

Science snapshot: Early humans hunted, not hunters By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY WASHINGTON D.C.  Hunting as the 9-to-5 job of early humans, striding off from the ole' cave to clobber a mastadon for dinner, is a popular notion for explaining how people survived in prehistory. But some anthropologists are suggesting that being hunted, rather than hunting, was the daily fare of humanity's ancestors. And they argue that trying not to be eaten played a significant role in human evolution. At a presentation here at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, anthropologist Donna Hart of the University of Missouri in St. Louis argued that fossil evidence and the experience today of monkeys and apes, the closest relatives to humans, "supports a 'Man, the Hunted' theory of evolution." About 174 predators prey on these primates today all over the world, even the chimps (which face leopords and lions) and gorillas (hunted by leopords) that are most closely related to humans. Looking at fossils of early humans more than a million years old, Hart and her colleague, Robert Sussman of Washington University, argue that numerous examples of skulls bearing bite marks, some the kind made by saber-toothed cats and leopards, show up from sites in Asia and Africa. Further, the evidence for weapons — needed to hunt down that mastadon — and control of fire — needed to turn that mastodon into a meal — don't turn up much later in the archaeological record. Instead, as omnivores without teeth designed for cutting up prey, modern humanity's ancestors likely spent a lot of time in large groups for protection. And they likely used excess male members of the species as sentinels in an atmosphere of intense social cooperation, like other prey animals. Rather than humans originating as the noble hunter of yore, our earliest ancestors probably spent a lot of time evolving into a creature that survived being on the run, they suggest.