Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  That fact left a world of speculation as to how on earth the little australopithecine ape-men had pulled it off. That they had lived large on the treeless spaces suggested they had sustained themselves on something more than a simple gathering of nuts and fruits, tubers and roots. The richest concentrations of calories on the plains were those giant packages of meat wandering the grasslands in herds. As hard as it was to imagine the little near-humans tackling zebra, gazelle, and wildebeest, never mind elephants—all the while fending off the saber-tooths and leopards and roaming gangs of hyenas—it was harder to imagine getting by without them.

  In 1968, wildlife biologist George Schaller and anthropologist Gordon Lowther decided to test their speculations. They set out into the predatorrich plains of East Africa’s Serengeti in search of carrion and game like two australopithecine scavengers, on foot and unarmed.

  For one eight-day experiment, the two set up camp on the banks of the Mbalageti River, whose waters in the dry season drew the great herds of the Serengeti. Their front yard offered views of strolling elephants and curious lions observing them from the far bank. “A group of hominids could never have had it better,” wrote Schaller. “That night the lions visited us, roaring nearby and stumbling over the guy ropes as they circled the tent.”

  Over the next week, the neophyte meat-seekers set off each dawn along the Mbalageti, steering clear of thickets and ravines where lions and Cape buffalo were most likely to lay hidden. They followed circling vultures to the leftovers of lions and disease, they watched cheetahs bring down gazelles and plotted to steal their kills.They roamed as two red-blooded australopithecine scavengers in search of sustenance.

  Schaller and Lowther settled into their primordial past, stalking with muscles taut, scanning the landscape for lurking danger and sizing up trees for emergency escape. They began to relish their daily adrenaline buzz, the air electrically charged with the hunt. In their heady thrill-seekers’ euphoria, they grew careless. Seven times in the first two days, they found themselves beating hasty retreats after stumbling upon prides of dozing lions. “It is often said that one should never run from a lion,” Schaller recounted. “This is nonsense.” They began to carry protection, loading one of Lowther’s empty beer cans with pebbles, and rattling their arrival whenever nearing potential lairs and blinds of ambush.

  There were bad days burdened by hunger and the dejecting sight of bones picked clean. Then, there were days that “would have gladdened the heart of the most morose hominid.” On one such day, Schaller and Lowther came upon an abandoned zebra foal. The little zebra was sick and slow afoot and stumbled to the ground after a short chase. Schaller stood over his prey and with a tug on its tail administered a symbolic coup de grace before letting the doomed foal return to its herd. The two later spied a giraffe calf, which oddly allowed Schaller to tiptoe within arm’s length. Schaller looked up to find the giraffe staring ahead through a pair of opaque, sightless eyes.

  Between bagging the sick zebra and the blind giraffe, the two slowest predators on the Serengeti had in one leisurely half-day’s wandering procured what would have amounted to more than three hundred pounds of protein. The next day they came upon an old buffalo bull, dead of disease and truly ripe for the pickings. “Although hyenas and vultures had eaten the viscera and much of the rump, a great deal of meat remained, rather putrid but nevertheless edible,” Schaller noted.

  Schaller would later write, “There is neither cruelty nor compassion in a lion’s quest for food and this impersonal endeavor strikes a responsive chord in man the hunter. I enjoyed watching most hunts as struggles of life and death at their most elemental. It is a time when each animal uses to the utmost those attributes with which evolution has endowed it. It is also a moment when man, weak of body and slow of foot, can watch his limits transgressed, a moment which engenders not only humility for his own lack of prowess but also pride and exultation that he has managed to survive at all.”

  The australopithecine experiment had given visceral support for the possibilities of early man as the lone predatorial biped of the African plains. With the scavenging lifestyle came ready explanations for human hallmarks such as family groups and divisions of labor (more hands to quickly tackle, butcher, and cache meat; more eyes to note incoming enemies). With the predatory component came an answer for the rudiments of speech and the process of planning. (“Look out, leopard in the bush!” or “Meet me on the far side of the water hole. Limping zebra there.”)

