In one study in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, 70 percent of baboon deaths were attributed to African leopards. Today’s leopards show what our ancestors had to contend with. With this combination of traits, leopards have been breathing down our necks for as long as 10 million years. And they can carry great weights (our bodies) to wherever it might be safe for them to pause and dine. They leap powerfully (up into primates’ sleeping trees). They run fast (at least faster than our ancestors).
Lions and tigers and leopards, oh are extraordinarily good at eating primates. The fact that you are alive means your direct ancestors escaped these fates, if not forever then at least long enough to reproduce.ġ. Here then are ten of the animals likely to have killed our ancient and not so ancient kin. For example, many of the best fossils of hominids come from piles of bones near places where predators ate lunch. Evidence of our historic fates comes from knowing what eats monkeys or apes today, and from studying what ate now-extinct species.
Hominids, including our direct ancestors, split from chimps and bonobos about seven million years ago, and our own species, Homo sapiens, is only about 200,000 years old. Larger apes evolved about 13 million years ago, eventually producing today’s gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and us. Starting with the first primates, which evolved about 65 million years ago, our ancestors were about the size of a monkey, if not smaller. For most of our evolutionary history as primates, one of the most common causes of death, perhaps the most common cause, was, well, being eaten. If you live in a developed country, odds are you are going to die of a heart attack, stroke, cancer or an accident.
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