Ancient eagle eats people

Taung kid skull version

An American researcher believed he had deciphered the mystery of why one of the most important ancestors of humanity died two million years ago. An eagle killed a child of three and a half years old, also known as Taung.

It was discovered that our little ancestor, or hominid, was not only hunted by huge terrestrial monsters but also by the fierce predators who dived from above, Lee Berger, Ancient anthropologists at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, said.

" This discovery helps us better understand the lives of ancient ancestors, the world where they lived and the things that scared them ," Berger said. " These are the pressures that form the human mind and make us one of the most successful animals on the planet ."

The discovery of a part of the skull of a gibbon child in the Taung area (48 km southwest of Johannesburg) in 1924, exposing a race called Australopithecus africanus, is considered to be a link between ape and people. It also provides evidence that prehistoric people developed in Africa, instead of Europe and Asia.

The death of the child is still considered to be a crime of a leopard or a tiger tooth - which is always on the hunt. But 10 years ago, Berger and his colleague Ron Clarke proposed a hypothesis that the killer was a raptor, similar to today's crested eagle in Africa.

Berger and Clarke believe that monkey bones and other animal fossils in the Taung area also show signs of being attacked by the eagle. Other researchers agree that eagles hunt small, but argue that gibbons are too big and clever to be subdued by birds.

Meanwhile, five months ago, scientists at Ohio University, USA, conducted a study of eagles with crests in the Tai forest and found birds that often hunted much larger primates. compared to them, by dive down and thrust their claws into the skull. There is even a case of an eagle killing a child, Berger said.

This research led Berger to examine Taung's skull again. He noticed that there was a small hole and jagged tears in the eye sockets that no one had noticed. " I think we have the final conclusion - the eagle is Taung's killer, " Berger said.