Prehistoric Man Faced Death From Above

Sept. 6, 2006 — -- It wasn't easy being a hominoid millions of years ago.

Some of our early ancestors didn't just have to worry about big cats and deadly snakes.

They may also have been attacked and eaten by birds, according to new research that may also solve the mystery of who killed a young child in southern Africa about 2.5 million years ago.

Ever since it was discovered in 1924, the famed Taung Child -- as the skull came to be known -- has puzzled scientists.

The prevailing theory has been that a large cat killed the kid, believed to have been 3 years old at the time of his death.

But anthropologist Scott McGraw of Ohio State University says he has a better idea.

Raptors, he says, or more specifically the African crowned eagle, was the likely perpetrator.

McGraw and his collaborators have spent years trying to piece together the story of predation on monkeys and other apelike critters on Africa's west coast.

Some of the story is pretty well established. Leopards are the main predators, but chimps also attack smaller monkeys.

But McGraw has long suspected that some of the animals that preyed on our early ancestors were airborne.

That's tougher to prove, he says, so for the last 20 years he has spent much of his time collecting bones from in and around eagles' nests to see how these powerful birds go about their business.

The Tai rain forest in the Ivory Coast is an ideal location for the research because "the entire predator system is still intact," McGraw said.

So the same types of predators are there today that once preyed on some of our distant relatives.

McGraw's lab includes an extensive collection of monkey skeletons that he acquired in Africa over the years as part of his general research into primate behavior.

More recently he teamed up with Susanne Schultz of the University of Liverpool, who spent two years monitoring 20 eagle nests in the Tai Forest and collecting bones from the nests and from the ground below.

By comparing the bones from the nests with the reference collection in McGraw's lab, the researchers were able to show that eagles indeed had a taste for monkeys.