You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolution's most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Weatherell.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we are two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
On this episode, we'll discuss how we are both, some may say,
irrationally afraid of seals, but we're going to stand by our
phobia and we're going to convert you to.
We'll also talk about some of the many animals that have dined
on humans and our ancestors for millennia, including lions and
tigers and fucking hyenas. And birds.
And alligators and snakes. And unless you two like eating
people, you'll probably not want to eat during this or frankly,
any of our podcast episodes. So like always, please check the
warnings in the description because we told you so.
A fun fact about me that sort of relates to the story is that I
once had to swim across a river that was freezing cold because I
was on a backpacking trip and we didn't know how big the river
was going to be. And there were seals in the
river. And I was terrified the whole
time that the seals were going to get me.
And everybody made fun of me saying seals don't eat people
and you know, hint, hint for today.
Maybe I wasn't so wrong. I mean, were you crossing that
river in Antarctica? I mean like.
Listen, if some seals do it, all seals do it.
That's how nature works. Were they smaller than me?
Yeah, but they're better swimmers.
But. It's in their jeans for sure.
And I feel you. Piranhas are smaller than you
too, so and they can take you down.
And there was a pack of them I. I think seals are freaky anyway.
And then today I learned more. So we'll we'll get into it.
All right, so today's episode is all about will this eat you?
Has this eaten you? I'm sure we'll come up with a
much catchier title, but Things that Ate Humans is the general
theme for today. So, So we are going to start off
today with a story about Djokotian or a dragon bone cave
in China where we have found a lot of Homo erectus bones.
Like a lot. They appear to be have
accumulated between about 700,000 years ago and 230,000
years ago. There's maybe some evidence of
artifacts, maybe some evidence of fire.
And when all of this was discovered, it was this big blow
up of like here we have what is clearly a cave home for this
group of people. That's maybe not entirely the
case, because it turns out that if you take a very careful look
at all of these bones, you notice some weird patterns.
First off, there are five skull caps, meaning the back of your
skull. There's no faces, just skull
caps. Second off, there are some long
bones, but not nearly as many as we usually have in the body.
And all of the long bones that are there are really
fragmentary. They look like they've been
broken open and chewed on. So there was some interpretation
for a little while that maybe this was cannibalism, but when
you look at the pattern of bones being broken, it comes up with
consistent comparisons to a slightly different animal,
hyenas. Why?
Hyenas are well known for cracking open bones to get at
the marrow. I've seen terrifying videos of
this. I've watched yes videos of a
hyena going through like, just like someone just threw in like
this hunk of like pig neck into this hyena cage and within 30
seconds the entire thing was gone.
Yeah, Gone. Yeah, they.
So they will eat chunks of bone. They definitely like the marrow,
so they crack open bone. They love brains, so they like
to bite off faces because that's the most breakable part of a
skull to get to the the meaty insides.
So there's two marks essentially from hyenas, probably the more
correct interpretation in my opinion.
You know what, It's still controversial.
Some people still think people were living there and just
occasionally getting eaten by hyenas.
But other scientists, including myself, suspect that this is
actually a hyena den. And it's not so much showing
like 500,000 years of humans living in a cave so much as it
is 500,000 years of hyenas living in a cave pulling in
their prey, which is people. And that's actually kind of a
theme throughout a lot of our history.
Specifically, hyenas are a big part of our history.
This particular species is Paki. Crocutta is the genus, and they
are the giant place to see in hyena.
They're not actually that much bigger than modern hyenas, which
should scare all of us, I think. I think we may have undervalued
the terror that a hyena act. Mad respect.
They were slightly taller and longer, and they lived
throughout Europe and Asia through the Pleistocene and
these sorts of accumulations of bones.
Where you see hyena bite marks, you see some places hyena
coprolite, so poop fossils. These are common.
There's a couple sites in France.
There's a couple sites in Spain I saw one of in Israel of a
slightly smaller species of hyena.
So yeah, hyenas were really fucking up our shit for millions
of years. And and it sounds like they were
targeting us on some level too. Like, I I'm sorry if I didn't
catch it. Like are there other animal
bones in these assemblages? Are we by far and away the most
abundant? And if so, why?
It doesn't seem like Homo erectus would be like Homo
erectus is pretty much us. So, you know, it's like, what
about us? I I just can't ever feel like
we're that desirable of a meal. Like we just seem kind of not
like got a lot there. So, like really?
Were we targeted? Listen, if you like brains.
Oh, good call. I think we we've got that going
for us. I don't know that there's any
indication necessarily that they were targeting us.
There are other bones that are pulled into these accumulations.
