The 'beast' mystery wanders around the world with other humans

Scientists discovered that ancient humans 2 million years ago shared a migration pattern with one of the world's most terrifying beasts .

2 million years ago, climate change caused the first humans to leave Africa. But of course they are not our Homo sapiens, species that are just over 300,000 years old. They are other extinct human species. Accompanied by them, there are flocks of "beasts", although today represent death and cruelty, but once lived peacefully with humans: hyenas.

Hyenas were not as cruel as they are today and lived peacefully with extinct humans - (photo: MARK BRIDGE).

That's the result of a team of scientists led by evolutionary geneticist Michael Westbury from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). The authors found that for a long time the African branch hyenas shared the migration pattern with ancient humans and they were very different from the Eurasian hyenas; before interference and many other complicated evolutionary steps to make hyenas today. These are expressed through the genes of hyenas.

African hyenas were very different before mixing blood with Asian-European hyenas.

However, this period of peaceful coexistence ended with the birth of us, modern humans Homo sapiens, which is harmful to the survival of hyenas. Modern humans are also the cause of extinction of some species in the hyenas family, for example ice age cave hyenas. Hyenas also thus evolved from benign to more aggressive, paralleling the evolution of humankind.

The day that hyenas actually turned into "beasts", that was about 100,000 years ago, was the time when people living in Egypt today began to build. The process of "beasts" can also occur with other mammals.

The research has just been published in the scientific journal Science Advances.

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