The Pleistocene: When men were men and women were glad!

OneSTDV has an excellent blog post about vegetarianism titled:   Real (White) Men Eat Meat:  How Vegetarianism Went Mainstream.  In it he draws the link between promotion of vegetarianism and an attack on masculinity in our culture.

The SWPL media has been all too willing to promulgate this lie [about fats being inimical to one’s health]. They do so because meat eating has become synonymous with traditional and masculine culture, the bane of the liberal media.

In the comment section there is a lively discussion of what pre historic humans likely did and didn’t eat. During the discussion I remembered recently watching a somewhat painful pseudo-documentary on the Discovery Channel (I think) speculating on the coexistence of humans and Neanderthals. In that program they showed Neanderthals hunting one of these friendly fellows:

Woolly Rhino

The program said that Neanderthals had to be built with extra bulk to be able to survive the kind of unfortunate mishaps which could occur at the business end of a woolly rhino’s 3 to 5 foot long horn. They were tougher than humans, but achieved this toughness at the cost of higher caloric requirements. With the help of Google I was able to back this up with a more reliable source (Excerpts from Scientific American: The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals):

…their brawny build seems to have been adapted to their ambush-style hunting of large, relatively solitary mammals—such as woolly rhinoceroses—that roamed northern and central Europe during the cold snaps. (P1)

…the energetic cost of locomotion was 32 percent higher in Neandertals than in anatomically modern humans, thanks to the archaic hominids’ burly build and short shinbones, which would have shortened their stride. In terms of daily energy needs, the Neandertals would have required somewhere between 100 and 350 calories more than moderns living in the same climates… (P4)

How bad-ass did they have to be to ambush hunt something like this?  Next time your wife calls you a Neanderthal, take it as a badge of honor!

But Neanderthals weren’t the only ones hunting these bad boys.  Our ancestors were hunting them too! In the program I watched, they speculated that humans were able to hunt woolly rhinos too using stand off throwing weapons.  I haven’t been able to find any references to this from my own searching, but there does seem to be general agreement that humans hunted these animals and made cave drawings of them.  From everything2:

Depictions of the woolly rhino can be found in various cave paintings made by humans who hunted them for food. Probably not the easiest of prey to subdue due to their size and disposition, the woolly rhino also was quick afoot and possessed what was probably a short temper. Instead of tackling one head on with the weapons of the day, humans probably trapped them in pits and then killed them with either rocks and spears.

Oh, so our ancestors cornered the deadly beast before going after it with little more than their bare hands.  In comparison I’m starting to think those Neanderthals were pansies!

Picture a band of early humans where the men are preparing to go hunt one of these.  I’m guessing the ladies around the camp experienced a few tingles along with the fear that their man might not return from this particular shopping trip.  Word has it there were very few bars or nightclubs in the Pleistocene era, so the early version of game might well have been dressing up in your hunting skins and strutting around the cave!

Maybe not as effective as a douchey top-hat and guy-liner, but I imagine it did the trick.