After the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit, giant birds became apex predators for tens of millions of years – and humans were among their prey.
  • Strange World Files@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    22 hours ago

    The best evidence for this is one of the most famous fossils there is: the Taung Child, the small skull from South Africa that Raymond Dart described in 1925 as an early human ancestor.

    For decades people assumed it had been killed by a leopard or some other ground predator. In the 1990s Lee Berger and Ron Clarke argued that the animal bones found with it looked like an eagle’s nest debris, and in 2006 Berger pointed out puncture marks and damage in the bottom of the eye sockets, the same kind of marks modern crowned eagles leave on the monkeys they kill. So the fossil that started the whole ‘out of Africa’ story may have been an eagle’s leftovers.

  • Strange World Files@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    There’s a famous piece of evidence for this in our own family tree. The Taung Child, the 2.8-million-year-old skull found in South Africa in 1924, has damage inside the eye sockets that researchers in 2006 compared to the marks crowned eagles leave on monkey skulls today. One of the first fossils of an early human ancestor may be an eagle’s leftovers.

    • MeatPilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      2 days ago

      That’s why they walked most of the way. Gandalf knew those hobbits would be too tasty to resist.

  • Gekkonen@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    64·
    2 days ago

    This is news to me. I was under the impression that humans don’t ever know to look up in most situations precisely because we never had any predators that hunt us from above. Therefore there wouldn’t have been evolutionary pressure to be wary of things above us.