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February 21, 2014

Strange But True!

Q. How did we humans dethrone the classic “king of the beasts” to become the kings ourselves?

A. By eating our way to the top of the heap, speculates Lars Werdelin of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, as reported in Scientific American magazine. Based on fossil records of African carnivores, evidence suggests that lions, hyenas and other large-bodied carnivores roaming eastern Africa today are only a small fraction of those that used to exist. “Intriguingly, the decline of these carnivores began around the same time that early ‘homo' started eating more meat, thus entering into competition with the carnivores.” So early human behavior may have led to the extinction of many of these beasts, starting more than 2 million years ago, before Homo sapiens came on the scene.


 
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