Howls in the Prehistoric Night
Ten million years ago perhaps the earliest time at which our hominid line might have been diverging from a common ancestor with chimpanzees, big mammalian predators were the order of the day. Big saber-toothed cats were on the rise (as we talked about in the last chapter), and giant hyenas and dogs roamed singly and in packs. While the hyenas and dogs were not as agile as the previously cited fossil cats (much the way domestic dogs are not able to contort themselves into the yogalike positions...
Info
Lucy the fossil skeleton of a young female hominid who lived 3.2 million years ago. (Used by permission of Institute of Human Origins) found by Richard Leakey (son of Louis and Mary), who is not only a world-renowned paleoanthropologist but a giant in the field of wildlife conservation and the Kenyan political scene. The younger Leakey commenced a dig at Lake Turkana, Kenya, and disinterred the famous Black Skull. This mineral-stained cranium is the most extreme example of the robust branches...
Who Was Eating Our Hominid Ancestors
Many scientists will turn ghastly shades of red when arguing against cre-ationism and for evolution, yet they want to hang onto some special classification for modern humans, early hominids, the great apes, and even primates in general as too smart to be prey animals. Surely, they insist, at least humans (that is, Man the Hunter) had to be in control of their environment they couldn't have been at the mercy of dumb animals that ate them right, left, and center. If we believe in natural...
Weapons of Mass Destruction
These, then, were the defenses used for most of our evolution increase in size, socialization, vocalizations, bipedalism, increasing complexity of the brain, confusing and active defensive behaviors. Active defenses by primates may be in a general mammalian category that is, employing teeth or nails and claws like the angwantibo (a slow and steady prosimian) biting a predator on the nose or they may be uniquely primate, such as using sticks or branches as weapons. The truly singular retort at...
Painting the Family Portrait
By far the best known of early australopithecine species is Australopithecus afarensis, with many fossil remains dating from between 3.6 and 2.9 million years ago and possibly as far back as 5 million or more years ago. Collections from Hadar, Ethiopia, alone have yielded 250 specimens, representing at least 35 individuals, and there are a number of other East African digs that contain remains of this species. Specimens include the famous Lucy (dated at 3.2 million years old), which is the most...
Coursing Hyenas and Hungry Dogs
It's surprising how many times university professors hear a comment from an undergraduate student and it begins a whole new train of thought. Since both of us are in the classroom, we often mention our predation research to students as it relates to course subject matter. One of us (DH) brought up predation as an analogy to another anthropology topic and received a remarkable insight through the comments of a young lady who had visited relatives in Croatia over the summer of 2002. Her relations...
Heavyweight Champions
Wow all those predators waiting to eat early hominids. Considering the fact that many of the smaller primates have more predators than do large monkeys or apes, it was fortunate that our ancestors were too large to be eaten by the mongooses, civets, genets, tayras, coatis, raccoons, opossums, and little birds of prey that eat our smaller cousins. Was increased size a primate adaptation to minimize predation It appears that the first primates were arboreal and small and that increased size was a...
The Long and Winding Road from South Africa to Georgia
As we discussed earlier, Man the Hunter as a paradigm for human evolution emerged from the caves of South Africa. Raymond Dart's analysis of over 7,000 fossils led him to the erroneous conclusion that australo-pithecines killed their huge prey with the bones of former victims, and due to the high numbers of bashed-in hominid skulls they also killed each other in callous and brutal fashion. Rigorous scientific examination of fossil evidence has jettisoned Dart's killer ape-man theory. While the...
The Other
Demonic males Man the Hunter What about the other 50 of the species Female hominids were they killer apes, too Obtaining meat may have been significant in later human evolutionary history, but there is considerable debate concerning the importance of hunting versus scavenging or scavenging versus gathering, during even these later stages of human evolution. Many feminist anthropologists emphasize a Woman the Gatherer scenario of human evolution over the Man the Hunter scenario.53 Empirical...
On the Path to Einstein
Intellectual development, to the extent that our modern brain is quite large relative to our body, was a continuing process for the entirety of hominid evolution. Chimps have a cranial capacity of 400 500 cc ours is about 1,300 1,400 cc. (But we can't puff out our chests too much because Neanderthals had even larger brains.) All of this brain acquisition may have occurred to outsmart predators. Primates are intelligent and resourceful animals and, as such, they have evolved both preemptive and...
The James Carville Approach
Remember how James Carville, the Democratic strategist, kept the Clinton campaign focused before the elections of 1992 and 1996 It's the economy, stupid was the mantra that spelled success. Well, apologizing for any unintended insult, we want to co-opt the James Carville tactic and reiterate It's the predators, stupid It is a paradigm in the published research of animal behaviorists (called ethologists) that predator prey relationships can best be studied from the perspective of the predator....
Lions and Tigers and Bears Oh My
Frica is a continent in which many humans still live with the realiza tion that predation may be a part of daily life. Probably the most famous modern man-eaters in Africa were the legendary Tsavo lions held responsible for the deaths of over a hundred railroad workers during a nine-month period in 1896.1 These may also be the only individual wild animals to be featured in a statement to the British Parliament. The prime minister of Great Britain in 1896, the Marquis of Salisbury, was called to...
