Not Always at the Top of the Food Chain

This release from the AP has a humbling title - "Researcher: Early Man was Hunted by Birds." Close re-examination of the skull of the "Taung child" one of the earliest discovered (1924) australopithecine fossils, shows damage at the rear of the eye sockets consistent with patterns seen in eagle predation of monkeys. We should always remember that our ancestors spent millions of years as prey species. As Lee Berger, the anthropologist who did this work, points out: ".... man's ancestors had to survive not just being hunted from the ground, but from the air. Such discoveries are ''key to understanding why we humans today view the world they way we do.''

So we weren't always at the top of the food chain. Actually, we probably had to go quite a ways down the evolutionary road before we emerged as effective predators.

A number of years ago, archaeologist Lewis Binford (one of the most respected in the world) published studies in Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths reanalyzing many australopithecine and Homo erectus sites. Binford had done exhaustive studies comparing bones from kills by humans to those by animals. Restudying sites with objective criteria to differentiate the two showed that most bone from early hominid "kill sites" really resulted from animal predation.

Our ancestors seem to have spent a very long time as opportunistic scavengers. At Olduvai Gorge, Binford found that most of the parts scavenged were leg bones with the meat removed or lower leg bones that had little meat to start with. The only edible part left was the bone marrow that tool-using hominids obtained using hammerstones to crack open the bones. He also demonstrated that a significant percentage of early hominid fossils we have recovered show signs of being killed and partially consumed by animals.

But then, anyone who has hiked unarmed through grizzly country knows what it's like not to be at the top of the food chain.