  Along with the ecological emergence of meat-chasing man-apes in the African plains came physical revolutions. The jutting jaw gradually flattened, the cheek teeth began to shrink. And the volume of the brain all but erupted. In the relative heartbeat of a million years, between the chimplike australopithecines and the human form of Homo sapiens, the size of the brain tripled. It had become the fastest-growing organ in the history of life.

  That brain, along with the stone and bone tools it produced, would indeed come in handy for the hunting life. But it turns out the most important vehicles blazing the hunter’s path may have been his own legs. When, in the 1980s, anthropologists began questioning the human stereotype as a hopeless slowpoke plodding about the plains, they uncovered one of nature’s purest talents for pursuit. Hunting cultures were to be found running down the fleetest quadrupeds on the planet. A deconstruction of ancient human anatomy and physiology revealed one of the greatest long-distance runners of all time.

  As the ancestral humans left the trees and hit the ground walking, their physiques and physiologies responded in kind. The bipeds grew tall and erect, their heads bobbing freely atop a long neck anchored to a stable platform of broadening shoulders. Leg bones lengthened, arms shortened, hips and waist narrowed. Midsoles of the feet began to arch; additional spring was added with the arrival of the Achilles tendon. They were the locomotory antithesis of the pig-necked, bowlegged, knuckle-shuffling chimpanzee life-form.

  In a race with the furred and four-legged, the naked ape also ran cooler and more consistently than the competition. The running hominid vented heat not only through the panting mouth but also through the evaporative cooling from the sweatiest skin on the savanna. Running erect heightened the thermal advantage, exposing a minimum of bodily surface area to the sun.

  These were just a few of the examined traits that padded the Homo sapiens racing pedigree. The contests were, admittedly, more of a tortoise-and-hare affair, with the slow and steady human ultimately gaining the advantage. But long-distance endurance may well have meant the difference between a life tied to the trees and a career as a big-brained biped competing in the carnivores’ kingdom. Homo sapiens was born to run.

  The marathon-man hypothesis came replete with anecdotes of modern cultures still known to run for their supper: North American Navajos chasing pronghorn antelope to exhaustion, Australian Aborigines running down kangaroos, African Bushmen overtaking zebra and wildebeest. Once looked upon with suspicion, the tales took a leap in veracity in the 1990s through the adventures of an anthropologist named Louis Liebenberg. Observing Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert of Africa running prey to death, Liebenberg went the distance, in a scientific exercise that nearly cost him his life.

  The Bushmen’s hunt would take place during the hottest times of the day, which in the Kalahari reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The runners, typically a team of three or four, would tank up on water, locate their quarry—a kudu, eland, gemsbok, or any of the various and fleet antelope of the Bushmen’s world—and begin the chase. They would track their prey through long empty stretches of sand and confusing thickets, slowing only to regain a missing trail. Running for hours, they sometimes covered more than twenty miles. “When the hunter finally runs the animal to exhaustion,” Liebenberg reported, “it loses its will to flee and either drops to the ground or just stands looking at the approaching hunter with glazed eyes.”

  Such exploits were not for the amateur. On one of the hunts, the observer Liebenberg abandoned his motor vehicle, went running
with the Bushmen, and in the heat of the pursuit, forgot to check his own thermometer.

  “By the time I caught up with !Nate, I was no longer sweating,” wrote Liebenberg. “The hunters immediately recognized the early symptoms of heat stroke, and after having run down the kudu !Nate ran eight kilometers back to the camp to get his father, !Nam!kabe, to bring water … Afterward they explained that when running down an animal the hunter must continuously compare the condition of his own body with that of the animal, and I had become too focused on the animal.”

  Man the Hunted

  In the early 1990s, at about the time Liebenberg was confirming for himself the human as fearsome pursuit predator, a Ph.D. primatologist at Washington University in St. Louis, had begun to ponder that same creature’s alter ego as an item of prey. Donna Hart, a disciple of Brain’s man-the-hunted camp, had come to the study of primates with a deep background in predator biology and, along with her adviser, the anthropologist Robert Sussman, a suspicion of one of primatology’s fundamental assumptions: Predation, in the evolutionary scheme of primate life, didn’t much matter. “Predation was just baldly discounted,” said Hart. “The assumption was, ‘No, it doesn’t happen, because nobody’s seen it.’”

