People Taste Bad

How did man evolve from being a strong, primarily tree dwelling ape-like animal into being a hairless, weak, slow, defenseless ground dwelling humanoid without being rendered extinct by predatory animals like lions, hyenas, leopards etc. that lived
in the same place?    I mean, look at us.  We have no built in weapons like claws or horns or strong teeth like other game animals and predators have, and early on in the evolution of our species we didn’t have very effective weapons
like guns, or bow and arrow, strong steel tipped spears, or even fire as a deterrent to the predatory animals looking for a meal.   We can’t run as fast as a big cat or hyena, we can’t climb trees as well as a leopard, we can’t
swim as well as a crocodile.   Why was the species not wiped out for food by the predators?   Early in human evolution we would have been easy prey for the predators, relative to antelopes and other hooved species in Africa.  My theory
is that we were not preferred food because people taste bad.  That is how we evolved, and it kept our ancestors alive.  It is a Darwinian thing. 

I don’t have any direct evidence of this, only ancillary data to present to defend
this theory.  Let’s start with shark attacks.  Between 1580 and 2013 there were 2667 documented unprovoked shark attacks on humans worldwide.  Of these, 495 were fatal.   Wikipedia data.  In the US on the average there are
16 attacks per year and one fatality every two years.  Most of the attacks are exploratory bites.  The sharks don’t eat the people.  There is the famous attack in which a shark took off the arm of Bethany Hamilton in 2003.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethany_Hamilton.
 She wrote a book about it and it was made into a movie.  Why didn’t the shark eat her?   My theory is that sharks don’t like the way people taste.

Cougar/mountain lion attacks on people are fairly common.  There
was a very recent attack of a 6 year old boy in Cupertino, CA in which the cougar grabbed the boy and was pulling him off the path but was scared off by the boy’s family.   The boy suffered non-life threatening injuries to his neck and back. 
If the cat had really wanted the boy for food it could have easily carried him off for lunch.    

Here is a list of all of the verified attacks on people in California by cougars since 1986:

 

Date	Type	Attack Location	County	Victim Sex	Victim Age
March 1986	Nonfatal	Caspers Wilderness Park	Orange	Female	5 yrs.
Oct. 1986	Nonfatal	Caspers Wilderness Park	Orange	Male	6 yrs.
March 1992	Nonfatal	Gaviota State Park	Santa Barbara	Male	9 yrs.
Sept. 1993	Nonfatal	Cuyamaca State Park	San Diego	Female	10 yrs.
Apr. 1994	Fatal	Auburn State Recreation Area	El Dorado	Female	40 yrs.
Aug. 1994	Nonfatal	Mendocino County (remote)	Mendocino	Male	50s
	Nonfatal			Female	50s
Dec. 1994	Fatal	Cuyamaca State Park	San Diego	Female	56 yrs.
Mar. 1995	Nonfatal	Mt. Lowe (San Gabriel Mtns.)	Los Angeles	Male	27 yrs.
Jan. 2004	Fatal	Whiting Ranch Regional Park	Orange	Male	35 yrs.
Jan. 2004	Nonfatal	Whiting Ranch Regional Park	Orange	Female	30 yrs.
June 2004	Nonfatal	Sequoia National Forest	Tulare	Female	28 yrs.
Jan. 2007	Nonfatal	Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park	Humboldt	Male	70 yrs.
Jul. 2012	Nonfatal	Confluence of Shady Creek and Yuba River	Nevada	Male	63 yrs.
Sept. 2014	Nonfatal	Cupertino	Santa Clara	Male	6 yrs.

 

The total is 15 attacks and 3 fatalities.  Cougars are good hunters.  They regularly kill and eat deer which have to be much harder to catch and kill than are people.  I remember one case in which the mountain lion
did eat the victim, a woman who was riding a bicycle when she was attacked.  I believe this is the Dec. 1994 attack listed above.  The cougar was found and killed, and it turned out that it was a female with two cubs, all very skinny and obviously
very hungry.  So maybe she was so desperate that she resorted to eating food that tasted bad. 

