Punctured Skulls

Prehistoric birds of prey made meals out of some of our earliest human ancestors, a new study suggests.

The researchers studied more than 600 bones from modern-day monkeys, collected from beneath the nests of African crowned eagles in the Ivory Coast's Tai rainforest.  A full-grown African crowned eagle is roughly the size of an American bald eagle, weighing about 10 to 12 pounds.

Punctures and scratches on many of the monkey skulls led some researchers to rethink which animals may have preyed on our human ancestors, said W. Scott McGraw, the study's lead author and an associate professor of anthropology at Ohio State University.

The results may also have important implications for the mystery surrounding the death of one human ancestor who lived about 2.5 million years ago.

Archaeologists discovered the skull of a 3½-year old ape-like child in a cave in South Africa in 1924. Researchers believed this child, called the Taung child (Australopithecus africanus), had been killed by a predatory cat. But McGraw said that puncture marks on the monkey skulls he examined closely resemble those found on the skull of the Taung child.

"Eagles leave very distinctive beak and talon punctures around the face and in the eye sockets," "The skull of the Taung child has these same kinds of puncture marks."

The study will be detailed in the October issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and is currently available online at their website.

--LiveScience Staff

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Credit: Jo McCulty, Ohio State University