So Joe Codian has a fair number of you know, deer and that sort
of thing. It's just that when we find
these places and we find people, we really hyper focus on the
people. And it's not actually clear if
people were entering the caves initially because there were
other animals that were dead and dying in these caves, because we
probably were scavenging meat for a long time before we began
actively hunting meat successfully.
So it may be that humans kind of sealed their own fate by going
into these caves. There's some evidence on some of
the bones of butchery from humans, so not butchery via the
teeth of a hyena. So it is possible that we he
just willingly walked into traps.
Interesting. Do you think that people ate
hyenas? Was this a mutually predatory
relationship? You know, I haven't seen any
indication that we butchered hyenas.
But I mean, just because you don't see evidence of it,
doesn't mean it didn't happen. And I'm sure Homo erectus was
just as vengeful as modern people could be.
So I'm sure that they ate some hyenas at some point.
No, no osteological evidence. Not none so far.
Oh man. It's not just hyenas that have
been eating us. There are many, many, many other
animals that have been found to enjoy the taste of Homo erectus
or Homo sapiens throughout time. Amy, I don't have a better
transition to that. Yes.
And this goes. You know, as I was mass Googling
for this episode and thinking about, you know, I was like,
wow, like prehistoric animals that ate us.
And then I was like, OK, a lot of animals around the world
today will still totally eat us. And you know, a lot of the
classic ones are going to be like your your lions and bears.
And tigers and tigers. And tigers.
And tigers.
Lions and tigers.
Mostly tigers. Mostly tigers.
And you know, I I well, I've had some close encounters with some
grizzly bears, but they've never are brown bears as I'm supposed
to refer to them because the Alaskan in my life is very
opinionated about how you refer to brown bears.
But anyway, I've been real close to them.
Never had them, like in my tent or in my stuff.
But man, I mean, it wouldn't be hard, right?
Just one little swipe and I would have been Grizzly man.
Because in Grizzly Man, his girlfriend dies too.
And her name's Amy, so I was always like.
Fate. Her name was Amy, I should say,
because she got eaten by a bear. So happens.
Amazing. I don't.
I don't know if I want to call it an amazing documentary, The
Grizzly Man One. It's a Venner Hussag, but it's a
it's pretty good, you know, it's very well done and absolutely
terrifying. But those are like kind of the
typical ones. I mean, but tigers like tigers
who they seem to really enjoy the taste of human.
Tigers love the taste of human. Tigers have killed 373,000
people or more between the year 1800 and 2009.
I'm sorry, wait. What was that number?
I'm sorry. 373,000 people in the last 200 years.
I really thought you were just going to say like 373.
No, I thought that was going to be the number.
No. Wow.
They are still. They still kill people, even
though in many places they're protected and like taken care
of. And they're not hungry, they're
just bored. There's I guess, a couple of
tigers that are in a location in India where they're like a tiger
sanctuary, which people are not supposed to go into the tiger
sanctuary for a variety of reasons, including tigers.
But there's fishing that they do for crabs and things, and they
still get attacked and eaten in their fishing boats.
So there's a video of a tiger launching itself into the river
to try and get on to, like an open canoe structure.
And in that case it didn't succeed.
But they do kill a couple of people every single year, just
in that region alone. So much so that in local
villages there are people known as tiger widows who lose their
husbands to tigers. Yeah, so Tigers.
Wow. Just really, really proof that
we are not as secure and safe as we like to sometimes think we
are. I just those numbers are I'm
still having a hard time wrapping my head around that I
and I feel you know. It got worse, I guess in COVID
because people were kind of desperate for income sources.
So there was like an uptick in tiger death related to fishing
activity, which I believe most of that fishing activity
activity is illegal, primarily because they don't want you to
die via tiger. But desperate times, desperate
measures. Tigers are definitely not
domesticated. They're just one of the big cats
that happens to really interact with people a lot and enjoys
eating them. But it's not like cats and
hyenas and filiform creatures are the only predators of
people. You know, seals eat people,
right? Or they try to.
It's. True, it's true.
It's, you know, they are all carnivores, so they're living up
to their family name, that's for sure.
But one of the predators we don't tend to think of, you
know, I think we think of big cats.
We definitely think about bears. We even think about wolves and
something like those as as threats.
But really, yeah, no seals, sea lions, like, OK, I wouldn't want
to get like squashed by one, you know, like that wouldn't be a
fun way to go. But in terms of like hunting
humans, I'm not a huge. I'd never consider that until I
read The Endurance, which is a book.
