Long before we made weapons, our small upright ancestors were prey. Eagles, leopards, giant hyenas and false sabre-toothed cats hunted Australopithecus — and the famous Taung Child was almost certainly killed by a bird.
We like to imagine our ancestors as hunters. For much of the story, they were the hunted. Australopithecus stood barely one to one-and-a-half metres tall and weighed 30–45 kilograms — a modest, upright ape on a savanna full of formidable carnivores.
Reading the bones
The palaeontologist C. K. Brain pioneered the study of how hominin bones ended up in South African caves. His book title captured the twist: The Hunters or the Hunted? Again and again the answer was ‘hunted’ — the caves were often carnivore larders, not hominin homes.
The Taung Child and the eagle
The Taung Child, the first Australopithecus ever found, died at around three years old some 2.8 million years ago. In 1995, Lee Berger and Ron Clarke showed that the damage to its eye sockets and skull matches the punctures a large raptor leaves when it kills a monkey. The likely killer was a crowned eagle, snatching the child from above. Death came out of the sky.
| Predator | What it was |
|---|---|
| Crowned eagle | A powerful raptor that still hunts primates today; likely killer of the Taung Child |
| Dinofelis | A leopard-sized ‘false sabre-tooth’ cat, sometimes proposed as a hominin specialist |
| Leopards | Big cats that dragged prey — including hominins — into trees and caves |
| Megantereon & Homotherium | True sabre-toothed cats hunting large prey |
| Pachycrocuta | The giant short-faced hyena, a bone-crushing scavenger and hunter |
Leopards in the cave
At Swartkrans, a juvenile hominin skull known as SK 54 carries two neat puncture holes in the back. They line up exactly with the lower canines of a leopard — the marks of a cat that had seized the child by the head and hauled it up a tree, dropping the remains into the cave below.
The false sabre-tooth
Dinofelis, a stocky cat with flattened stabbing canines, has been cast as a possible specialist predator of early hominins. The evidence is debated, but it prowled the same landscapes, and its remains turn up in the same cave deposits as our ancestors.
Why it matters
Constant predation pressure helps explain why early hominins lived in groups, stayed alert, and may have favoured trees for safety. We spent millions of years as prey; the shift to confident predator came late, with fire, weapons and the larger brains of early Homo.
See where the vulnerable australopiths sit near the base of our family tree.
Explore the family tree →Frequently asked questions
Was Australopithecus hunted by predators?
Yes. Australopiths were small and vulnerable, and their bones frequently turn up in carnivore-accumulated cave deposits bearing the tooth and talon marks of leopards, eagles, sabre-toothed cats and giant hyenas.
What killed the Taung Child?
The pattern of damage to its skull and eye sockets matches the wounds a large bird of prey inflicts, so it was most likely killed by a crowned eagle around 2.8 million years ago.
What is Dinofelis?
Dinofelis was a leopard-sized ‘false sabre-toothed’ cat of Plio-Pleistocene Africa. Some researchers have suggested it specialised in hunting early hominins, though this remains debated.
- Berger, L. R. & Clarke, R. J. (1995). 'Eagle involvement in accumulation of the Taung child fauna.' Journal of Human Evolution 29. sciencedirect.com
- Brain, C. K. (1981). The Hunters or the Hunted? An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy. University of Chicago Press.
- Smithsonian Human Origins — Australopithecus africanus. humanorigins.si.edu