Cat Food as well as food for worms

I often joke with my students that civilization and architecture and literature are not responses only to some vital creative impulse and human genius and whatnot, but simple self-defense and its side-effects. We, I say to them, were prey, cat food. We're not fast, nor strong, nor particularly well enweaponed in our natural form. Put any one of us, alone on the savannah or in the jungle, without so much as a spear, and it won't take long for a lion, cheetah, jaguar, lepoard, or tiger to make mincemeat outta that 'mouse'. At last, a study to back up my thesis..... Now, my mother's counter-thesis is that we are smelly critters (try not bathing for four days) also as a kind of self-defense. We smell a bit dead after a few days, and that might have been a biological response to being food too. 'Course, I had to point out that nearly all predatory cats big enough to eat us also eat carrion when its available and they're a bit desperate.... and then there's hyenas. Fangs....Notre Dame.