It's a nonfiction book about Ernest Shackleton's famous
journey to Antarctica and back, which is the epic part, and it's
like the most insane book I've ever read.
And their journey to Antarctica and whatnot.
They get trapped in the ice. All hell breaks loose like it's
just not going well. And multiple people in their
party were stalked and haunted by leopard seals, so I had never
heard of leopard seals before besides like maybe just random
mentioning along with other seals.
And then it was like, Oh no, these are giant seals.
I mean they can be like 10 plus feet long.
I mean they're all muscle and blubber.
I don't know if all seals have this, but apparently they have
claws on their front somewhere on their paddles.
Their front paddles, which because they can't really use
them for anything. Is it a vestigial feature?
I don't know. I didn't dig into it.
I have questions, but they because they can't actually put
any weight on their flippers, so they still are just like don't
make you know, gastropods in their own way.
Are they hunting people on land? They're like they.
So the the dangerous place in both the Shackleton journey,
which took place in like the early 1900s.
No one died on that journey, which is probably the most
incredible part of all. But one of them was like stocked
on like kind of right where the ice meets the ocean.
So that seems to be the danger zone for leopard seals.
And then in like the 1980s, a researcher was grabbed by a
leopard seal in that same kind of an environment and his
colleague had crampons on and just like crampon kicked this
seal in the face until it let go of this researcher.
And then in 2003, similar situation of a researcher was
right on the shoreline and a leopard seal grabbed her and
dragged her down and actually killed her.
Oh, wow. Yeah, she passed away.
And that's when they investigated this whole report
about how dangerous are leopard seals because there was an
actual fatality, which makes you wonder, you know, with some of
those other early Arctic, I mean Antarctic, wow, sorry, brain,
you know, upside down with some of those journeys.
Are there any other cases? Are there?
I mean, it's it's Antarctica. So I'm like, there's probably no
ancient human record of this interaction.
But leopard seals can make it up to like New Zealand and
Australia, sometimes that far north.
So there is a chance for more human leopard seal interaction,
and it really only seems to be a problem when we're right on the
ice and they're still in the water.
And I guess the thought is that we are confused as Penguins
because when the leopard seals interact with like scuba divers,
they're super friendly and they even are kind of interactive and
whatnot. So they do not seem to be at all
threatened or at all in predation mode.
They seem to recognize that we're not their prey item, but
maybe being on the ice. And if you want to see what they
do to Penguins, oh man, I feel like it.
Kind of makes sense that they think we're Penguins.
Like, you're all, like, swaddled up in all of your warm gear.
You're kind of wondering. Probably just think they hit the
jackpot of the biggest fucking Penguin of all time.
Yes, good point. I wonder if they're like, whoa,
what else would walk on 2 feet out here?
Come on, it's a big. Other fluffy bipedal thing.
So they do love to eat Penguins. They also eat a lot of krill in
different times of the year, but I'm sending you a picture of how
they hunt their Penguins. So I just sent you that picture.
Through the chat. OK, so I mean the first, the
first thing that you really see in this photo is the nostrils.
Because this leopard seal is launching itself out of the
water, it looks like it like met a Penguin mid Penguin diving
into the water. Like these two animals are
colliding mid air and it has happening.
I don't think that's what's happening, but it does look like
the Penguin like voluntarily dove into the leopard seal
mouth. I would not have guessed that
their nostrils were that big, but it looks like it must be
stoked to get a Penguin. Yeah, and the Penguins head is
just straight up in the leopard seals mouth and it the Penguin
doesn't look happy, but the leopard seal sure does, yeah.
Yeah, and so that's a beautiful description.
This is how they actually kill their prey, because they can't
use their little flipper claws and all they really are is a
face full of terrifying teeth. So they just grab kind of like,
I think orcas kind of do this too, where they just grab the
head of the the Penguin and then they just go thwack, thwack,
thwack and actually just flip it out of the water, smacking it
into the water until it breaks open and then they're able to
mow down on Penguin innards. So it's yeah, it's a very, it's
not you. You don't, you don't like to
envision being a human involved in this situation in any way,
shape or forms. Yeah.
So those are the leopard seals. They're definitely, you know, I
would totally go to Antarctica if the opportunity presented
itself. And I wouldn't have, like, 12
anxiety attacks, but I would be afraid of leopard seals.
I mean, they really. They've earned my respect, for
sure. And, you know, don't judge a
cute little seal by its giant nostrils.
It might eat your face so. So the seals that I felt were
stalking me were harbor seals, which are significantly smaller,
but they have spots just like actual leopards.
So yeah, they didn't get me. They didn't even come close to
me. They actually swam away from me.
