It is believed that a person close to the modern type first appeared in Africa. The first wave of migration to Europe began about 1.5 million years ago. However, the resettlement was not very active … Recent finds of ancient remains with traces of someone's teeth indicate that our ancestors fell prey to some predators.
In 2000, in the Drimolen area, near the Sterkfontein caves, Dr. Andre Keizer found fairly well-preserved fragments of skeletons that belonged to one of the subspecies of Australopithecus, which disappeared about a million years ago.
As for the Australopithecus themselves, they lived on Earth in the period from 4.2 to 1.5 million years ago. Their fossil bones have been found in Eastern and Southern Africa. It is believed to be the oldest hominid bones found to date.
The latest DNA research also claims that the entire population of our planet has a single common ancestor - a woman who lived about 200 thousand years ago in the Sudan and Ethiopia. This fully confirms the biblical theory of the origin of man, according to which the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were, was located just in Ethiopia …
In fact, the gnawed bones were discovered back in 1994 in caves on the Moroccan coast. Even then, experts determined that the remains belong to Homo rhodesiensis - the "Rhodesian people" who lived in these places about half a million years ago. But studies of the teeth marks left on the bones were carried out quite recently.
It was not easy for a person to survive in those distant times among nature. After all, he did not immediately stand out from the animal world. Even the mind did not save from wild animals, which had a clear physical advantage in the form of heavy weight, fangs and claws …
"Our ancestors fought for a long time with large predators for space and resources - for example, for the same caves and some herbivores, they hunted each other," said Dr. Camilla Dujard from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who led the study. "People often became victims - that is, food."
Perhaps the most dangerous opponents of our ancestors were hyenas. The giant predators belonged to the now extinct Pachycrocouta brevirostris. They were twice the size of modern hyenas and possessed such qualities as cunning and bloodthirstiness … In addition, their number was quite large. In all likelihood, they were the main "eaters" of human meat. Only hundreds of thousands of years later, the population of large hyenas was exterminated to such an extent that people could feel relatively safe …
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The Moroccan region was not the only one where predators ate people. To the west of the capital of South Africa, Johannesburg, there is a place called the Cradle of Humankind - the Cradle of Humanity. It is assumed that it was here that the first tribes of people lived. Many human remains have been found in the local Gladysvall Cave, and the earliest of them are millions of years old.
Several years ago, experts from the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research found strange white "stones" in a cave with a rounded shape. One of the expedition members, Robin Pickering, submitted them for analysis. And what happened? It turned out to be coprolites - fossilized excrement of giant hyenas, left 200-260 thousand years ago.
But an even more surprising surprise awaited the scientists ahead. “Under the microscope, we saw translucent, glass-like rods inside the coprolites,” recalls Lucinda Backwell, who led the laboratory analysis of the samples. "They were sticking out."
Further research showed that the "rods" are nothing more than … human hair! The fact that the hair belongs to people is evidenced by many characteristic features, such as size and shape, composition of scales, etc.
This means that a quarter of a million years ago, our distant ancestors were still becoming a dinner for predators … True, it is not yet clear whether the hyenas ate people alive, or first killed them, or ate the bodies of the dead … By the way, in our time hyenas feed mainly on carrion, but do not disdain and hunting for monkeys. Maybe from old memory, because the latter are considered the predecessors of people and really are in many ways similar to humans …
Another scientific challenge is to find out exactly who owned the coprolite hair. Perhaps Homo heidelbergensis - to the Heidelberg people, they just lived in that era … But it is possible that these are some other hominids, perhaps even now unknown species.
Irina Shlionskaya