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."

Comments

Thousand Years of Conditioning

[reporter]

You can indeed see the effect of a thousand years of conditioning on the island of Japan. For 2000 years, the Japanese people have lived on a resource-poor island. When resources are scarce, everyone in the village is forced to share and to cooperate. Only through cooperation as a group can everyone expect to survive.

If a person does not cooperate with the group and stakes his own territory, then he risks his own survival. By himself, he will have a hard time in finding the necessary food and hospitable living space on a tiny island constantly ravaged by tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes.

What is the result of these 2000 years of group think? It has produced a nation where the group has more value than the individual. Such thinking is perfect for mass production, where each worker must be a cooperating cog in the great wheel of industrial manufacturing. Toyota is hard to beat for this very reason.

Things change...

[like-it-or-not]

This was like, what, over a million years ago?
Get over it!

Re:Birds of Prey or Carrion Birds?

[HiThere]

OS X may be secure (I've been operating on that assumption...and the grandparent is the first contradiction I've encountered), but I purely hate it's user interface. I use both it and KDE, and I vastly perfer KDE. I'll even choose Gnome over the Mac. (Mind you, I'm not talking about Finder 7.5 and earlier...which I thought superb, especially in contrast with MSWind. I didn't use the versions between 7.5 and 10.0, so I can't talk about them, and I haven't yet tried Tiger, though on BRIEF trial it seems about the same as 10.3.)