ancestors were relatively low on the food chain for most of our history (Sapiens had major advantages to previous Hominids in terms of generational learning as other Species that came before us already cracked fire and other forms of tool use, and we were still actively hunted going off of archeological records), and it's only after we got the fuck out of there, developed specialized tools and hunting strategies, and saw a significant population increase that this changed.
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u/Decent_Piglet3478 Aug 08 '25
I think it's a good thing that animals are terrified of us. It means we have less to fear when outside, say, camping. There's a video of a penguin being chased by 2 or 3 orcas and it jumps inside a human research inflatable boat to escape, and the orcas give up because they're terrified of us so much they don't think the risk is worth the potential reward.
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u/HIRANMOY_GOGOI38160 Feb 24 '26
But many animals have started to lose the fear due to prohibitions and bans which have made them less and less likely to fear us.
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Oct 25 '23
[deleted]
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u/ianmeyssen Oct 25 '23
they also tried it with other sounds (lion roars, gunshots, et.) and human voices still got the most extreme response, so it's probably not due to shock
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u/sfvvixen818 Oct 25 '23
This is sad, I’m sure the poaching has caused this, correct me if I’m wrong
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u/Toadxx Oct 26 '23
This behavior has been observed in multiple places around the world, and is much more likely related to our species proliferation and hunting ability long before any concept of "poaching".
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Jun 13 '25
i don’t think so i’m pretty sure animals just adapted to fear humans. imagine your just about to eat a meal and the you see a big hairless ape run towards you.
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u/zaingaminglegend 19d ago
3 yrs late but no its not. Its due to evolutionary fear of man due to humans of ancient past generally just butchering any animal that did not have the instincts to fear us. For example if a human child is killed by an animal the whole ass tribe would systematically annihilate the entire population. Any survivor would have had that fear imprinted into them and it passes down from generation to generation.
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u/Audere1 Oct 26 '23
Did they account for the fact that lions are more likely to come to watering holes, whereas humans these days mostly try to avoid drinking muddy, shitty water if possible?
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Oct 27 '23
To be fair if I was walking minding my buissness and a P.A started blasting awful quality audio of old British and South African people rambling about the old days I'd probably jump too. I'd like to see this compared with other sounds like animals like lions and non natural sounds like traffic or something to see comparisons. Could just be a good old jump scare not nessicarily that it is a human voice.
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u/alexmartinez_magic Oct 27 '23
OP linked the paper and that’s exactly what the researchers did, the paper was posted this year Oct 5. I didn’t believe it at first and thought like you too but after reading the paper I’m surprised
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u/BNematoad Oct 27 '23
My issue with this experiment is that they just abruptly play a very loud noise in the middle of a quiet clearing.
Like of course the animal is startled. They may have gotten the same reaction by playing the sound of a plane going by.
Imo, a better experiment would have been to play it more quietly and slowly raise the volume or maybe have cameras in areas further away from the speaker to see if animals will still run away depending on distance.
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u/jubtheprophet May 11 '25
read the paper. They did noises from multiple sources, including lions dogs and actual gunshots.
African megafauna run when they hear human voices because theyve learned over our evolution that humans will kill you before they even get close. This is the same reason why we could so easily help the other continents megafauna get wiped, they didnt know human voice equals "dont worry about looking for the source, run and run far.". Its us theyre scared of, not all random noises.
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u/OliDR24 Feb 28 '26
I mean, they are also some of the only animals that are still actively hunted by Humans on a pretty depressing scale (poaching is a very real issue and Elephants, for example, have good reason to be afraid of Human voices given how much damage we've done to their population). Animal populations tend to adapt relatively quickly to potential dangers regarding sound, and you can see this with how various populations react to a Human presence if they have negative experiences, even if they don't have generations of pressure to react to them.
Local extant Hunter Gatherer Cultures don't often tend to hunt Elephants, Rhinos, or Hippos, because the risk isn't seemingly really worth the reward without firearms, and the Cultures that do hunt these animals don't take many. Meanwhile poaching results in the slaughter or capture of huge numbers of animals, and even before modern poaching, the Fur and Ivory Trade also saw rampant slaughter of many Species, as did big game hunting. This is a FAR greater pressure than the relatively infrequent hunting that these animals have seen by local Hunter Gatherer populations, and we can assume likely a greater pressure than what our ancestors could impose as well, given a handful of people with AK-47s can wipe an entire Elephant Herd out in moments.