But how could I really tell that they weren't coming from
underneath? It's dark.
It's a river. It's.
Cold. I would not have handled that
situation well at all. I feel like we've already, I
don't do well with open water situations usually, especially
the ocean and one time I went kayaking in Alaska and the IT
was just like, yeah, a little harbor seal or something.
But what I don't like about them is how they just pop up right
And then then. They're like there.
And they give you this, like, look, and they have kind of
those big dead eyes. And then they pop back down.
And then like a minute later they pop back up and they're way
fucking closer to you. Yeah.
Like, no, no, no, no, no. You stay away from my boat
buddy. Because like, I would be fine if
I fell into the water or something, but for whatever
reason, it's like the done it, done it.
It's like they just keep getting.
Popping its head up to double check that you're still bigger.
I think they're freaky. I mean, I also think they look
like dogs. I mean, they're they just look
like ocean dogs. So that's what I think of too.
But they're like ocean dogs with dead eyes.
And really. Teeth.
So yeah, I'm I'm low key rate of seals too and even more so now.
So as far as we know, seals have not really killed that many
people, both in the modern record and in the fossil record.
But it is worth pointing out that it's actually pretty
difficult to conclusively demonstrate that animal A at 8
Animal B. Because, I mean, a lot of
reasons, but First off, like, sometimes you eat the whole
thing, so that makes it go bye bye, all of your evidence is
gone. Sometimes the bite force that
killed the creature doesn't impact bone, and that's the only
record that we get. So if you're killing something
and eating something, but you don't hit the actual bones hard
enough to leave distinct marks, you're Scott free, you get away
with that evolutionary murder. But there are some other ways
that we can tell when animals are consuming one another.
And one of the big ones is just the way that the bones are
accumulated. So do you have a lot of skull
caps and not the fronts of faces in Bad Side?
You see just a whole bunch of open skull caps go like,
literally there's no hyena there.
It does not matter. That's not a good place to be.
No. So yeah, the way that bones are
accumulated can be a really great indicator that something
ate something else, especially if you are at least looking at
something that has like a modern relative.
So you know, hyenas, we know what their accumulations of
kills look like. Not because there's a hyena like
a dead Paki Kurkata sitting there being like this is me,
this is my stuff, I did this. But because we can look at the
way that modern hyenas accumulate bones and destroy
bones and eat bones and poop all around the bones.
So it's one part. Did you actually leave marks?
Are those marks actually diagnostic and and or do you
accumulate bones in a weird and specific way?
So those are the ways that we can tell specifically that
certain animals have eaten us. But if they don't leave those
Marks and they don't leave any accumulation, like a specific
accumulation, then yeah, you're you're kind of screwed.
You're not going to get. So there's a lot of animals that
definitely have eaten people that we have no idea really ate
people because they would eat one at a time or something and
maybe not put big old marks in its skull.
And what are the chances? We've already discussed before,
but I we will reiterate this constantly Fossilization is an
extremely rare process. This does not happen to every
single skeleton that ever existed.
That'd be cool. It'd be like the catacombs
everywhere. But that's not how it goes down.
So even if an ancient human, which again, in terms of the
like, what they represent ecologically is a very small
part of their ecosystem, so humans are already a really
small part of your ecosystem. You're way more likely to find
an ungulate than a human because of just sheer numbers.
And then you happen to have to find the human that was nibbled
on by some other animal and be able to tie that, like it just
makes it so much more complicated than the whole
process of fossilization already is.
So it's has to be a perfect storm to have fossil evidence
that we find that indicates that something, some animal was
eating us, which is amazing that we have as much as we do because
that means that means a lot of animals have eaten us overtime,
which is, you know we should be honored.
We should be honored. We're a part of the animal
Kingdom. It's it's it's a it's a rite of
passage. Maybe we're not sitting in the
place on the food chain that we really would love to occupy,
which is the Tippity tippity top.
But we are still involved. We are still part of the food
chain all throughout our history.
Yeah, exactly. And it sounds like when I mean,
I think I mentioned this to you Megan, that I I worked on these
itty bitty fossil primates monkey things in Graduate School
and it was usually just isolated teeth that we would work with.
And one of the things that we would look for on the teeth is
sometimes they would have this, it's really pretty.
It's like acid etching on it and have these beautiful kind of
lines and discoloration looked like it had been soaked in acid
for a little while. And those were teeth that had
been digested by something that had eaten that little Oma Maya
had eaten that little primate. And then as it the teeth again,
yay enamel being so Hardy, it made it through your poop.
So we were finding pooped out monkey teeth, essentially.
