Comment on Drop your unpopular opinions here because c/unpopularopinions is filled with popular opinions
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day agoThe practice was reported as abandoned in most places before the late 20th century
In other words, nobody has ever been reliably documented as having done this.
but the San people and other hunter-gatherer tribes are known to have used it in the 21st century
By far the most extensive study of the San peoples ever conducted was in the 1960s and 1970s by Richard Lee and other anthropologists as part of a Harvard study, and there was no mention whatsoever of “persistence hunting.” There was mention of their extensive use of poisoned spears and arrows, which allowed them to track and eventually kill already-wounded animals. Something that could easily be mistaken for persistence hunting.
A 2024 study found hundreds of recorded examples of this method being practiced on all inhabited continents.
Hundreds? I would love to see this study.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t know what’s stopping you from opening links from the page I linked.
Indeed, nothing written before 2000 is true, the history and people actually never existed.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lol, you know what name-calling as a form of argument means, don’t you? And no, that isn’t persistence hunting, that’s hunting with poison. Your own link includes injury as a reason this might work, and being poisoned could be considered as an injury, but tracking an injured animal is a form of scavenging and is nothing special or unique in the animal world. What is special and unique (or would be if it were true) is the ability to pick out a healthy animal and simply walk or jog after it until it drops, and that is what make the endurance hunting claim such a “popular opinion” – and by opinion I mean something not supported by any facts.
Your link is to a very brief Wikipedia page, and I cannot read this “2024 study” without paying a subscription, which I’m not going to do. Since you’ve obviously actually read that study, you must know that that’s an obstacle. If you actually have a copy, I’d love to see it instead of just the abstract which I was able to read. That being said, as a former Anthropologist I’m reasonably certain the authors used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample for their work. Having read nearly all of the ethnographies that the sample draws from (there’s really not much else for Anthropology students to do other than actually going places) I can assure you that there is no mention in them of anything like persistence hunting. Plenty of mentions of stalking and concealment and the use of spears and bows and arrows and poison, but there was never any controversy over these human activities.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
‘Former anthropologist’ but can’t find how to open the paper, eh? Took me two clicks from the Wikipedia article.