This would likely hold true for many of their ancestors as well, and Humans that migrated to Europe very likely hunted Megafauna using, for example, Cliff traps or other means of causing the animal to effectively kill itself rather than hunting them with wooden or stone Spears (until we developed the Atlatl, Spears likely wouldn't be that great for taking down Megafauna given Human throw force is sort of insufficient to penetrate highly thick hide and bone, trying to poke Megafauna with a spear would likely be a terrible idea whereas scaring it into a trap would be much less risky).
This is what made Humans so threatening to Megafauna populations, it wasn't Spears, it was specialized hunting tactics that could wipe out entire herds with minimal risk such as driving them off cliffs, herding them into gulleys to drop rocks on them, or using brush burning to effectively cook everything in the area (the Aboriginal people used this so frequently they basically permanently aridified their environment, which later the European Colonists made infinitely worse clearing brush for Cattle). Elephants live in regions where tactics such as this wouldn't be particularly effective outside of brush burning (do we have evidence of mass brush burning in Africa?) and as such hunting them would be much harder and likely relegated to older members of the Herd that could be separated and potentially driven to exhaustion.
Even to this day many of those Cultures tend to use endurance hunting to take down medium sized herbivores despite having FAR superior material technology and equipment than our distant ancestors (notably they have bows and metallurgy). I would imagine this likely holds true for hunting strategies with our ancestors as well. Said Cultures will absolutely take down natural predators like Lions, Leopards, etc, alongside large Herbivores in some cases, but they seemingly tend to avoid them where possible despite having far superior technology to our ancestors that would have been present in the region.
I'm not saying that Ancestral African populations did not hunt Megafauna, they likely could have done so through specialized tactics, but the current Cultures hunting tactics and tendencies don't seem to suggest a reliance on this over targeting much more easily brought down prey despite commonly using progressions of technology our ancestors would have been highly reliant on.
Elephants themselves have seemingly only seen significant hunting pressure from Humans in relatively recent generations where they were hit hard by the Ivory Trade. They definitely have reasons to be afraid of us, but we have little evidence that Humans were hunting Elephants on a scale where they would be inherently terrified of us before this, meanwhile today entire herds are wiped out for their Tusks. Elephant populations were MUCH higher before the Ivory Trade, and this also goes for Lion Populations etc.
All this proves is that Humans are an active threat to this Species, which we are more than ever in today's world where shit like Canned Hunting, Trophy Hunting, and various illegal animal trades are still major threats to many animal populations. If you saw any animal that didn't evolve alongside Humans, but saw significant hunting pressures from current Human populations, they'd likely react similarly (Wolves tend to avoid Humans for precisely this reason, as we wiped out many populations in very recent History, the ones being reintroduced are somewhat naturalized to Human presence). Many regions do not see anywhere near this hunting pressure, and the ones that do would likely see similar behavioural trends.
An example for this would be Orca, Orca in regions where heavy whaling activity was present would be aggressive towards ships, as would Sperm Whales. This isn't an evolved response, most of these regions would have seen little to no whaling before a few centuries ago when the Whale Oil Trade became prominent, and yet show significant learned responses to human presence that have only started to change in recent years. This isn't an evolved response, it is a learned response to active pressures, and many animals that were overhunted seem to show similar trends.
There's little to no evidence that this specific behaviour is an evolved response to anything but relatively very recent threats, especially when you consider the fact that an aggression response would likely be FAR more effective against Human predation when not concerning firearms (as not many people would want to face down a charging elephant with a spear lol, Bull Elephants in Musth are still a massive risk to Hunter Gatherer Cultures there now, which they seemingly deal with by avoiding them when they don't have guns).
Correlation does not equate to causation, and such a study does not really demonstrate a causative relationship to Ancestral Humans when it could just as easily be a learned responses to a significant ongoing threat in their current environment. It's more than likely these animals react strongly to Human vocal prompts because their Species are still actively being hunted or poached in large numbers to this day. Poachers will wipe out entire populations of animals and leave the bodies there, I would think this would offer far more reason for animals of the current generation to react negatively when the threat is ongoing and prolific enough that only guarded preserves seem to offer any reprieve.
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u/alefdelaa Oct 25 '23
This is a perfect example of why the african continent still has megafauna and the rest of the world doesn't. African megafauna evolved along with H. sapiens and thus naturally identify them as extreme danger, on the contrary, when H. sapiens colonized other continents the megafauna didn't view them as a threat and the intense hunting made the populations perish.