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Ancestors of Homo Sapiens Hunted by Birds
CFTM writes "The associate press writer, Alexandra Zavis, reports that 'A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.' The article raises some really fascinating questions, particularly when one begins to think about the evolutionary impact that this may have had on humans." From the article: "The Ohio State study determined that eagles would swoop down, pierce monkey skulls with their thumb-like back talons, then hover while their prey died before returning to tear at the skull. Examination of thousands of monkey remains produced a pattern of damage done by birds, including holes and ragged cuts in the shallow bones behind the eye sockets. Berger went back to the Taung skull, and found traces of the ragged cuts behind the eye sockets. He said none of the researchers who had for decades been debating how the child died had noticed the eye socket damage before."
Bah. A behavior as simple as protecting your tribe's corpses from opportunistic predators quickly ensures you generally don't get attacked by eagles. Once a raptor sees it doesn't get a free meal from attacking proto-humans, it quickly gives up.
Heck, burying your dead becomes a great advantage: predators gain nothing from killing your species, and soon seek prey that actually gives them food! Maybe human death rituals (e.g. burial, burning, leaving to vultures) got started because they ensured predators didn't profit from the death of the victim.
So the whole eating chicken thing is some unconcious racial memory payback thing?
Couldn't the birds have attacked AFTER death?
How about a raptor weighing 200lb+, standing 6.5ft tall with a wingspan of 7-8 meters (~25ft)?
n s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis_magnifice
Not too much you could do to stop one of those swooping down and sucking on your brain!
How big a bird? Would an eagle with a 3 meter wingspan (that's just shy of 10' for you Americans) that hunted moa (flightless birds that weighed as much as 250kg (more than 500 pounds)) count? Because Haast's eagle was exactly that, and only became extinct around 500 years ago. One of those would have had no trouble taking down a man.
New Zealand has very unique fauna, and unlike nearby Australia (which seems to have the finest array of deadly creatures in the world) it's almost all harmless. Haast's eagle was one glaring exception, and would certainly have been a truly fearsome creature had it survived.
Jedidiah.
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The Haast egale, now extinct was the worlds largest eagle and is believed to have hunted people as recently as 800 years ago... Cant be bothered looking for a link, do your own research.
A good indicator, of how fast the best genes spread, is the story of Gengis Khan. According to a recent investigation in 2003, Djengis Khan's Y-chromosome is now carried by 16 million males in asia. Since these chromosomes are only given by fathers to sons, this 16 million multiplication of his genes in 800 years is quite remarkable. If he had superior genes then, he wouldn't have it as much today.
People forget humans were much smaller in the good old days. Men weren't 150lbs. Male proto-humans might weight 70lbs and females much less. So the birds are really going after prey in the same weight class.
I happen to agree with this theory of evolutionary predation fears. I think this could be used to explain all these 'hairy men' creatures that appear all over the world.
Up until about 200,000 years ago there were about 5 or 6 different apes running around alongside our direct ancestors. These guys were smart, and they could use spears. My guess is they had a lot of body hair.
My personal pet theory is that about 100,000, human beings began systematically exterminating all other groups of hominids besides their own. The only hominids crafty enough to escape the slaughter were other homo sapiens.
You can see this continue today. Any group of human beings that give themselves some kind of group identity hate those other guys -- that group next door -- and will try to kill all of them, given the opportunity. They also think of other groups of people as savage animals.
So anways, rewind 100,000 years ago. A hairless human hunter venturing out into the woods to track down lunch stood a good chance of being killed by some hairy spear-wielding apeman.
Fast forward to today. People are still catching glimpses of hairy apemen in the woods (Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, whatever). Not that those hairy apemen are still alive, but that it's better to be paranoid and *suspect* that a creaking branch or other ambiguous sensory data is a hairy apeman, rather than foolishly walking into a hairy ape-mans' spear. To this day, human groups view their neighbor groups as savage animals who they are probably better off getting rid of.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I don't know about some of this. I'm not sure that pre-humans were other animals dinner that often. It is important to recognize though that this pre-human of 2M years ago is basically an ape. Chimpanzees and Gorillas are probably better to compare this pre-human with than Neanderthals. Big cats probably posed some threat to the pre-humans, but Chimps and Gorillas don't face much by way of natural predators. These and other large apes are strong, social, and well organized. They can gang up on predators and coordinate defense effectively.
Open fields? What do open fields have to do with this? Ok. Here is the scene. Late 1970's. Don't remember what year, but the U.S. National Falconers Convention was held outside St. Louis, Mo. My father and several of his friends were licensed falconers and had red tailed hawks and goss hawks mostly. The birds were fun to catch, and local. I have seen Red Tails and Goss take mice and rabits in open territory, but I have also seen them take squirrles off of trees. I have seen footage of harpy eagles taking monkeys out of trees. No plains needed.
well, you don't have to be stupid to be attacked by a bird. a math-teacher of mine was once attacked by a hawk while he was training for the marathon. he spent 2 weeks in hospital after that.
