SOUTH AFRICA: The answer to a scientific whodunit has revealed a chilling fact: we used to be bird food. Scientists in South Africa say they have definitive proof that a two-million-year-old apeman skull, famed as one of the most dramatic human evolutionary finds, was killed and eaten by an eagle.
"Birds used to eat us and in doing so they shaped our behaviour," said Dr Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand.
"Birds of prey are one of the few things that some modern primates have special calls or alarms for." Dr Berger said the "Taung child" had probably been scooped up by an eagle to its nest, where its eyes were ripped out for dinner.
The skull eventually fell out of the nest and was found almost two million years later.
The scientists found key features of bone damage which distinguished bird-of-prey kills from those of big cats, including "puncture marks in the base of the eye sockets of primates, made when the eagles ripped the eyes out of dead monkeys with their sharp talons and beaks. It was a marker that linked eagles definitively to the kill," Dr Berger said. - (Reuters)