The smarter man became the less fit (physically) they became. It was somewhat of a feedback loop in my opinion.
Well duh. The less you rely on physical strength and coordination, the less effort you waste on cultivating it. But I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that today's humans are born with inferior physical fitness than our ancestors. Within my own lifetime, the U.S. staffed its war adventures by enforcing involuntary servitude. They drafted some remarkably out-of-shape guys, and turned them into soldiers who could pass the remarkably rigorous tests of basic training. Even today, if you took the average office worker and put him through a serious workout program at a fitness center, after a few months he'd be as sturdy as his Stone Age ancestors. And according to Orly he could also be taught to hunt his own food, although perhaps that requires more coordination and needs to be taught at a younger age.
But I think the watershed moment will be when the vegetarian movement gains more momentum. I'm a carnivore, yet I love animals and I recognize my own cognitive dissonance in sitting here typing with one in my lap while I just ate a different one for dinner. I think it's clear that the day will come when humans no longer kill animals for food. Perhaps by then we'll have Star Trek replicators that can make tissue that was never part of a living creature, or perhaps we'll be eating textured tofu and taking solace in the fact that chocolate is a vegetable.
Either way, at that point if the average human were stranded in the wilderness, perhaps he would rather die than commit what he regards as an immoral act: killing another animal to eat it. Unlike Orly's family, I don't think I could bring myself to eat one of my dogs. They're my family and I couldn't live with that memory so there'd be no point in extending my survival. If I killed myself, their scavenger instinct would kick in and they'd eat my corpse, and perhaps it would help them survive until they learned how to hunt squirrels.
If you want to talk about an animal who's lost his survival skills, it's the wolf population that separated off to become dogs. They're still the same species but a distinctly different subspecies,
Canis lupus familiaris. And I'm not talking about a Maltese trying to find the nearest Starbucks; in a couple of generations they'd all hybridize back to the Ancestral Dog standard. But dogs have adapted to be scavengers around human habitation, not hunters or even carrion gleaners. Their brains are smaller than wolf brains so they don't require as much protein, and this decrease in IQ would work against their survivability. Their teeth have changed shape subtly so they're better for chewing up garbage than for ripping the flesh off a dead animal before the larger predators show up to pull rank. And their psychology has become more social; they form larger packs than wolves, which would probably not make for good hunting in today's wilderness.
