The Plains Hominid

The Hominids had diversified into a new environment, the plains, from their traditional arboreal home. The new environment provided them both with newer sources of food like the grass seeds and bone marrow and newer challenges in the form of dangerous predators like tigers. They had taken to a new mode of locomotion and started using rudimentary tools like stones to extract bone marrow. The use of stones as tools to break the scavenged bones scattered in the plains would also have given access to the hominids to a new source of nutritious food with very little competition. They had by then begun partnering with dogs to warn them about predators and help them hunt small game. These partnerships would not resemble those of the modern hunter gatherers. Instead more likely the wolf’s kills would have been scavenged as these animals were more likely to allow this. The discovery of fire would have enabled the hominids to adapt to the new food available in the plains like small game. Worldwide migrations far and away from their original forest homes in the Tropics occurred mainly as a means to avoid internal conflicts. As the place became crowded the groups splintered and some of them moved away in search of new territory. It is conceivable that internal violence was so severe that individuals crossed seas to inhabit many islands to escape with their lives. Later as all available niches began to be filled the species began settling down by completing the adaptations such as the new diet and an upright stance. With no further new niches to move into hominids would have faced a steady increase in both speciation and population. This is due to individuals adapting to all favorable niches available and settling down into stable habitats. As crowding increased the latent internal conflicts would have resumed. As populations rose, food would have become scarce. The dominance hierarchy would have favored the stronger males who tried to corner the scarce food resources as well as the fertile females. This would have resulted in the strong males getting stronger and capable of holding out against more and more weaker ones. A stage would have been reached when the alpha male totally denied the weaker males access to females or even food. It can be envisaged that alpha males carved up the land into their own territories and drove the weaker males to desperation. Also even after banding together the weaker males would not have been able to win the fight against any alpha male due to the differences in their nutrition and consequently physical strength. The alpha males would also have virtually imprisoned females and prevented any other male from mating with any of their females. The starvation endured by the weaker males would have driven them to desperate tactics to survive.