  The nonbelievers had apparently been looking in the wrong places at the wrong times. Hart dug up five hundred eyewitness accounts of monkeys and apes attacked by a range of predators, from raptors and reptiles to big cats, wolves, and bears. She added up the evidence of primate remains from the nests of raptors and the feces of carnivores. One leopard scat in particular—so compelling it was photographed—featured the undigested toe of a gorilla. As word of her search got around, unsolicited reports and testimonials from fellow researchers started piling in. In order to finally finish her dissertation, Hart was forced to close her files. Her tally of documented primate deaths by teeth and talon had ballooned to 3,600 cases.

  Predation happened. And it didn’t need to happen often to leave its mark. As John Terborgh had impishly noted in his 1983 monograph on societies of South American monkeys, “Successful predation is a rare event—at most it can occur only once in the lifetime of a prey.” Suppose a troop of capuchin monkeys, Terborgh postulated, lost only one infant a year to, say, a harpy eagle. For a troop typically producing but one or two infants per year, such a loss would be anything but trivial. Such a loss couldn’t help but change the way capuchin society conducted itself.

  Hart’s suspicions led her eventually to the most supposedly invulnerable of primate species. It turned out that one of the more compelling arguments for man the hunted had come ironically from the very skull on which the legend of man the hunter had been born. In 1995, the paleoanthropologists Lee R. Berger and Ron Clarke reopened the case of the famous Taung child, the two-million-year-old australopithecine toddler whose association with bashed-in baboon skulls had led Raymond Dart to label its kind “an animal-hunting, flesh-eating, shell-cracking, and bone-breaking ape.” Dart had offered graphic scenarios of australopithecine hands prying away skull plates and reaching in for brain food.

  When Berger and Clarke reexamined the Taung child’s supposed victims, they came back with a scenario as gripping as it was contrary to Dart’s. Berger and Clarke came away convinced the damages Dart had so assiduously ascribed to killer apes, and to the Taung child itself, were in fact the work of a killer eagle.

  Berger and Clarke found modern passages of monkey predation that put the Taung child’s hypothetical demise in a grisly new light. One report on a particularly ferocious African raptor called the black eagle, offered this:

  When a complete animal is brought the eagle removes [the gut] first, which is not eaten, and then usually eats from the head. The eyes are eaten, and the tongue; the jaw is forced open so that the eagle can penetrate through the palate to the brain, which is also eaten. The scalp is removed from the cranium; the skin is removed from the face, chin and neck and eaten, together with the ears. The head is then broken off at the neck by twisting the neck vertebrae and eating the disks between them. Long strings of the spinal cord and bone marrow are pulled out and eaten, so are the thin shreds of the stomach and intestines. The heart, lungs and liver are eaten, together with the ribs, legs, feet and most of the vertebrae.

  By way of the raptor’s methodical butchery, the skull of the victim often bared telltale patterns of puncture and breakage. It struck Berger and Clarke that some of the baboon skulls from the Taung cave lacked the chew marks and paired tooth holes more typical of the leopard. Some had received small piercings in the braincase and cracking at the base of the cranium, which was more in line with talon damage.

  “We would not presume to guess at the exact species of eagle responsible for the collection of the Taung assemblage,” Berger and Clarke noted, adding what would become a prophetic conclusion, “although the crowned eagle is a likely candidate.”

  Stephanoaetus coronatus, the African crowned eagle, was a frightening, war-bonneted raptor with a scythe beak and fierce mien. Thick, cable-steel ankles powered heart-piercing talons. The crowned eagle featured on its trophy rack a broad range of animals as heavy as sixty-six pounds, including in East Africa a six-year-old child. Stephanoaetus coronatus was an aerial monster capable of regular and impressive carnage on organisms five times its weight.

  The raptorial hypothesis was immediately met with one heavy objection. The Taung toddler, three to four years old and weighing maybe twenty-five pounds, would have been hefty cargo for even the most powerful eagle to lift off. Not so, countered Berger, noting that the eagle had likely disemboweled and partly dismembered the child as it would any other large primate, thus considerably lightening its load. It was not unknown for eagles to be seen carrying fifteen pounds of prey through the forest.

