The Most Annoying Ways in Which Prehistory is Misrepresented

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"The dinosaurs were killed by the Ice Age."

No they were not. They were killed by the giant impact.

Also, there have been several ice ages throughout the history of the earth. Which one are you referring to?

Have you seen any other predator with tools?

Using tools.

Tools can also be used to crack open an animals skull so you can eat the the brain. The reason early humans were such excellent scavengers is because they could get at food that other animals couldn't. After other animals had picked the carcass clean, only humans could eat the brain.

I thought you said evolution doesn't have a vision/purpose. Do you think they started walking on their hind legs because they wanted their distant descendants to grind grain?

The truth is we already had the ability to walk on two legs before we became human. Other apes can do it. We can do it better because we relied on it more. On the savannah standing up straight means you can see further. You can spot predators from a greater distance.

Sure they could have walked around with two handfuls of grain but they could have just as easily walked around with tools. They probably did both.

Humans evolved to be omnivores. Unlike other omnivorous species however, we are capable of choosing not to eat meat.

"The earliest land animals were walking fish like Tiktaalik."

Nope. Those walking fish were the first land vertebrates. Aquatic animals came onto land in several waves. When Tiktaalik crawled out of the water, the land was already populated by bugs.

Evidence suggests that the earth's land was populated by bugs as early as the Cambrian. Micro-animals (such as nematodes and tardigrades) may have lived on land during the Precambrian. This is hard to prove or disprove, given that micro-animals seldom leave fossils.

If you're going to eat enough plants to get enough proteins to gain muscle, you'll get fat. Several omnivores (eg. bears) can survive without meat, but it's not healthy. Also, dental problems first started showing up when humans started eating grains.

I eat raw fish all the time. It never killed me.



Our vision developed when we were apes, but the vision of a tree-climbing monkey is different from that of an ape. Humans have excellent hearing in certain frequencies, and the lack of smell only shows that we're not scavengers.



Pre-humans born with a smaller jaw had a bigger brain because there was room for one. A big jaw interfered with the brain development, and as such, individuals with larger brains survived and reproduced, while individuals with larger brains did not.

Muscle mass is purely a lifestyle thing. The strongest human that ever lived is by far stronger than the strongest neanderthal that ever lived.



False analogy.



It's not better for eating frozen meat or bone marrow.



https://www.livestrong.com/article/4805 ... ne-marrow/

The massai frequently eat bone marrow.



E. Coli infections are just as harmful to dogs as they are to us. You are misunderstanding evolution, and seem to think that bacteria does not evolve like everything else does.



I cannot prove a negative. There's evidence that farming arose due to food shortages, though, and that dental problems were nonexistant prior to then.



For catching fish, tools are far superior to sharp teeth.



We do not. Birds do not have teeth either, where grains would get stuck.



Grinding grain with stones would require a lot of energy and would still be damn near impossible to pick up and eat afterwards.



Or you can reproduce quickly, like a rabbit does. Intelligent prey animals are mostly found in the savannah, but only because predators there are intelligent as well.



An unintelligent tiger would be killed by large prey animals. A gaur would kill it easily, for example. A stoat would not stand a chance against a rabbit either without intelligence to back it up.



Yes. Lions hunt together and have a pattern that the zebra will not be able to predict.



Our ancestors had spears and were able to set traps. Certain prey animals could also be chased over cliffs and killed that way.



No stronger than a somewhat serious gym-goer.



Yes. Certain bacterial and fungal grain infections are deadly. Even mold can kill you if you're unlucky.



Our intestines relative to bodylength are only 20% longer than those of a dog. Too much fiber leads to bloating and low testosterone levels, among others. It's one of the things people are actually reacting to when they think they have gluten intolerance.

Humans need small amounts of fiber, but so does a cat.



It depends on the amount you eat and the type of fat. Wild animals often have far less bodyfat than captive animals. Furthermore, several animals are deliberately bred to have a lot of saturated fat on them. If it's not exaggerated, saturated fat is still a good source of energy.



There's hard, irrefutable evidence that Homo Sapiens Sapiens always ate meat.



Big muscles do not automatically require a lot of energy. I boosted my resting metabolism by a "whopping" 500 calories per day by gaining 20-ish kg of muscle.

People in several communities ate more proteins in the past. My grandfather would eat fish 6 times per week during and shortly after WWII, for example. My grandmother would eat a lot of rabbit meat. The meat back then was far more pure and less watered down by flour and other unhealthy components. Scandinavians in the stone age would eat 90% meat during the winter.

I thought of some more.