It is true that cougars now should fear man, we have very effective weapons to defend ourselves, and in fact the cat that attacked the boy was hunted
down and killed, but big cats’ fear of man was not necessary 100,000 years ago.  A pride of lions could have easily bested a man or a group of men with simple stone tipped spears.

Tiger attacks are fairly common in India and surrounding countries. 
Tigers are recorded to have killed more people than any other big cat, and tigers have been responsible for more human deaths through direct attack than any other wild mammal.  About 1,000 people were reportedly killed each year in India during the early
1900s, with one individual tiger killing 430 persons in India.   However, it is worth noting that the vast majority of the tiger attacks are by tigers that are
in ill health, old, have lost or broken teeth and therefore are forced to resort to killing easy prey: people.  In some cases tigers change their natural diet and become man-eaters. This is usually caused by a tiger being incapacitated by a gunshot wound
or porcupine quills, or some other factors, such as health issues and disabilities. As tigers in Asia often live in a close proximity to a large number of humans, the tiger has killed more people than any other cat.  It is impossible to ask a tiger if
they like the way people taste, but my theory is that if they did, healthy tigers would attack and eat people much more frequently than they do.

Human cannibalism, people eating people, has been documented many times in history.  However, the vast
majority of this is the result of either starvation in an isolated group of people like the Donner party.   Alive tells the story of a Uruguayan Rugby team and their friends and family who were involved in an airplane crash into the Andes
Mountains on October 13, 1972. Of the 45 people on the flight, only 16 survived in sub-zero temperatures. After a few days, the rescue team who were supposed to be finding the survivors gave up. Consequently, the survivors had to keep alive by themselves.
This meant that most of the survivors decided the only way to keep alive was by eating the dead, which was what many decided to do.  There are also many examples of sailors stranded in a small boat at sea who resort to cannibalism to survive. 

And we have all heard of acts done by people with severe personality disorders such as Jeffrey Dahmer.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer.

 Ritualistic cannibalism has
existed in many cultures.  This is the act of eating parts of your enemy after vanquishing him in order to gain his power.  In Fiji the natives used to wound their captives by breaking their backs so that they would stay alive and fresh and not be
able to escape until they held the ceremony that included eating parts of the captives.

In other words, people do not sanely or willingly eat people for food.   Is this because people taste bad?  I can’t find any evidence to the
contrary.

After writing the above about animals not liking the way people taste, I see this on the internet:

(Reuters) – A man who suffered a heart attack and died outside his rural Northern California home had his corpse dragged away and eaten
by a black bear that was sheltering nearby, medical officials said on Friday.

The 65-year-old man, identified as Marion Williams, had walked from his trailer in Humboldt County to a water source about 100 yards (meters) away on Oct. 8 when he suffered
cardiac arrest, said Humboldt County Deputy Coroner Roy Horton.

A bear that was bedding just feet (meters) from the water source apparently saw or smelled the body and dragged Williams away, he said.

“The
bear saw the opportunity for a food source and took advantage of it,” Horton said, adding that the bear stripped Williams out of his clothes and necklace, feeding on him for several days.

“The bear did eat most of this guy,” he said. “He was about 85
percent consumed.”

Friends became concerned about Williams on Oct. 11 and called the sheriff’s department. They also visited his property and could smell the decaying body, Horton said.

Horton stressed that the bear was acting naturally after
finding the man’s lifeless body, and said black bears are normally timid and non-aggressive.

Wildlife officials in California report there has been no known fatal maulings by black bears.

Does this one story totally refute my theory?  Not
necessarily.   Officials in this case decided to not hunt and kill the bear.  So we do not know if this bear was wounded, old or infirmed and was unable to effectively catch more usual food.  This time of the year bears are preparing to
go onto winter hibernation, so eating anything would be necessary to survive the winter.