I can't believe you have me saying monkey.
I've permeated your brain. But it's it's pretty cool that
we could but what we don't know is who ate it.
What we'd have to look at is again it wouldn't be a for sure
there are direct tooth marks that fit this predators tooth
size. It would have to be like, well
we know that there's this creodon out here so it might
have been this creodon. We know that there are birds out
here, so it might have been this bird, but besides that, it's
just we don't have any direct evidence to say this monkey
thing was eaten by this crocodile.
It is. But it's remarkable to me how
many fossils not of humans, this is not a human related thing are
found that we probably are just like decayed owl pellets where
owls just went and they collected, they ate a whole
bunch of animals, they puked up their bones and then they kind
of left them all in a pile. Yeah, there's a lot of fossil
sites that are like that, which is thanks owls.
Thank you, Thank you. You did all of the hard work for
us. You put all of the bones, just
the bones into this great little fossil friendly environment and
then you left. It was great.
Like, thanks. And then you probably pooped on
it, which probably helped keep the oxygen out.
Like, thank you. So yeah, it's it.
But it is, you know, this is a fun topic and it is a lot of
detective work as well. And it does sound like, you
know, while a lot of animals out there are would love to eat us,
it does sound like it has definitely been worse in the
past. And I think that we're going to
take a quick little break and then we will get into more
fossil horror stories of man eaters.
So we'll be right back looking for the perfect new nerdy
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Welcome back from what I'm sure was a really invigorating, very
interesting and consumer directed commercial break.
And if you also would love us to give you just as good of a
commercial break as we just did. Yeah, you could pay us.
We would. We would take your money.
We would. Now we're going to talk about
what else has killed people in the past.
Yeah. Yep.
More man eaters and there was a Just Dance song for it, like.
Oh, was there? Anyway.
And it looks good. Yeah, that looks.
That looked really smooth. Yeah, you can break that one out
at the club for sure. How do you think, like all those
men's I ate, obviously. The club.
I thought you were just pregnant, but.
And we know that if a male paleontologist found my remains,
they would assume that. I ate this.
Baby and that I didn't actually have a was a female with the
fetus. They would go.
These men were cannibals. And yet somehow they would make
a diorama that made it look like you were fucking the fetus for
sure. Yeah, I mean, it would just be
totally. Anyway, This is why everyone is
needed in science. All perspectives are needed in
science. Help us.
That's actually a great segue to what I want to talk about, which
is. It is terrifying.
Well, you know this about me is that I do study primate
evolution or I did. I don't really don't do too much
of it these days, but for Graduate School, my focus was on
early primate evolution, which meant like the fun cute little
things from like 50 million years ago.
Okay like cute little lemurs and tar seers and like little pro
simians and just cutie patooties.
And we actually have like a decent sample sizes with those
fossils and we have a fairly good idea of timing and geologic
time and geochronology. But when you start to get into
human evolution, then you get into one of my huge pet peeves,
which is the entire field of human evolution.
Actually, I used to love it. It totally inspired me as a very
small child, and then as I became more and more involved in
academics and realized how gatekeepy it was and how very
just not friendly, very competitive, very cutthroat,
some characters who do not have the best reputation.
And what bothers me the most of all is these huge, overarching,
like, conclusions drawn from like, a couple of bones, right?
Like we're like, oh, it's a whole new species of humans and
it's based on one tooth. And if you study any other type
of animal besides maybe Raptor dinosaurs, which have a similar
problem, and I blame pop culture, you know that you
actually need way more than just like one freaking isolated tooth
to have any good handle on if you have an actual new species
or not. Because individuals vary, guys,
we all vary. This is why you need a big
enough sample size so you can say anything about the
population, because we're all variable.
Look at the heights of Megan and I.
We are very different. No, this is an online venue.
I could be tall. You don't know.
You don't know how tall I am. She could be short.
Look at her. She's so small.
She's she's just head level with the washer.
She's not sitting. This is her real height.
Anyway, this is my little like, I remember writing about this
man eater in Graduate School for our blog because I was so over
learning about human evolution and all of what felt like really
overdrawn conclusions based on really limited sample size.
And so I became obsessed with this kind of offshoot topic
that's tangentially related to human evolution because it's
about the crocodile that ate early humans.
And that just brought me, it just brought me such joy to know
that A that animal existed and B people were studying it and
bringing light to the fact that not it's it's not all about the
people, man. Like, there's some really cool
other animals who found us delicious.
And that's how I learned about Crocodilus anthropophagus, which
is arguably one of my favorite scientific names of all time
because it literally translates to the human eating crocodile.
