Posted on 09/17/2025 9:01:29 AM PDT by Red Badger
Leopard tooth marks were found on this Homo habilis jawbone.
Image credit: Vegara-Riquelme et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2025)
Around 2 million years ago, prehistoric humans in East Africa turned the tables on the carnivores that had previously terrorized them, learning not only to fend off these predators but also steal their kills, thus replacing them at the very top of the food chain. Generally, the ancient species Homo habilis is credited with making this trophic leap, yet new research suggests that this extinct hominin was actually hunted by leopards and may therefore have been more prey than predator.
Considered by many anthropologists to be the first truly human species, H. habilis is thought to have created the earliest stone tools – known as the Oldowan Toolkit – in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. In the same region, researchers have found evidence that prehistoric hominins began butchering the carcasses of animals killed by big cats and other predators.
This suggests that H. habilis may have developed the ability to defend itself from these carnivores while also learning to outsmart them and consume their kills. In contrast, earlier hominins like Paranthropus and the Australopithecines are known to have been devoured by leopards, lions, and other large felids.
To test this theory, researchers re-analyzed the remains of two H. habilis individuals from Olduvai Gorge - including the 1.85-million-year-old holotype specimen that defines the species’ morphology - both of which show signs of having been gnawed on by animals. Previously, researchers had suggested that these bite marks reflected hyenas scavenging on the hominins’ corpses rather than active predation.
However, using AI, the study authors were able to assign the tooth marks to leopards, with a greater than 90 percent probability. This, in turn, suggests that the two H. habilis specimens were in fact hunted by these big cats.
Homo habilis being eaten by leopard - The researchers used AI to create this image of Homo habilis being eaten by a leopard. Image credit: Vegara-Riquelme et al.
“If we take both individuals as random representatives of the larger H. habilis population that lived at Olduvai, their convergent signal of having been preyed on by leopards would indicate the inability of this taxon to cope with the predation risks of a medium-sized carnivore like a leopard,” write the researchers.
“The implications of this are major, since it shows that H. habilis was still more of a prey than a predator,” they continue.
Speaking to IFLScience, study author Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo explained that “for some time we have been depicting Homo habilis as the first conqueror of the trophic pyramid, as the scavenger-hunter, fending carnivores off from their kills.”
“But we have identified that these Homo habilis [specimens] actually were eaten by leopards in the same fashion as the previous Australopithecines,” he adds. “So it's actually it's kind of dethroning Homo habilis and putting him at the same scale as other Australopithecines.”
Yet if H. habilis wasn’t able to muscle in on the prey of big cats, then which human species was the first to ascend this throne? According to the researchers, the most probable candidate is Homo erectus, which existed around the same time as H. habilis and was more adapted to life on the ground rather than in trees.
They therefore speculate that H. erectus might have been better equipped to fend off leopards and other carnivores, and could therefore be responsible for the earliest signs of butchery on stolen carcasses.
The study is published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
PinGGG!...............
What do you mean "we" ?
Well, duh. God didn’t create Adam and say, “And, oh yeah, here’s a spear.”
Who thought humans were apex predators? We didn’t come near that status until the bronze age. And without tools we still aren’t. We’ve got no natural weaponry, our senses are for crap so don’t know what’s going on around us, we’re slow, we’re weak. Until we get a 30-30 in our hand we’re hunted.
Heh, heh. Love the one where a cave man throws a spear at a wooly mammoth and misses by about ten feet and his buddies heckle him with taunts of, “Airrrrr spearrrr! Airrrrr spearrrr!”
Leopards still attack humans and kill them.
I’m sure quite a few homo sapiens have been eaten by leopards in our time.
On the morning of May 30, 2025, well-known German businessman and philanthropist Bernd Kebbel was mauled and killed by a lioness at the Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp in Namibia while stepping out of his tent to use the toilet. Despite his friends’ efforts to drive the animal away, Kebbel died at the scene from his injuries.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lion+kills+person+in+namibia
Yes, leopards built the pyramids with their human slaves.
I have read that we have two sides to the brain where one side focuses predation and the other side focuses on avoiding on being preyed upon.
Nobody, anywhere, has ever advanced the theory that humans were ‘apex predators” in the sense that nothing would dare attack a lion.
They find one chimp skull with a few leopard toothmarks and conclude that humans were not invulnerable to predators. Wonder how much this cutting edge analysis cost us?
[[Leopard tooth marks were found on this Homo habilis jawbone.]]
And it was probably a few blind deaf old individuals who couldn’t defend themselves or who got seperated from the tribe- They find one toothmark and declare the leopard the dominate creature? Healthy individuals likely dominated the big cats en mass- but just like today, things can go wrong and a cat can kill a human-
No, it does not. They still only have two individuals. The sample size is far too small to draw any conclusions.
Funny thing, though.
We now have a boatload number more humans running around the world than leopards. More humans than lions, tigers, bears, and cheetahs, leopards, and pandas. More than cave bears, sabre-toothed tigers, short-nose bears, European lions, and other assorted toothed critters.
That one leopard ate one human ancestor several tens of thousands of years ago is not surprising at all.
“The sample size is far too small to draw any conclusions.”
I was thinking the same thing. One needs larger sample sizes, perspective and context to get a bigger picture.
I realize they only have what they were able to find. But they have drawn grandiose conclusions from a small sample. A little more humility may be in order.
Humans still get attacked and eaten by wild animals in today’s world yet we sent men to the moon and destroyed two entire cities with two bombs.
And this is why some of us still don’t trust cats.
The difference was the greater combat ability of homo manilla when acting in groups. One on one, leopards and other big cats were superior predators. Groups of homo manilla could drive groups of big cats from their kills.
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