Cassowary attacks

Cassowaries have a reputation in folklore for being dangerous to people and domestic animals. During World War II American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of them. In his book Living Birds of the World from 1958, ornithologist Ernest Thomas Gilliard wrote:

The inner or second of the three toes is fitted with a long, straight, murderous nail which can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease. There are many records of natives being killed by this bird.

This assessment of the danger posed by cassowaries has been repeated in print by authors including Gregory S. Paul (1988) and Jared Diamond (1997). A 2003 historical study of 221 cassowary attacks showed that 150 had been against humans. 75% of these had been from cassowaries that had been fed by people. 71% of the time the bird had chased or charged the victim. 15% of the time they kicked. Of the attacks, 73% involved the birds expecting or snatching food, 5% involved defending natural food sources, 15% involved defending themselves from attack, and 7% involved defending their chicks or eggs. The 150 attacks included only one human death.

The one documented human death was caused by a cassowary on 6 April 1926. 16-year-old Phillip McClean and his brother, aged 13, came across a cassowary on their property and decided to try to kill it by striking it with clubs. The bird kicked the younger boy, who fell and ran away as his older brother struck the bird. The older McClean then tripped and fell to the ground. While he was on the ground the cassowary kicked him in the neck, opening a 1.25 cm (0.49 in) wound which may have severed his jugular vein. The boy died of his injuries shortly afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary

Thomas Robert Malthus

This guy is talked about in Jared Diamond's book Collapse.

Jared suggests that overpopulation in Rwanda coupled with rudimentary substance farming techniques helped to set the stage to for war.

@theali, that is a very, very good sift.

Great sift!

For anyone that enjoyed this, consider checking out Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, or just the wikipedia page about it if you're short on time -- a good interesting read!

wwjdd, what would Jared Diamond do...

Damn I love the TED lectures. Whenever I watch one I feel that my day has been enriched.

About the brain size thing - that's always bothered me. Having that big old head with all it's disadvantages (calorie consumption, child birth morality) and doing little more with it than making camp fires. One of Jared Diamond's hypothesises is that changes to the voice box around 40,000 years ago made complex speech possible. This dudes mirror neuron idea could be accurate too, though part of me thinks that huge amounts of evidence of past civilizations was lost when the seas rose 12,000 years ago. We always put major cities near water, usually the sea or failing that a major river near its exit to the sea. The sea jumping up 130m would erase a hug proportion of our cities today, and I kind of suspect it did then.

^I tried it too and it didn't work for me either. Apparently the *amazon invocation isn't working in Sift Talk posts. It works in video posts, because I just did it a little bit ago. Go figure.

Anyway, that looks like a good read. I'll add it to my already lengthy to-read list. If I quit my job and did nothing but read for the rest of my life, I still wouldn't be able to finish the list. Oh well.

I'm also reading a book right now: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. So far it's an interesting read, but I'm only about a quarter of the way into the book. It's a look at how various past societies failed, and the lessons we can possibly take away from their mistakes.

"What had made us give up te simple life for the city? That question still bewitches archeologists, because to explain it is to understand the very soul of humanity"

Overly dramatic, as the question has been already answered comprehensively, (it's all about the agriculture), and shouldn't really bewitch anyone anymore. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fate of Human Societies., the Pulitzer Prize winning book from Jared Diamond. This book rationally answers the question and one hell of a lot of other nagging questions I've had.

Edit: In watching this I think the producers indulge some theories based on their dramatic appeal. Like the Warfare theory of why people started living in cities. The guy talks about warriors and warrior classes and leaders - specialized jobs that could only exist in a settled, (already city like), society. Maybe they built the walls and such for warfare reasons, but the city living aspects must have been already there.

Don't "That's just correlation" me. Do you think humans arriving in these locations and the animals going extinct had some external, shared cause? If not, then the correlation implies causation. And the mechanisms are many and obvious -- hunting, land use changes by humans, competition for prey with humans, etc.

Cite your claim that humans didn't have enough population density. I don't believe that. Humans expanded very rapidly in new worlds (1000 years = 40 generations, even a small growth rate would lead to saturation over one millennium. From crossing the ice bridge in Alaska humans managed to saturate both continents surprisingly quickly according to Jared Diamond).

And read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna
"Some proponents claim climate change alone caused extinction of the megafauna, but these arguments have to account for the fact that megaufaunal species comfortably survived two million years of climatic oscillations, including a number of arid glacial periods, before their sudden extinction. New evidence based on accurate optically stimulated luminescence and Uranium-thorium dating of megafaunal remains suggests that humans were the ultimate cause of the extinction of megafauna in Australia.[3] The dates derived show that all forms of megafauna became extinct in the same rapid timeframe — approximately 47,000 years ago — the period of time in which humans first arrived in Australia."

>> ^rychan:
>> ^cybrbeast:But the statement about humans killing off the megafauna is far from certain. They could have easily died out due to climate change or evolutionary pressures besides humans.
I find that scenario highly unlikely. These species had gone through scores of ice ages and warming periods, only to die exactly when the humans arrived at each continent by coincidence? At least, that's Jared Diamond's argument and I find it persuasive.


That's just correlation, a causal mechanism needs to be found. And it is unlikely that human populations were big enough to severely impact the population of these giant mammals stretched over a huge expanse. Elephant were never killed off and they mustn't be much harder to kill than mammoths.
The point is that we just don't really know exactly what was the cause. But it's not that unlikely that they were out competed by the smaller mammals that were gaining ground. That and extinction events are usually the reason why most of the branches of the evolutionary tree die out. Being really large is a good advantage in keeping isolated from the cold, but with the warming climate of the Holocene this advantage was lost. Also the trade off of being large is requiring a much larger intake of food.

>> ^cybrbeast:But the statement about humans killing off the megafauna is far from certain. They could have easily died out due to climate change or evolutionary pressures besides humans.

I find that scenario highly unlikely. These species had gone through scores of ice ages and warming periods, only to die exactly when the humans arrived at each continent by coincidence? At least, that's Jared Diamond's argument and I find it persuasive.

"God is a racist!"

Anthropologist Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, & Steel won a Pulitzer prize for its exploration of the geographic determinism of human history.

Critics rightly point out that culture (including religion) and other factors likely played a substantial role in global inequality, but the deck was stacked against most cultural areas of the world from the very beginning.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Guns-Germs-Steel-Why-Eurasia-Has-Dominated-the-Globe

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA.

"In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book.

"A documentary based on the book was broadcast on PBS in July 2005, produced by the National Geographic Society."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

thats because jared diamond is very very smart

Jared Diamond is brilliant!


Guns, Germs and Steel
1. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4008293090480628280
2. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6846344734969027300&hl=en
3. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3449100874735282191&hl=en