So Crocodilus crocodile. And then Anthro is human and
Fagus is to eat. So it is the human eating
crocodile. And it it was, it was awesome.
It was awesome. It lived around the same time as
Homo habilis, so we talked about Homo erectus earlier.
Homo erectus is one of the later humans, one of the bigger,
taller ones that again looked a lot more like modern.
Yeah, And then Homo habilis lived earlier.
Homo habilis lived like 1.81.9 million years ago, I want to
say. And that's where we also get
Crocodilis anthropophagus in this place, this very famous
site that I'm sure a lot of folks have heard of, which is
Olduvai Gorge. So old of I Gorge is one of this
like localities that people make a really big deal about in the
human evolution game because it's been really productive and
has given us a lot of understanding of this kind of
Plyo Pleistocene time and that has quite a few different
records of human evolution sites.
So we literally have homo habilis there about 1.9 million
years ago. And then we also get
Paranthropus Boise Eye, which is my favorite of the weird
australopithecines, which is like The Nutcracker Man, his
Paranthropus Boise Eye. And then we also get Homo
Erectus at this site and Homo Sapiens there too, because
Africa was a happening place for human evolution.
But Crocodilus anthropophagus lived at the time of Homo
habilis and apparently really liked to eat them because we
have some pretty solid fossil evidence of their predation.
And again, we talked about this earlier.
How do you know? We know with this case because
of these pits and grooves and scratches that we found.
And it's a, it's essentially a foot of Homo habilis that was
preserved. So we've got like the talus,
which is the ankle bone, it's called the astragalus and other
animals. We've got the meta, whatever
those annoying bones metatarsals.
There we go. And they've all got these
scratches and a lot of pits. So that's the number one thing
that they're looking for. And they also have material from
this crocodile at that site. So they can do a direct
comparison here. Again, this is one of those
perfect storm situations paleontologically, where we have
fossil evidence that something ate this right.
Those pits and grooves are are not random, they are
significant. And they were not produced when
we dug it out of the ground because you can tell the
difference between something that happened while the Organism
was alive versus if you fucked it up excavating it 2,000,000
years later. And we have the other animal, we
have the crocodile and its teeth to literally look at the size of
its teeth and figure out what size pits, grooves, and
scratches it would produce. And they match all of these
things on this foot bone. So talk about your Achilles
heel, Homo habilis. But they ate the crap out of it
and it's really, really, really fascinating.
And I was just reading that There's also another Homo
habilis specimen so that the foot is OH 8.
So if you're a huge human evolution nerd, you will know
that specimen OH 8. So there's another one which is,
OH 35, which is a tib Fib, So like your lower lower leg, so it
looks like it's a left tib fib. And yeah, it looks like the
proximal ends, the ones closest to the middle, the middle of the
body look like they have feeding traces from like a leopard, like
carnivore. So apparently humans were
delicious not only to reptiles but also to mammals.
And like, we've talked about cats and humans, man, just funny
because I love my cat and I also acknowledge that she will eat me
if I die and she wouldn't take her that long.
She has tried to eat me like she's not waiting.
She's strangers, yeah. No, no, no.
It like she's doing this thing to me lately where she'll like
come up and like sniff and whatnot and then do a gentle
like. Just like this little just a
little test bite. I'm alive.
I am alive still. Please.
Like I'm sleeping and she comes up and it's like, hey, and I'm
like I'm still alive. Cat.
Yeah. So it's AI don't know.
I think I I think I put a lot more.
I think I'm projecting into my relationship with my cat and I
think she sees me as a future fancy feast.
So and it's in both of our genes.
Well not mine. I should know better.
Obviously for millions of years we've been attacked by cats so
maybe we shouldn't be like hi cats.
But we are, and cats have a long history of mowing down on us, so
it's just so you can take your classic human evolution sites
and get all excited about that. But there are really cool
animals in there that were also eating us that I think deserve
just as much acknowledgement and story time and praise.
Dang it, give them the cover of nature, not just some other.
Anyway, and I digress. So those are things that make
sense to me, but I feel like, you know, with like the leopard
seals, that was just like another unexpected animal.
And I feel like there's probably some other unexpected animals we
haven't talked about yet. And do you have any insight on
some? Other weird ones?
Birds. Birds are bad.
I mean like, are we talking like terror birds?
Is there any evidence of those big terror birds with humans?
I don't. I don't think we we overlapped
enough. I think terror birds went
extinct a little bit too early on, So, Well, there were there
were some in South America, like in the pious scene, right?
But no, not giant predatory walking birds, but giant
predatory flying birds. Even scarier.
