The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were

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.

The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

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.

“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.

It's kind of dethroning Homo habilis.

Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo

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.