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Survival of the persistent

Have you ever wondered how hunter-gatherers hunted for their food? Best way to get a peek into the past is to observe still surviving hunter-gatherers communities in the world. Well, they aren’t many such communities around. I am going to take you to the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. In the Kalahari Desert lives a hunter-gatherer tribe known as San people or Bushmen. Early in the day, a group of San hunters surrounds a Kudu herd. They create panic and scatter the heard. One or two San hunters then start to chase the bull that got separated from its herd. Kudu bull or any other four-legged animal is faster than us humans. Will the hunter-gatherer ever get to match the speed of the bull? Is one or two men enough to tame and kill the mighty bull?

Kudu Bull
Photo by Tobias Adam on Unsplash


Well, four-legged animals gallop and run at great speeds that humans cannot match. But they can run at those speeds for only a short time. Kudu bull runs for its life. After a short while, looks around to make sure it’s in the clear. It slows down or takes a break to get some breath. The thing is four-legged animals can’t run and pant at the same time. They are heavy and has thick furs or hairs that make it difficult to sweat and cool the body. So it has to slow down or stop to catch its breath and cool down. But humans thanks to the little hair on the body, we sweat and our body cools off. Meanwhile, the human hunters mix up their pace, they run, walk and run again. Thanks to evolution, humans had developed methods to track the animal. So they eventually locate the bull. "Damn!" thinks the bull and starts to run again. The process repeats. Bull slows down, hunters arrive a little later, bull runs. This goes on for four or five hours in the scorching heat of summer. Exhausted the bull gives up. It can’t take it anymore. And that is when the sole hunter or maybe two finishes off the animal. The long chase in the hot desert finally yields reward. Persistence in chasing the animal ensured the survival of the tribe. The process has a name, persistence-hunting.

 

And we modern humans are no different. While we have abundant food at a tap of a button and other basic needs met, but we are still in for the game. The thrill of the hunt drives us too. Don’t believe me? We hunt for information. In the information age, access to information ensures we stay at the top. Social media and technology companies utilize this nature of humans very well. We keep scrolling our twitter feed. Some are interesting, some are irrelevant. But we keep scrolling just to get to the next tweet which might be the relevant or something interesting. We are persistent in our hunt for information and are driven by the pursuit of information itself. It makes us scroll even more our twitter feed. This is true for other sites and mobile applications like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook.

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