Scientists just figured out how long humans were apex predators

bgrpro65 avril 05, 2021

You probably don't feel like it when you dribble some raspberry filling from your jelly donut onto your shirt on a Monday morning, but you could be an apex predator. Well, maybe not you specifically, but humans have dominated the food chain for some time. We didn't get here because we're bigger or stronger than every other animal on the planet — in fact, there are a lot of animals that could dispatch us without a second thought if they really wanted to — but because we're smarter. The question that scientists want to answer is when did we achieve top predator status, and how did that happen.

A new research paper by scientists at Tel Aviv University attempts to answer that burning question, looking back over the history of humanity and painting a picture of humanity's rise to the top. They were able to do this by crunching a massive amount of data gathered over decades of research and roughly 400 different scientific papers, eventually reaching a conclusion that humans were apex predators for approximately 2 million years.