How did you like ‘Man the Hunted’? I read some decent reviews and one scathing one on amazon.

I’m curious to your thoughts.

Hoberg et al ‘proved’ that humans must have caught tapeworms long before domestication (therefore we gave them to pigs and cows) and as a result of eating bovids, shared as prey with lions, cheetahs, hyaenas and hunting dogs.

They presented figures purporting to show that speciation between two human tapeworm species closely related to felid and hyaenid tapeworms diverged ‘between 780kya and 1.71Mya’.
These were figures taken up by many commentators, including, I’m sorry to say, Carl Zimmer.

They ‘proved’ that humans ate big game regularly, at least as long ago as a million years, and depending on your bias, perhaps as long as 2.5My.

Those dates have irrevocably entered the ‘Human Story’ as the paper is now widely cited by palaeoanthropologists.

Hidden in the small print of the paper were the real estimates of bracketed ages (to 95% confidence level) ranging between 170,000 years ago and infinity (ie before Creation).

I’ve written this up at:
http://www.coconutstudio.com/Tapeworms.htm
as part of a series of ‘papers’ querying the general assumption that very early humans ate a lot of big game meat, and thus we became what we are.

The writers of this paper are far more cautious, and note that rates of gene evolution in bacteria can vary widely.

Hoberg et al also noted similar rate changes between larger ‘animals’, but then based their estimates of the timing of speciation in tapeworms on comparisons between their ‘molecular clock’ ticks and those of hammerhead sharks (diverged when Panama closed), humans/chimps, snapping shrimps, and mangrove crabs. Perhaps if they’d mentioned the common names of those in their paper they might not have got such unquestioned acceptance of their findings.

Finally, ignoring the fact that lions, leopards, and hyaenas, the primary hosts of tapeworms closely related to human ones, ranged throughout Africa and Eurasia (even North America) during the Pleistocene, they plumped for origins of tapeworms in Africa alone via African bovids (antelopes) as secondary hosts.

They didn’t actually give any direct evidence that the antelopes they named were the exclusive secondary hosts, nor that they were commonly infected in the wild. In fact their list of secondary hosts appears to come from a couple of palaeoanthropogical papers quite unrelated to tapeworms.

African antelopes nowadays are not infected with specifically human tapeworms, which might be another slight objection to their findings.

Yes, we were definitely more often eaten by, rather than catching and eating, big game.

Richard Parker

Would we be better off as yogurt-eating vegetarians?

Not clear, but we (or our ancestors) would probably have been better off if big cats were.