Name: When Humans Were Prey
Uploaded: 2021-05-03T07:35:30.000Z
Duration: 9 min 52 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

In 1924, a worker at a limestone quarry in the town of Taung, South Africa made an incredible

It was the fossilized skull of a juvenile hominin, a member of the human lineage that

includes us and all of our ancestors that came after our split with chimpanzees and

That little skull became the type specimen for Australopithecus africanus, and it would

become one of the most important fossils in the study of human evolution.

Today, the specimen is known as the Taung Child.

Its discovery revolutionized our thinking about our past for a number of reasons.

For one thing, at about 2.8 million years old, it was the first fossil evidence that

our early human ancestors originated in Africa.

The skull had been found among lots of bones from other, mostly small animals, and many

of them had been badly damaged, as if the animals had been butchered.

So for decades, these fossils were read by experts as evidence that hominins like Australopithecus

weren't fruit-eating apes -- they were carnivorous hunters, so-called “predatory ape-men.”

It would be more than 80 years before scientists would realize that, in fact, the Taung site

was not proof that australopithecines were hunters.

Instead, it was actually evidence that the hominins themselves were being hunted.

No one noticed it at the time, but the skull of the Taung Child bore the telltale marks

of violent trauma: puncture holes in the base of the eye sockets, a depressed fracture in

the top of the skull, and scratches on the sides.

These would eventually prove to be the hallmarks of a predator that no one suspected.

But this child's skull is just one example of the evidence that, not too long ago, our

early human ancestors were under constant threat of attack from predators.

And it turns out that this difficult chapter in our history may be responsible for the

adaptations that allowed us to become so successful.

We may be who we are today, because of the time when we were prey.

The notion that our ancestors were once hunted by other animals would have come as a surprise

to the anthropologist who first studied the Taung Child.

His name was Raymond Dart, and he proposed that one of the driving forces of human evolution

was what he called “the thirst for blood.”

To Dart and many anthropologists of his time, the impulse to kill prey was seen as a deeply

Dart observed baboons that appeared to “spontaneously” hunt down prey, and he noted that living hunter-gatherers

seemed to be hunters first and gatherers second.

So, Dart built the case that australopithecines were ravenous carnivores, as more and more

fossils emerged that seemed to support his model.

One such fossil was unearthed in a South African cave in 1949: the bony skullcap of a juvenile

hominin with two very suspicious puncture marks.

This partial cranium belonged to a young member of Paranthropus robustus dating to between

It was found alongside other fossil mammals, like antelope and baboons, many of which were

also damaged or had only their skulls preserved.

The child's skull was labelled SK 54, and it had suffered two punctures at the back

And the bone on the inside of the cap, where those punctures were, flaked upward - indicating

that the victim was probably alive, or only very recently dead, when it was attacked.

At the time, a science writer named Robert Ardrey took this fossil as evidence of interpersonal

violence: SK 54, he said, was the victim of two blows to the back of the head with a pointed

Soon, the idea began to take hold that our evolution was deeply shaped by violence, including

Ardrey gave this idea the rather sensational name of “The Killer Ape Theory.”

Dart described it as “the predatory transition from ape to man.”

And this view seemed to get another big boost from a discovery made at a South African cave

The cave was found to be filled with the bones of Australopithecus africanus and many other

mammals - most of which, like at the Taung site, were broken.

Raymond Dart studied more than 7000 remains from this site and was struck by the fact

that the fossils consisted almost entirely of skulls and neck vertebrae.

So he concluded that the fractures on these bones were evidence of blows by hunters and

that the high proportion of skulls meant that the hominins were taking the heads of

their prey as trophies -- including the heads of their own species.

But within the field of anthropology, changes were in the works.

Just as the Killer Ape Theory was reaching its peak of popularity, more scientists began

to suspect that we had actually spent most of our evolutionary history being prey of

Enter the American anthropologist Sherwood Washburn.

While doing research on a game reserve in Africa, he noticed how modern predators ate

carcasses selectively - eating the soft, meaty parts and leaving skulls, jaws, and upper

It struck him that this was the same pattern of bones that Dart saw at the sites of supposed

Washburn also observed hyenas carrying off parts of carcasses and stashing the bones

around their dens - again, creating a pattern like the one Dart was seeing in the South

Washburn published his observations in 1957, and argued that australopithecines weren't

headhunters - instead, they were the prey of carnivores like hyenas.

This was a major turning point in our understanding of our evolutionary history.

For decades, Dart and his contemporaries had been studying human nature in the violent

social context of World Wars I and II, so it made sense that they understood our history

But while they stuck to that model, younger anthropologists began to explore Washburn's

And his work made enough of an impact that when another damaged hominin fossil was found

-- this time at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in 1960 -- other hominins were not considered

In this case, the fossil was OH8, a slightly mangled partial left foot of Homo habilis,

discovered by anthropologist Louis Leakey.

The ankle bone had tooth marks on it, and Leakey's wife and partner, Mary Leakey,

concluded the marks came from a carnivore that was probably not a hyena, but nor was

So by the mid-1960s, anthropologists were at least starting to think that hominins could've

Then, in 1970, paleontologist C.K. Brain revisited the cave site where SK54, that skullcap with

He wanted to try to figure out why all of those fossils had accumulated where they had.

And he realized that the fossils weren't signs of hominins hunting, much less fighting

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When Humans Were Prey

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