this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025

993 points (99.0% liked)

Science Memes

15755 readers

4352 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

[email protected]

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

993

All downhill from there (media.piefed.social)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

112 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 69 points 6 days ago

I was playing tag with my kid yesterday. He's 3, almost 4. He's very fast for his age, but not as fast as me. He asked to play tag because he just learned it in school. I could dodge to the side as he was getting close and change direction. I could fake him out. I could sprint to the other side of our 1 acre meadow to creat space. But he just kept coming. Smiling and laughing the whole time. I'm starting to get winded. Hands on my knees for a second after a sprint, but only for a second as he's closed the gap already. His undeterred motivation and pace was scary. He was going to get me eventually, and he seemed to know it.

I now know how the victims of Chucky must have felt.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Persistence predation is the only way I can manage to take my cats to the vet.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Did you try just picking them up and having a towel or blanket underneath in case they want to dig their claws into something, and hand in their shoulders in case they try to escape? That's what Ive done for years and it is so much less stressful on everyone involved.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The problem is getting a hold of them in the first place. They just bolt from one hiding place to another, and I say "hiding place" but they're not as much "hidden" as "hard to reach when you are a human-sized human". The only reason I eventually manage to catch them is that ambush predators get tired quicker than persistence predators.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (12 children)

How do they know youre taking them to the vet?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

The hate being picked up in general, even if there is no threat of vet, so they'll struggle to get out of my arms and if they succeed - I've lost the element of surprise.

Also - I have two cats, and if I need to take both to vet then even if I manage to place one in a carrier he'll alert the other that something is wrong.

load more comments (11 replies)

[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 days ago

We are the snail

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Fun fact: the guy who first proposed this "running man" hypothesis about persistence hunting in the late 1960s (Grover Krantz) was better known as a staunch advocate for the existence of Bigfoot. Personally, I can't believe that anybody could still believe in Bigfoot - it's so obviously just a Yeti in a gorilla suit.

For some weird reason, Krantz's skeleton and that of his favorite dog are on display at the Smithsonian.

[–] jnod4 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

The father of modern day physics changed course and started studying alchemy, chronology, biblical interpretation, losing himself to mysticism. He'd probably research big foot if he was alive as well. That doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss his real magnum opus

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Contrary to modern-day physics, the "persistence hunting" thing is very much not a scientific consensus. It's more of a fringe idea supported by hardly any science that somehow made it into popular science.

There's about as much credible evidence to that theory as there is to the theory that eating chocolate helps with losing weight.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Wikipedia politely labels persistence hunting as "conjecture". It's interesting that pretty much everything important from our ancestral past (e.g. fire-making, flint-napping tools, spears, skins and furs etc.) can be and regularly is reproduced by modern people. But somehow you never see modern people jogging down deer and killing them - even with the benefits of modern footwear, portable water containers, a carbohydrate-rich diet for energy, and GPS trackers.

somehow made it into popular science

The "somehow" as far as I can tell is the David Attenborough documentary bit that supposedly shows a Khoi-San hunter doing it. Richard Lee and a team of Harvard anthropologists extensively studied the !Kung (a Khoi-San people) during the '60s and '70s and there was never a mention in any of the literature this produced about these people engaging in persistence hunting. What they did describe was the practice of hunting with poisoned spears and arrows and then tracking the wounded, poisoned animal for days until it dropped and could be butchered. Needless to say, this is not persistence hunting.

The popular anthropologist Marvin Harris also featured Krantz' work is his final book Our Kind (which is where I first heard of it), but I don't think enough people read that book for it to have been the source of the idea's current popularity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Thank you chicken lady. That makes much more sense.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 days ago (1 children)

isnt this a diprotodon, which is the largest marsupial in australia, in the vombatiforms.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

For some reason I read that as vomitiform (I bet I know how they fought)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (3 children)

It just means wombat-shaped, the w was changed to v in a half-arsed effort to Latinise it (despite -form coming from Greek anyway).