Birds May Have Hunted Human Ancestors

Posted on January 12, 2006

The Associated Press reports that Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger belives an eagle may have killed the Taung child -- the 3.5-year-old bones of human ancestor from 2 million years ago.

The discovery suggests that small human ancestors known as hominids had to survive being hunted not only by large predators on the ground but by fearsome raptors that swooped from the sky, said Lee Berger, a senior paleoanthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

Berger took a closer look at the Taung skull after reviewing a study about how large eagles damage the bones of their prey.

But they also identified features previously never described: puncture marks and ragged incisions in the base of the eye sockets, made when eagles rip out the eyes of dead monkeys with their talons and beaks to get at the brains. Large predators can't reach inside the tiny sockets and instead crack open the skulls, Berger said.
The study prompted Berger to re-examine the Taung skull.
"I picked up this little face, and I almost dropped it," he said Thursday. There was a tiny hole and jagged tears at the base of the eye sockets that he and over two dozen other researchers had never noticed.

It is a gruesome theory but it does sound plausible. If true, it would also made early man's need for finding shelter, such as a cave, that much more important.

BIRDS