I hate it when Neanderthals are given a hunchbacked posture. In reality, when apelike prehistoric creatures were evolving into humans, one of the first humanlike traits to evolve was modern human posture. Case in Point: One of the earliest humanoids was Australopithecus. It already had humanlike legs and humanlike posture ... though it was apelike in every other way. Full bipedalism evolved very early on in the human evolutionary process. Humanlike facial structure and human intelligence evolved much later.

I hate how prehistoric humans in cartoons almost always have clubs. Real prehistoric humans used spears far more often. I guess clubs are easier to draw though...

I hate it when cartoons depict prehistoric humans inventing the wheel. In reality, the wheel was invented after the beginning of civilisation. Case in Point: The Olmecs never developed the wheel. What would a prehistoric human use wheel for? If you build a wheeled cart, who will pull it? If you have no motor and no beasts of burden, you might as well walk.

I hate it when people say "The dinosaurs went extinct because they were stupid." In reality, the K-T Extinction Event killed them. If a similar extinction event happened today, crops would fail all over the world and the extinction of the human species would be a possibility. When plants are dying all over the world, intelligence won't help you. If you need a lot of food to live, you will die.

I hate it when dinosaurs are depicted with dragging tails.

Dinosaurs didn't do that.

Overall, I'm really starting to hate the entire Jurassic Park film series. The title really screws up chronology. It gives people the impression that all dinosaurs lived during the Jurassic Period.

THE FACTS: The dinosaurs first evolved during the Triassic Period. They continued to exist throughout the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. The last non-avian dinosaurs died at the end of the Cretaceous.

Many of the prehistoric creatures that we see in the Jurassic Park films didn't even exist during the Jurassic. Here is a brief rundown.

Tyrannosaurus - Cretaceous
Velociraptor - Cretaceous
Triceratops - Cretaceous
Stegosaurus - Jurassic
Parasaurolophus - Cretaceous
Gallimimus - Cretaceous
Brachiosaurus - Jurassic
Dilophosaurus - Jurassic
Compsognathus - Jurassic
Pteranodon - Cretaceous
Pachycephalosaurus - Cretaceous
Spinosaurus - Cretaceous
Ankylosaurus - Cretaceous
Apatosaurus - Jurassic
Dimorphodon - Jurassic
Mosasaurus - Cretaceous
Corythosaurus - Cretaceous
Ceratosaurus - Jurassic
Mamenchisaurus - Jurassic
Baryonyx - Cretaceous
Carnotaurus - Cretaceous
Stygimoloch - Cretaceous
Allosaurus - Jurassic
Procompsognathus - Triassic
Camarasaurus - Jurassic
Maiasaura - Cretaceous
Dryosaurus - Jurassic
Cearadactylus - Cretaceous
Othnielia - Jurassic
Mussaurus - Triassic
Hadrosaurus - Cretaceous

I was going to go over the other animals on this page, but I got bored. You get the idea. Cretaceous Park would have been a more appropriate title.

Overall, I find that the entire Jurassic Park franchise gives the general public an anti-intellectual attitude towards dinosaurs. I'd rather see dinosaurs being animals in their natural habitat than see dinosaurs terrorizing humans. I don't like it when dinosaurs are turned into kaiju because dinosaurs only make perfect sense when they are placed within their natural habitat.

The 2013 Walking With Dinosaurs movie was almost a masterpiece ... but then they added human voices to the dinosaurs. I guess Hollywood executives are trying to keep people stupid.

This may seem like nit-picking, but I just have to point this out. I hate it when people call Helicoprion a shark.

FACT: Helicoprion was a member of the Holocephali clade. The only extant representatives of this clade are the Chimaeras, but the group was once far more spectacular and diverse.

Apart from Helicoprion, there were many others. Check them out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belantsea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iniopteryx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edestus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmorium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcatus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stethacanthus

I hate it when plesiosaurs are described as "water dinosaurs".

In reality, these are water dinosaurs.
VVV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJtF4VvKBTA

Well done there, Kurgan. That's pretty comprehensive. I tend to think that vegetarians are the sort of people who would eat only meat, if everyone else was vegetarian. It's about 'look at me, look at me, I'm different (and also morally superior)'. There are too many people who have seen Disney type cartoons with talking animals and apparently believe them to be documentaries. If mankind had been vegetarian for much of our time on the planet, we would have been extinct tens of thousands of years ago. The planet is frequently horrifically cold and, during those long periods, the idea of a herbivorous human is nonsense. You hunted, or died. You did not hunt berries! We are an omnivore. Thinking meat eating is immoral or wrong is merely egocentric. Similarly, the idea that our ancestors somehow wrongly chose to eat meat is baseless. The idea that our ancestors had time to make middle-class moral choices is absurd. You got enough food into your belly or you died. Life was nasty, brutish and short.