178 CHAPTER 8 | Early Homo and the Origins of Culture
Original StudyHumans as Prey by Donna Hart
There’s little doubt that humans, par-
ticularly those in Western cultures, think
of themselves as the dominant form of
life on earth. And we seldom question
whether that view holds true for our
species’ distant past.... We swagger
like the toughest kids on the block
as we spread our technology over the
landscape and irrevocably change it for
other species.... The vision of our utter superiority
may even hold true for the last 500 years,
but that’s just the proverbial blink of an
eye when compared to the 7 million years
that our hominid ancestors wandered the
planet.
“Where did we come from?” and
“What were the first humans like?”
are questions that have been asked
since Darwin first proposed his theory
of evolution. One commonly accepted
answer is that our early ancestors were
killers of other species and of their own
kind, prone to violence and even can-
nibalism. In fact a club-swinging “Man
the Hunter” is the stereotype of early
humans that permeates literature, film,
and even much scientific writing.
... Even the great paleontologist
Louis S. B. Leakey endorsed it when he
emphatically declared that we were not
“cat food.” Another legendary figure in
the annals of paleontology, Raymond A.
Dart, launched the killer-ape-man sce-
nario in the mid-20th century....
Dart had interpreted the finds in
South African caves of fossilized bones
from savannah herbivores together with
damaged hominid skulls as evidence
that our ancestors had been hunters.
The fact that the skulls were battered
in a peculiar fashion led to Dart’s firm
conviction that violence and cannibal-
ism on the part of killer ape-men formed
the stem from which our own species
eventually flowered. In his 1953 article
“The Predatory Transition from Ape to
Man,” Dart wrote that early hominids
were “carnivorous creatures, that seized
living quarries by violence, battered
them to death, tore apart their broken
bodies, [and] dismembered them limb
from limb,... greedily devouring livid
writhing flesh.”
But what is the evidence for Man
the Hunter? Could smallish, upright
creatures with relatively tiny canine
teeth and flat nails instead of claws,
and with no tools or weapons in the
earliest millennia,
really have been
deadly predators? Is
it possible that our
ancestors lacked the
spirit of cooperation
and desire for social
harmony? We have
only two reliable
sources to consult for
clues: the fossilized
remains of the human
family tree, and the
behaviors and eco-
logical relationships
of our living primate
relatives.
When we inves-
tigate those two
sources, a different
view of humankind
emerges. First, consider the hominid
fossils that have been discovered. Dart’s
first and most famous find, the cranium
of an Australopithecus child who died
over 2 million years ago (called the
“Taung child” after the quarry in which
the fossil was unearthed), has been re-
assessed by Lee Berger and Ron Clarke
of the University of the Witwatersrand, in
light of recent research on eagle preda-
tion. The same marks that occur on the
Taung cranium are found on the remains
of similarly sized African monkeys eaten
today by crowned hawk eagles, known
to clutch the monkeys’ heads with their
sharp talons.
C. K. Brain, a South African paleon-
tologist like Dart, started the process of
relabeling Man the Hunter as Man the
Hunted when he slid the lower fangs of
a fossil leopard into perfectly matched
punctures in the skull of another austra-
lopithecine, who lived between 1 million
and 2 million years ago. The paradigm
change initiated by Brain continues
to stimulate reassessment of hominid
fossils.
The idea that our direct ancestor
Homo erectus practiced cannibalism
was based on the gruesome disfigure-
ment of faces and brain-stem areas in
a cache of skulls a half-million years
old, found in the Zhoukoudian cave, in
China. How else to explain these strange
manipulations except as relics of Man
the Hunter? But studies over the past
few years by Noel T. Boaz and Russell L.
Ciochon—of the Ross University Schoolof Medicine and the University of Iowa,
respectively—show that extinct giant
hyenas could have left the marks as they
crunched their way into the brains of
their hominid prey.
The list of our ancestors’ fossils
showing evidence of predation contin-
ues to grow. A 1.75-million-year-old
hominid skull unearthed in the Republic
of Georgia shows punctures from the
fangs of a saber-toothed cat. Another
skull, about 900,000 years old, found
in Kenya, ex hibits carnivore bite marks
on the brow ridge.... Those and other
fossils provide rock-hard proof that a host
of large, fierce animals preyed on human
ancestors.
It is equally clear that, outside the
West, no small amount of predation oc-
curs today on modern humans. Although
we are not likely to see these facts in
American newspaper headlines, each year
3,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa are
eaten by crocodiles, and 1,500 Tibetans
are killed by bears about the size of
grizzlies. In one Indian state between
1988 and 1998, over 200 people were
attacked by leopards; 612 people were
killed by tigers in the Sundarbans delta
of India and Bangladesh between 1975
and 1985. The carnivore zoologist Hans
Kruuk, of the University of Aberdeen,
studied death records in eastern Europe
and concluded that wolf predation on
humans is still a fact of life in the region,
as it was until the 19th century in west-
ern European countries like France and
Holland.© J & B Photos/Animals, Animals
Whether hunters or hunted, early Homo was in competition
with formidable adversaries like hyenas. Communication and
cooperation helped early Homo avoid carnivores that saw them
as prey.