Imagine if, instead of spending your childhood, teenage years and early adulthood in schools, you just spent it learning to hunt, then continued to learn and practice hunting for the rest of your life. Imagine if everyone in your family, and everyone else you knew had also spent their entire lives learning to hunt and hunting. Imagine if every genius born into every generation devoted their entire intelligence to the problem of hunting, from their first moment to their last. Imagine if this had been going on for generation after generation, with knowledge and expertise refine and passed down through mentorship and oral tradition.<p>Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. As such, it's perhaps no surprise that early humans were spectacularly successful at hunting so many of even the largest and most fearsome animals to extinction.