Flying but. I'm That is how I feel about all
animals, right? Like if you can swim in the
ocean and you can pop up your head any which way.
I don't like that. I can't track you if you're a
bug and you can fly. I don't like that.
I can't track you and birds. Yeah, flying is kind of one of
their definitive features. And there is a those.
Penguins. Those worthless Penguins.
Well, that and they're like 6 different times that the ratites
have lost their ability to fly I.
Know they're like, no, no, we're over it.
Yeah, but yeah, so there is some evidence that Harpy Eagles and
Eagles of similar size, so big fucking Eagles have killed not
grown adults, but babies. Because it turns out that babies
are kind of easier to snatch. Not that surprising, I suppose.
They can't really fight back. They're a lot smaller.
They're easier to carry off. And so the famous specimen of
bird predation is the Tong child.
The Tong child is about 3 million years old and it is a
specimen of Australopithecus africanus.
And it has these really distinct scratches in its eye sockets
from where the bird grabbed it by the head, dug its claws into
the eyes and pulled it up and off somewhere.
So the next time that you go to one of those birds of prey shows
and they tell you to like, hold your kids still.
That is why it is because some of those big birds, they
probably can't kill your kid and they probably won't kill your
kid, but they might. So hold on to your toddlers.
But in the past? In the past they have, and in
the modern day harpy Eagles for example, hunt monkeys and small
primates to the extent that I think it's like 50% of a harpy
Eagles diet is primates. So there's today things that
specialize on primates. It's not so unusual and
unexpected that in the past there would have been some birds
and things that also specialized on primates, probably less so on
specializing on Baby Australopithecus.
Certainly baby Australopithecus and other similarly sized
primates would have been a very good food group.
So yeah, Big Bird. Not always nice sometimes.
Really mean and that it's just really very interesting that
it's that the harpy, is that what the one that you said eats
about 50% primate. Harpy Eagle.
Yeah, And so they like the taste.
They've been doing this for a long time.
They have acquired. They are like, oh, yes.
What do you want tonight? Oh, how about some more howler
monkey? Wrong, wrong continent.
Never mind. Sorry.
Got my monkeys? Missed, I know.
I do think actually Harpy Eagles are from South America, so I
wouldn't have been. Then I was right.
But there's some big, big birds across our world and some of
them will definitely eat people if they have the chance.
I just think, I just think that that is absolutely wild that
again that I mean tongue child is a really famous specimen
because it's very well preserved and we especially for the part
that we the only part of the body we care about which is the
skull, she's great gay. So again, the fact that this
specimen was killed was someone's prey and then was
preserved in such good condition and then was found.
It's just, oh, I remember learning about finding this
specimen. Yeah, it was found in a lime
quarry, like all of these kind of like limestone deposits,
which is so weird to me to think of like going to a lime quarry
for fossils, 'cause that's not like where we find vertebrates
in North America as much, but it's.
So Codian, Joe Codian is also a limestone cave or a series of
limestone caves. But it's the they're
accumulating sediment inside those caves, and the accumulated
sediment is the actual it's not the limestone is the host rock
for a lot of these deposits, but a lot of these deposits are
actually things. So do you think that being, you
know, I mean Australopithecus definitely had the ability to go
to be bipedal? Whether or not it was 100%
bipedal is still debated and whatnot.
But do you think in this case being bipedal was a detriment
because it was just like look at these holds, they're right here,
look at those pockets. Hi, You know, with our big.
Forward. Facing eyes like the Harpy Eagle
is just like I'm going to go rock climbing on your face, you
know, like. I don't know.
I mean, I do want to clarify that the tongue child was we do
think that the tongue child was about three years old.
So really, more toddler than baby.
So probably still capable of some degree of upright walking.
But yeah, maybe. Maybe that wasn't such a good
thing. I mean, it does not look like it
turned out very well for this particular child.
Whether or not it was evolutionarily disadvantageous,
I don't know, but obviously this this little kid didn't have a
great day. But we did continue to evolve
and get even taller. But maybe that's like it was,
yeah. Well, some of.
Us. Gotta give.
You're still tall enough that I don't think a bird would take
you on unless it was like a cassowary.
Because I'm a very, very afraid of some of these large
flightless birds that we have. Like I feel like a cassowary
could kick you and do some serious damage.
So. Well, so the other thing, So
we're just going to segue now into a podcast about which
animal could we take in a fight? And the thing about most birds,
right, when they fly, they have to have those super light bones.
But things like cassowaries, they don't fly, they don't need
to have those super light bones. They're much heavier and denser.
