For decades, Homo habilis, one of our early ancestors, walked with the confidence of a creature that felt like it was hot s**t. With stone tools in hand, this early hominin was believed to be the first of our ancestors to go entirely carnivorous. They sliced up and devoured meat nearly 2 million years ago, solidifying its role as a bona fide predator.
Using an AI research tool, some researchers have found that Homo habilis may not have been as capable and powerful as previously thought. In fact, they might have been regularly eaten by leopards. Yikes.
Researchers from the University of Alcalá, publishing their work in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, dusted off some long-forgotten H. habilis fossils from Olduvai Gorge. That’s the Tanzanian dig site from which came a good deal of what we know about human evolution.
More specifically, they reexamined the bones of two individuals—OH 7 and OH 65—but this time had some upgraded technological weaponry on their side: artificial intelligence.
Previous human interpretations of the remains attributed the tooth marks all over the bones to scavengers, such as hyenas. But after feeding a massive dataset of predator tooth patterns into an AI, researchers think it wasn’t hyenas munching on their already dead bodies. Still, rather leopards munching on them when they were alive.
Leopards are not known for cleaning up leftovers, unlike hyenas. They kill their meals fresh.
Early Humans Sure Did Get Eaten By Leopards A Lot
One skull had gnaw marks on the back of the head, a chewed-up finger, and enough bite patterns to suggest that this poor hominin had its face in a big cat’s mouth, not in some triumphant hunter’s pose next to a freshly slain antelope. This means H. habilis may not have been nearly as cool and bada** as we thought. Maybe it was walking cat food.
The findings are reigniting a debate over who actually made the stone tools found nearby. Since they love getting eaten by leopards so much, maybe H. habilis weren’t smart enough to develop tools?
Perhaps the H. habilis tools they’ve found actually belonged to Homo erectus, which would make more sense, as they were the next significant leap in human evolution. It makes even more sense when you consider that Homo erectus shared similar neighborhoods as H. habilis, and they most definitely used tools for hunting.
You may have lost your job to AI, but H. habilis just lost its several-million-year-old reputation as a prehistoric badass thanks to a stupid algorithm developed by nerds. Turns out they weren’t that cool at all. Turns out, leopards literally ate their faces.
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