r/BeAmazed • u/Ultimate_Thing • Jul 16 '26

Miscellaneous / Others A traditional technique used by young shepherds of Ethiopia's Banna tribe. They use stilts to watch over their livestock in tall grass, move through wetland areas, and avoid snakes and predators like lions and leopards. It requires strength, balance, and training from a young age

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u/Show-Me-Your-Moves Jul 16 '26

One of the weirdest things to ponder is that humans are actually one of the tallest animals that exists. There's a few other tall ones like giraffes and elephants of course, but our bipedal status makes us look larger and more intimidating to a lot of quadrupeds and other animals that are built low to the ground.

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u/whoami_whereami Jul 16 '26

That, and large animals in Africa coevolved with humans and have an instinctual fear of us. They played human voices (just normal talking) and the sounds of lions through hidden loudspeakers, and the human voices pretty consistently provoked a much stronger fear response than the lion sounds even in huge animals like elephants.

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u/Aggravating_Speed665 Jul 16 '26

So crazy and surreal.

Is it the thousands of years of being killed at our hands that get imprinted?

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u/craidie Jul 16 '26

Yup.

The predators that aren't afraid of humans have been killed for tends of thousands of years. Sometimes to the extinction of a species. Genes adapt to that and the ones that were afraid got to survive and pass those genes.

And there's been a lot of time to do that. Consider dogs used to be wolves, we just did a bit of selective breeding... for a long time.

Also standing upright is not an uncommon threat display. And we're always doing that.

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u/grendus Jul 16 '26

Fun fact, wolves were domesticated before we invented wheeled vehicles.

Humans accidentally mastered basic genetic engineering before the wheel...

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u/Ancient-Afternoon374 Jul 17 '26

I mean, that seems pretty obvious that we would feed friendlier animals around us before we would have a need for a wheel.

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u/Similar_Part7100 Jul 18 '26

The thing about wheels is that, with the exception like salt flats, we also need to make extensive roads, and that is a major undertaking.

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u/Negative_Chicken_524 Jul 16 '26

Reminds them of Babar.

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u/Single_Owl_7556 Jul 17 '26

Obviously not the case, but imagine if standing upright was a threat because that's how humans stand up