>This is again inconsistent with the picture of friendly little bears >all cooperating.
Just for the record, the *only* time bears "cooperate" is when, say, the salmon are running, there's too much for any one bear to eat, every bear has his own turf on the side of the river, and the power hierarchy is *completely* sorted out. The rest of the time they fight each other and kill, and sometimes eat, each other's offspring. Heck, even when they're on the side of the river and bored, they kill each other's offspring just for sport. We did the same thing with trade-route intersections, even when we were trading raw rocks for finished hand-axes millions of years ago. Sedentary food-gathering and year-long storage, and then agriculture, made those intersections into cities. Food is an attractive nuisance. Even with carnivores (eagles do the same kinds of things on a running salmon stream) population concentrations create property, and then culture, for lack of better words. Brains just make the same fight more complicated, is all... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
