Nowadays, humans aren’t much concerned about being devoured. We may have to worry about blowing ourselves up, or being blotted out by an asteroid strike, but we don’t worry much about lions and tigers and bears.
But it was not always thus.
Three million years ago, we were more prey than predator. Africa was predator-rich, more so than anywhere today, with familiar beasties such as leopards, lions, and hyenas, but also bears, three kinds of saber-toothed cats, and giant otters. Judging from the chewing marks and punctures in australopithecus skulls, leopards were the biggest threat.
Something like two and half million years ago, we began to turn the the tables. The first sign of our new status was the disappearance of Africa’s giant tortoises. Conventional predators just couldn’t get through their shells, but we could, presumably by
throwing or dropping rocks.
First, we drove them extinct in Africa. Next, homo erectus expanded out of Africa about two million years ago and wiped out the giant tortoises of India and Indonesia. Later, after modern humans developed boats/rafts and Arctic survival techniques, we eliminated the tortoises of Australia and the Americas. In recent millennia, better navigation led to turtle massacres in Madagascar and other islands.
Today giant tortoises are only found in out-of-the-way places like Aldabra and the Galapagos Islands – and we nearly killed them off.
Man took his first step towards ecological dominance on the back of a giant turtle.
The question is, do we have to worry about payback?