The Pouakai, or Haast eagle of New Zealand was hunted to extinction by the Maori. But before it lost this battle, it also hunted humans.
http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/haasteagle.html
The cassowary (australia and NZ) kills a few people each year by kicking them (it can weigh as much as 125 pounds and has very strong legs disemboweling or doing massive internal damage) as do Ostrich and Emu, and um Secretary birds are pretty large and carnivorous, but not big enough to attack humans.
There was a man killed by Magpies in Australia Sept 2003 A ROGUE magpie has been captured and destroyed after fatally injuring one man and seriously injuring a tourist. A Mildura man, 74, received severe eye injuries when a local magpie swooped from trees in the Victorian town. The man, who collapsed after the attack, died on Tuesday night at Melbourne's Royal Eye and Ear Hospital. A South Korean tourist attacked by the same magpie was taken to hospital. Department of Sustainability and Environment officers destroyed the magpie. A coroner will investigate the man's death, the cause of which is still unknown. Some Magpies swoop during the spring nesting season. http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,7and here:
A grandmother died after a jackdaw nested in the chimney of her home, blocking the escape of poisonous carbon monoxide fumes from her fire, an inquest has heard.
But modern birds hunting modern humans for food? (Don't leave your baby out where the eagles can get to him)
WRT hunting birds:
When humans developed either spear throwers or archers then the birds would have begun learning to keep their distance. This wouldn't have needed to wait for stone tools, either, if, e.g., spear throwers came first.
OTOH, larger primates like even proto-humans don't need to fear active predation from flying birds (as opposed to something like ax-beaks) even when they are unarmed. It's too dangerous for the bird. Primates are likely to grab ahold and not let go. The bird may kill them by blindness and infection, but those are relatively slow compared to a broken neck...and even bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) should be able to manage that, much less something even larger. (OTOH, one could check to see whether gibbons had problems of this nature.)
So this predation probably usually only affected young children before hunting became common. (Even a sling can do a bird a great deal of injury from a considerable distance.) N.B.: I'm presuming that distance weapons of at least a light nature were developed rather early. This may be wrong. I'm not sure what evidence we should expect to find, since I don't envision them as containing anything permanent in their composition. Including not stone heads. Think hard woods ground to a point, and possibly fire hardened. (The last is optional...if fire is available, then it can increase the effectiveness, but it isn't necessary.) Truthfully, my expectation is that spear throwers were the first such extension, but neither they nor the spears they threw would contain anything beyond wood and leather. Modern spear throwers extend the reach of a light spear by much more than double...so say their effective reach was, what, 25 feet up? More? Less? Say it was only 15 feet, that would still make a group of humans quite dangerous for a bird to approach.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Here is somewhat of a brainstorm to your answers:
You may not be afraid of bigfoot because you didn't have an experience of 'encountering' a bigfoot in the woods. My theory currently states that you have some ambiguous sensory experience in the woods, and the paranoid hunter/gatherer part of your mind incorrectly interprets it as an ape-man. If you haven't had the experience and misinterpretation, you wouldn't be afraid. The same way you may not be afraid of the ghetto if you've never been mugged in the ghetto -- which happened to me recently. I live in Columbus, OH, which is a relatively safe place, and does have its share of ghettos. I never had any fear walking around in them, but a couple of weeks ago I was mugged in the ghetto. Nothing bad happened -- I just got hit and they took my wallet. However, now I am suspicious of every guy I see when I'm walking in a ghetto, and if someone gets close to me, the hair on the back of my neck stands up.
Why are you not a racist? One answer is that maybe you aren't a typical human being. My theory states that *groups* hate each other, not necessarily individuals hate other groups or other individuals. If you look at human group relationship around the world and across time, they always hate or at best think poorly of the other group. The theory does not predict or address individual behavior. Here in Columbus Ohiom there is an intense Ohio State / Michigan rivalry. This always results in fights between college age fans. Now, if those people weren't wearing Ohio State or Michigan jackets, nobody could tell them apart. But somehow being a Michigan fan during a home game in Columbus gets you a beating. It's the same for any other group identification, whether it's high schools, gangs, neighborhoods, religions, or ethnicities.
Also, have you ever been to a place where you were a minority? I'm guessing that you are a white male living in the US. That's my background -- I never had a problem with other people until I spent a couple summers in Ecuador, where I was very obviously a minority. I don't hate Ecuadorians or Hispanics or anything like that, but I definately felt a sense of "me against them" while walking down the main streets of Ecuador.
I guess my theory states that after a violent trauma, the human mind haphazardly groups recognizably 'other' people together in a danger category. If a member of your own group beats you up, you probably won't hate your own group as a whole, because you know too many individuals. But if can't differentitate any individuals of the other group, you mind will just err on the side of caution and fear all of them.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso