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The Skull Version of the Taung Child |
An American researcher believes he has decoded the mystery of why one of humanity’s most important ancestors died two million years ago. A large eagle killed a three-and-a-half-year-old hominin child, known as the Taung Child.
This discovery reveals that our tiny ancestors, known as hominids, were not only hunted by gigantic beasts on the ground but also by fierce predators swooping down from above, said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“This discovery helps us understand more about the lives of our ancient ancestors, the world they lived in, and the things that scared them,” Berger said. “These pressures contributed to the development of the human mind and made us one of the most successful species on this planet.”
The finding of a part of the skull of a hominin child in the Taung area (48 km southwest of Johannesburg) in 1924 revealed a species known as Australopithecus africanus, considered a link between apes and humans. It also provides evidence that prehistoric humans evolved in Africa rather than in Europe or Asia.
The child’s death was long attributed to the act of a leopard or a saber-toothed tiger, which were always lurking to hunt humans. However, ten years ago, Berger and his colleague Ron Clarke proposed a hypothesis that the killer was a predatory bird, similar to the modern African crowned eagle.
Berger and Clarke noted that the bones of monkeys and other animal fossils in the Taung area also showed signs of eagle attacks. Other researchers agreed that eagles prey on small animals but argued that hominids were too large and intelligent to be subdued by birds.
Meanwhile, five months ago, scientists at Ohio University conducted a study on crowned eagles in Tai forests and found that these birds often hunt primates much larger than themselves by diving down and piercing the skulls with their talons. There was even a recorded instance of an eagle killing a child, Berger noted.
This study prompted Berger to re-examine the skull of the Taung child. He noticed a small hole and jagged tears in the eye socket that had previously gone unnoticed. “I believe we have reached a definitive conclusion – the eagle was indeed the murderer of the Taung child,” Berger declared.