  Convinced as he was of the Taung baby’s killer, Lee Berger lacked enough hard evidence to convict. But then, ten years after airing his hypothesis, came a breakthrough. Berger was asked to review a manuscript submitted from a trio of anthropologists, led by Scott McGraw of Ohio State University, who had been searching the nests of crowned eagles in the Tai Forest of the Ivory Coast. More than half of the twelve hundred bones they collected had belonged to monkeys, a good many of them from big, fanged, and formidable species averaging more than twenty-five pounds—the Taung child’s estimated weight.

  But it was the victims’ skulls, and the particular brand of wreckage inflicted on them, that raised Berger’s pulse. He continued reading: “Punctures from talons were found inside the orbital cavities … Incidents of isolated damage, including V-shaped punctures and ‘can-opener’ perforations …”

  Berger all but sprinted back to the museum where lay the Taung specimen. He peered into the ancient child’s eye sockets. And in his giddiness, Berger almost dropped the world’s most precious hominid skull on the floor.

  Next to the tear duct of what had once been the right eye of the Taung child, Berger discovered a tiny hole; in the left eye socket he discovered “a ragged ‘tear’” He had handled the skull hundreds of times, as had so many before him. And nobody had noticed what he now noticed. What the McGraw manuscript was describing as the indisputable assaults of an African crowned eagle on the skulls of large monkeys precisely matched the wounds Berger now found in the little ancestral human skull in his hands. Two million years ago, a professional killer with the capacity of a crowned eagle had swooped from the sky and taken the life of the Taung child.

  “This is the end of an eighty-year-old murder mystery,” Berger declared in a press conference. “We have proved conclusively and beyond a reasonable doubt, which would be accepted in a court of law, that the African crowned eagle was the killer.”

  The conviction answered much more than the immediate question of who or what had done it. “It shows it was not only big cats but also these creatures from the air—aerial bombardment if you will—that our ancestors had to be afraid of,” said Berger. “These were the stressors and stresses that grew and shaped the human mind and formed our behavior t
oday.” Those who had ever startled to the harmless shadow of a passing airplane could now look into the telling eyes of the Taung child and begin to understand why.

  Man the Haunted

  A long legacy of stalking and being stalked had left lasting imprints on the human physique and psyche. As late as the twenty-first century, ten thousand years after the advent of agriculture and the slow dying of the chase, phantom hunters of the African plains could still be found in feats of the modern human athlete. There were legs and lungs that could cover twenty-six miles in little over two hours. There were arms that could accurately hurl a spear (disguised as an Olympic javelin) one hundred yards on the fly or throw a rock (fashioned into a five-ounce baseball) one hundred miles per hour.

  In turn, those creatures that had hunted the hunting ape remained lurking, in the dark reptilian recesses of the subconscious mind. “Why do we jump when we see a large object that comes into our peripheral vision?” asked Donna Hart. “I don’t think it’s just because large blobs are what we fear. I think we have millions of years of history of seeing something large and dark in our peripheral vision that could very well eat us.”

  “Not getting killed is a powerful force to deal with each day,” concluded Hart and Robert Sussman from their exhaustive foray into the archives of human predation. Yet for better or worse, the force was no longer. Except for a smattering of dangerous outposts, where human incursions were pressing against the carnivores’ last wild bastions, death by predator was rarely an issue of daily concern. Tigers still stalked woodcutters in the Sundarban swamps of Bangladesh; wolves still carried away stray children from the village edge of rural India; crocodiles still snatched untold thousands of victims from the rivers and lakes of Africa and Australia. But beyond these and a few other anachronistic hot spots, man-eating had been relegated to the realm of nightmares and media circuses. When one day in 2004 a cougar in Southern California killed a mountain biker and badly mauled another—one of less than twenty lethal cougar encounters recorded in the country over the previous century—the news went national, the stories running for months thereafter. The indisputable tragedy of those maulings notwithstanding, many more Americans died that year by dog bite. Yet it was the lone wild predator that got the monster’s treatment.