Hominins are prey
Sabre-toothed cats, giant hyenas and eagles hunt the hominins whose bones we now dig up.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2.4 million years
- Known to
- ± 500 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
The false sabre-tooth Dinofelis, the giant hyena Pachycrocuta, and large eagles all preyed on hominins, and much of the South African cave record exists because predators carried carcasses into fissures or dropped them down shafts. Tooth punctures on the Swartkrans hominin SK 54 match a leopard's lower canines exactly. It is a useful corrective: for most of the story, hominins were medium-sized primates in a landscape that ate them, and being hunted shaped their social lives as much as hunting did.