Choose Your Weapon
Scimitars, sabers, daggers, dirks which will it be Long, curved, sharp teeth, the fossil cats had all those weapons handily attached to their top jaws. An incredible array of cats and pre-cats roamed the earth from 10 million years until relatively recently. One wonders how any primate much less our smallish bipedal hominid survived the predation of so many large-bodied, large-toothed felines. The figure on p. 65 diagrams A reconstruction of the skull of Megantereon, a fossil saber-toothed cat...
Chimpanzee Aggression
Just how common is it for chimpanzees to kill other chimpanzees This is where the real controversy may lie. During the first 14 years of study at Gombe National Park in Tanzania (1960-1974), chimpanzees were described as a peaceful, unaggressive species. In fact, during a year of concentrated study, Jane Goodall observed 284 agonistic (aggressive) encounters. Of these, 66 were due to competition for introduced (that is, human-provided) bananas, and only 34 could be classified as attacks...
Leaders of the Pack
During our study of predation on non-human primates, we considered the wild dogs and hyenas together due to similarities in their ecological niches and social behavior (although, taxonomically speaking, hyenas are more closely related to the cat family than to dogs). Both dogs and hyenas have completely terrestrial lifestyles, and most of them employ cooperative (pack) hunting strategies, allowing for the killing of very large prey. The efficiency of cooperative hunting by spotted hyenas and...
An Alfred Hitchcock Moment
The office of a colleague, paleontologist Tab Rasmussen at Washington University in St. Louis, houses an awesome, frightening treasure. It's the talon of an extinct raptor that once lived in Madagascar. The raptor has no common name. Like many fossil species, it is known only by its scientific name, Stephanoaetus mahery. Recently, we had the opportunity to examine this talon. It came from a large eagle that became extinct 1,500 2,000 years ago. The talon was from the front of the raptor foot....
Debunking Man the Hunter
Y are we the way we are What makes us think and act the way re do Birds fly and snakes slither because they must. What are we impelled to do Well, humans walk upright, they verbalize language, and they manipulate their environment to suit their needs. But did we start out with those legacies or did they come slowly over time Yes, most birds fly, but the ancestors of birds were probably terrestrial dinosaurs. Snakes slither, but the skeletal remnants of hind legs are found in primitive snakes....
We Werent Just Waiting Around to Be Eaten
Just how easy was it for predators to serve up hominid du jour The fossil history tells us little, if anything, about behavior and virtually nothing specific about defensive behavior against predators. We may find the fossilized remains of the losers in a predator prey encounter, but we do not have enough fossils to draw any conclusions about the predation rate on hominids or their successful strategies to outwit predators. Obviously if we had been passive victims we would not have survived as...
The Record of Giant Raptors
The talon from S. mahery was found in Madagascar. So far, no fossils of great antiquity have been found on that island, so it is more accurate to designate this eagle as a subfossil since it is only a few thousand years old. In that period 1,500 2,000 years ago there was a varied, now-extinct mega-fauna (including pygmy hippos, giant elephant birds, and large lemurs) on the island of Madagascar. The arrival of humans at this point began a wave of extinctions at least 17 species of lemurs...
Featherweights and Talon Tips
We knew from our data collection and quantitative analysis of predation on non-human primates that eagles and hawks are the major and most competent predators on primates worldwide.3 Our research found that 46 of published eyewitness accounts of primate predation relate to raptor kills. And a good portion of these primate kills were the work of crowned hawk-eagles. In what seems, from our study at least, to be a fairly typical attack by a crowned hawk-eagle, the bird initially launched itself...
Man the Hunted
Throughout this book we have posed a question Were our early ancestors hunters or the hunted How do we finally and definitively answer such a question There have been copious attempts to reconstruct the behavior and ecology of our earliest ancestors, but the most common theory, and the one that is widely accepted today, is the Man the Hunter hypothesis. Cultural anthropologist Laura Klein expresses the current situation adeptly While anthropologists argue in scientific meetings and journals,...
Predation Risk versus Predation Rate
We like a pithy statement from tropical ecologist John Terborgh who summed up predation rather concisely Successful predation is a rare event at most it can occur only once in the lifetime of a prey.37 Whatever the overall impact of successful predation may be to the species or population, it does not modify the behavioral strategies of an individual primate living at constant risk from successful predation.38 Behavior is predicated on predation risk not predation rate because animals react to...
Wolves at the Door
European wolves prey on humans, especially in the summer when females are on the lookout for extra food to feed their cubs.2 We realize this is a bold statement that deserves to be supported with facts. A patient reading of the next few pages will provide the rationale for our contention that humans, especially small humans, might have been one of the most available and appropriate prey for wolves in the past. But to get there from here we need to tell a fascinating story. Hans Kruuk, the...