About 5 minutes ago, I had a realization that there are no
piranha like behaviors in birds. And then I realized it's
probably because birds, your bones are going to get broken if
you get smacked at. So why hunt together anyways?
Cassowaries. I'm I'm surprised that they
haven't formed. Bands have begun killing.
Taking over the earth. Could be the next stage A?
Cool project that I got to do some research on in our very
early undergrad was on cannibalism in people.
Like, we're talking about all these animals that eat people
and we're kind of dancing around this big obvious thing that is
like, well, humans are humans, So of course we're going to also
have eaten each other. And that seems to be really,
really prevalent, like a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if Homo
erectus was occasionally doing that.
But would we be able to interpret the evidence as
cannibalism? You know, those are interesting
questions because when I think of cannibalism in humans, I
think a lot about Neanderthals that we're known to be
cannibals. I mean, Neanderthals are
interesting because they're, I mean, they're pretty much
humans, right? We know that we interbred with
them. So on some level, I don't know
why we act like there are different species, but fine,
they are morphologically different differences if you
want to focus on those. And but species are all a giant
scam and none of none of them really exist anyway.
So we'll talk about that more, I'm sure, but we're they're very
closely related to us, if not just fully us.
And they're very interesting because they're the first record
of being able to see humans actually taking care of their
dead and burying their dead. I think they're the earliest
occurrence of art that we have. So like, there's this idea that
the first occurrence of, like, art and culture and religion
even are with Neanderthals. But man, they weren't so
advanced that they wouldn't crack open a cold one.
And by that I mean each other. A cold one?
Are they waiting until they're dead and cold, or are they
cracking open a hot one? They, they lived further north,
so maybe they were cold by the time they got to them and maybe
it was opportunistic again. I'm not sure if it's like,
again, hunting or scavengering, Like that's another thing that
we can't necessarily get at with just fossil evidence alone,
which leads to very interesting questions.
But yeah, I mean, there's lots and lots of evidence of that
Neanderthals were eating each other.
They like the skulls that have been processed in some of these
caves that are that are like 100,000 years old.
It's like they have cut out the the chewing muscles.
So they're essentially going for some human barbacoa by cutting
out like your masseter and your temporalis, and then also marks
of being cutting out the tongue because I guess that was also
delicious and going after, like we've talked about that bone
marrow. So especially in your bigger
limb bones, that's going to be a really good source of just
energy and fuel. So they process the remains of
deer and other butchered animals the exact same way that they
process these human bones, which is why it's pretty clear they
were eating them too. It's like, oh, why else would
you break open their Morrow cavities and then scrape out all
of their bone marrow? You know, it's probably not
because you're doing a science experiment.
So Neanderthals were definitely cannibals.
And then one of my, a few other favorites are, you know, the CRO
Magnon people like, yeah, they're like.
Some of the, I mean, not personally, but yeah.
Well, they're probably in. There's a little bit of them in
all of us. These are ancient humans that
were true Homo sapiens that lived in Europe.
And there's this cave, the Go cave.
I think that's how it's pronounced and it's, I think
it's somewhere in England, I don't know somewhere on that
island that is a thing. So I had their Ice Age.
So we're talking like 14,000 about 14, 1/2 thousand years
ago. It's another cave and it's more
processing of human bones. And like you already brought up
with the skull caps, one of the ways they know that this is
definitely planned, and definitely potentially even like
a ritual, is that all the other bones in the skeleton totally
smashed to get at all the meat and all the marrow except the
skull cap and just the top of the skull.
And you don't want to go too far back because then you get your
frame and Magnum, and you can't have that because then you can't
use your skull cap as a bowl or a cup, so.
You can't use it as like a thumb hook.
For your bowl. I mean, you could hang.
It could. Be like a ladle.
It could be, you know, but. That's true.
Yeah. But I don't I don't know if the
the rest of the skull shape works for that.
So you know they they find these caves that are just like
scattered with crushed human bones and then just perfect
skull caps that have been processed for eating and
drinking as and like it's very clear that this the face again
has been carefully removed so that you can just get those
cranial vaults to be perfect cups for your future.
So I just like, like want to remind people like we think
we're so high class. We were eating, Britons were
eating each other like not that long ago, OK, like not that long
ago. And I mean, I'm not saying let's
bring it back on the menu. I'm not saying let's go Soylent
Green. I just think it's.
Unless unless some sort of Soylent Green company sponsors
our podcast. In which case, yes, we will.
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All, thank you for listening. Oh, it was a real thing.
It only existed for a year but was called Hoofu and it was a
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And vegan cannibals rejoice, there's finally a plant based
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