Perfect Primate Predators
None of the discussion above obviates the fact that primates are a frequent prey item for many species of wild cats. The frequency in which primates occur in leopard diets ranges as high as 80 . 36 And, as we've said before, if we want to project what might have happened to our early ancestors, we can look at modern non-human primates that end up as prey for the big cats. Normally opportunistic hunters, the availability of prey or total prey numbers are the important criteria for food selection...
The Taung Child Tells Its Tale
It's time to leave theoretical discussions and talk about the specifics of raptor predation on ancestral hominids. The first evidence that eagles preyed on the human line appears, coincidentally, as part of the same fossil evidence that humans evolved in Africa. The very same child's fossilized skull and brain that Raymond Dart carefully removed from its mineralized crust in 1924 holds the clues to raptor predation on hominids. After much scientific debate and investigation during the past...
No Laughing Matter
Hyenas are scorned by indigenous cultures wherever they occur, often representing despicable characters in myth and folklore. Yet, they aren't weak, silly, or base creatures and, just like wolves, hyenas have the strength and predatory instinct to attack people. After the work of field researchers in the 1970s and 1980s notably Hans Kruuk, who wrote a seminal monograph entitled The Spotted Hyena, and Hugo van Lawick and Jane Goodall's Innocent Killers , the old myths of cowardly, skulking...
Whos Eating Whom
One thing's for certain there's nothing in a Stephen King novel that will beat the gruesomeness out there in the archives of the print media. It was quickly apparent as we gathered material for this book that entire volumes could be filled with gory exploits of man-eaters garnered from newspapers and magazines around the world. These bloody events are commonly given high profile in newspapers, and they often make the front page in a city that is thousands of miles from the predation itself. For...
African Crowned Eagle
There aren't many birds of prey, either in far distant times or right now, that reach a size large enough to attack and kill a hominid. There aren't many, but there are a few. Several years ago we interviewed a U.S.-government researcher about his stint in the forests of Uganda. One of his objectives was a study of a very unique raptor, the crowned hawk-eagle. This research brought him in contact with local people who told stories of harrowing encounters with the great forest eagle. There was...
My What Big Teeth You Have
Snakes and lizards are not the only reptilian predators the human lineage has faced. The large saltwater and freshwater crocodiles have garnered a well-deserved reputation for dining on primates of many species in general, and hominids in particular. To say that a headline in the 24 March 1993 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch caught our attention does not fully convey the impact of seeing Woman Loses Arm to African Crocodile in 1-inch-high type. We were already deep into our research on...
Making a Last Stand Counterattack and Chutzpah
If all else fails, chutzpah is the primate last-ditch effort. Under certain circumstances early hominids could ably defend themselves and probably used unaltered rocks and sticks as weapons. When conditions were in favor of early humans, they were as likely to succeed as are modern baboons and chimpanzees in facing down a predator. Tim White, who has been discovering fossil hominids for 30 years, mused one day while he was examining the fossil Lucy and her relatives, Although I'm bigger than a...
Just Another Item on the Menu
On the second day of January 2001 something occurred that has happened uncountable times before . . . something that has been happening, in fact, for millions of years . . . something that has influenced the way we humans act and the way we evolved. A woman was cross-country skiing along a popular lake trail near her home in Alberta, Canada. Rangers say a 132-pound cougar lay hidden under an evergreen. It watched her pass, then stealthily zigzagged behind her for nearly 150 feet. The woman was...
The Serpentine Route
To say that primates in general including humans are fearful of snakes is a generalization that just might be provable through statistical analysis. Avoidance of snakes is a well-documented behavior in nonhuman primates, although, in seemingly perverse behavior, primates sometimes approach snakes out of sheer curiosity.4 Innate avoidance of snakes by primates would presuppose some evolutionary relationship with snakes, either as predators or as dangerous co-inhabitants of tropical and temperate...
Gentle Savage or Bloodthirsty Brute
Et's take stock of what we can say about early humans They were tasty items for cats, dogs, bears, hyenas, raptors, and reptiles. They were bipedal. They communicated by vocalizations. They lived in groups. Their brains got larger over millions of years although this was not a steady process there were long periods of stasis through much of the early Pleistocene epoch . But how did they act Would we recognize features of ourselves if we got to know them What was your average smallish bipedal...
Breathing Fire The Komodo Dragon
We have to state at the beginning that neither one of us has ever had the pleasure of personally meeting a wild Komodo dragon, the largest of the monitor lizard family and feared denizen of several small Indonesian islands. But, being hominids, we succumb to the fear they may have generated within the primate brain for millions of years. For worst nightmares there is really nothing comparable to the thought of a gray, slobbery, 9-inch-long forked tongue picking up your scent and tracking you to...
Chimpanzee and Human Males as Demonic Killers
One of the new claims to the importance of killing and the biological basis of morality is that of Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in their book, Demonic Males Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Their argument rests on the fact that 20 25 years ago we thought human aggression was unique because research on the great apes had revealed that those species were basically unaggressive, gentle creatures. Although early theorists proposed that hunting, killing, and extreme aggressive behavior...
