Nearly 2 million years ago, a leopard in Africa sank its teeth into the face of an early human. This bite etched tiny tooth marks into the unlucky person’s jawbone. That bone now speaks to a chilling early chapter in our history: when humans were prey.

The fossil belongs to Homo habilis. It’s one of the earliest members of our genus. (Homo includes modern humans and our closest relatives.) At first glance, the bone marks look like scratches. But a recent, close analysis tells another story. The bite marks suggest leopards hunted these early folk.

That discovery helps solve a fossil mystery. It also raises questions about a time when humans held a more precarious spot in the food web. Sometimes people ate meat. Other times, they were the meat being eaten.

That threat of becoming prey to some other predator likely shaped how humans evolved. To survive, our ancestors learned to count on each other for protection. They may have lived and worked in groups, sharing information about dangers and teaching each other skills. Over generations, these behaviors could have helped people become more cooperative and successful.

Today, it’s easy to imagine our early ancestors as fearless hunters, chasing prey across ancient savannas. But that image reflects a time late in our evolution. Before we became one of the world’s most successful predators, we first had to survive life as prey.

When humans were on the menu

Much of what scientists have learned about ancient humans comes from fossils found at Olduvai Gorge, in Tanzania. Since the 1930s, researchers have unearthed many bones from our early ancestors at this site in southeastern Africa. They include a pair of tooth-marked jawbones.

Other finds include tools made of stone or bone.

Sharp stones likely served as knives. Cut marks on animal bones suggest early humans ate meat. This led many scientists to assume H. habilis was a hunter. But these early people may have dined on leftovers scavenged from bigger, stronger predators.

The bitten human jawbones add another angle to this story.

Marina Vegara-Riquelme studies our human ancestors and their fossils at the University of Alcalá in Spain. She led a team that examined H. habilis bones using artificial intelligence, or AI. Her group wanted to know what animal had left its bite marks on a human jaw.

Different carnivores have different eating habits. Hyenas often scavenge dead carcasses. Leopards, in contrast, rarely eat meat they didn’t kill. Knowing which one left the marks would suggest whether the H. habilis had been hunted or died some other way.

Even experts can struggle to tell apart the tooth marks of a leopard from those of a hyena, Vegara-Riquelme notes. But AI can. By comparing thousands of details, it can spot patterns too subtle for the human eye to see. Her team used thousands of tooth-mark images from modern carnivores to train the AI. Then they showed it the bones in question.

“Two Homo habilis specimens show tooth marks most likely inflicted by leopards,” Vegara-Riquelme says. That makes it look less like scavenging.  

Study co-author Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo co-directs the Institute of Evolution in Africa in Madrid, Spain. To him, it’s clear how the encounter ended. “That individual was preyed upon,” he says. “Not scavenged.”  

If true, what had the lives of H. habilis been like with lions and leopards as neighbors? Could survival have required new traits that helped our ancestors ascend the food web?

Life in a world of predators

For millions of years before H. habilis, our ape ancestors spent most of their time in trees. They might venture to the ground now and then. But when danger emerged, they’d dart into the trees and out of reach.

By the time H. habilis evolved, humans were walking upright (though not as well as today’s H. sapiens), spending far more time on the ground.

An open savanna offered new opportunities. Ambling upright helped early humans travel farther. It also gave them a better vantage to spot potential food across the landscape. But being out in the open may have made them easier targets, too, for powerful predators.

Craig Stanford studies predator and prey relationships among primates. He’s an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He’s spent years in Tanzania watching Africa’s monkeys work together and protect one another.

Life on the open savanna would have been risky for early humans, he says. Even if predators killed only a few people, the threat would have shaped how early species lived and behaved.

“Predation may have been rare, but that doesn’t mean it was unimportant,” Stanford says. “There’s no question that predation influenced our evolution.”

Many prey species rely on group living for protection. “You have more eyes to detect a predator coming,” Stanford explains. When one animal spots danger and yells an alarm, others can run or climb to safety.

And safety in numbers isn’t just about watching. It can also help to fight back.

In Tanzania, Stanford saw male colobus monkeys work together to fend off threats. They would leap onto chimpanzees that threatened them. An adult male chimp weighs about 54 kilograms (120 pounds); a colobus monkey only about 9 kg (20 lbs). “So three [monkeys] together weigh half of what the chimp weighs,” Stanford says. “They’re biting the chimps.” Such group attacks could fend off a chimp.

Early humans on the open savanna may have similarly benefited from teaming up. Faced with threats from big cats, people who were more alert and willing to cooperate may have been more likely to survive. If so, they could have passed along those traits to their offspring.

Working together for a better dinner

Survival wasn’t just about not becoming someone else’s meal, though. It also was about getting access to your own high-quality food. Here, too, cooperation would have helped.

Briana Pobiner works at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. She studies what ancient humans ate and how they got their food. Marks on fossil bones can say a lot about this, she says.

Early humans would have cut meat from wherever they could get it. Consider butchery marks on bones that don’t have a lot of meat on them — “like ankle bones and lower foot and leg bones,” says Pobiner. Here, she says, “We think [humans] mostly got the scraps after the predators ate.”

Such a pattern suggests people were scavenging.

With large prey, early humans likely ate after big carnivores had already taken the better meat. That doesn’t mean these humans didn’t hunt. They may have captured smaller animals on their own. Taking down large prey, however, would have been much harder and more dangerous.

“Early humans probably got the not-great parts of animals when they were able to eat meat,” Pobiner says. “The predators were getting the best parts.”

But, she adds, “At some point that changed.” By around 1.5 million years ago, fossils show stone-tool cut marks on bones from some of the meatiest parts of big game. By now, it seems, people were no longer eating just the leftovers.

Fossils can’t directly show cooperation. But the bone markings suggest humans gained better access to meat over time. Researchers think teamwork may have helped make that possible.

Working in groups would have given humans a better chance of getting larger prey and better meat. Sharing meat may have strengthened social bonds. Plus, large carcasses are hard for one person to process or defend.

Such cooperation may have paved the way for humans to become more successful.

Learning to control fire

People likely evolved group living for several reasons, cautions Richard Wrangham. He works at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. As a biological anthropologist, he studies how fire has shaped human evolution.

Around 1.8 million to 1.5 million years ago, fossils show the rise of a new species of human, Homo erectus. Compared to earlier species, such as H. habilis, H. erectus had longer legs, a larger body and a bigger brain. These changes suggest humans were better adapting to life on the ground. This may have included sleeping there rather than in trees.

Here, fire also may have been key. “Once you’ve got fire, it increases the amount of protection against predators substantially,” Wrangham says. Flames and smoke would have scared off big cats, especially at night. He says, “I would imagine that there was much more predation of [early humans] prior to fire.”

Groups able to control fire may no longer have needed to retreat to trees each night. Sleeping on the ground would have marked a major shift in human evolution. With time, arms got shorter. Legs got longer. Walking and running became more efficient. Such changes would have made them more effective hunters, too.

People who could travel long distances could also track prey across broad savannas.

Fire had another benefit: It helped people get more energy from their food.

Cooked food is easier to digest. That extra energy could have allowed brains to grow bigger and more complex. Wrangham explored this idea in the 2010 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

Ours is the only human species alive today. But earlier in history, multiple human species lived — and evolved — beside each other. Fossils suggest that not all of these species advanced at the same pace. The pressures of avoiding predators while getting enough food may have nudged some species higher in the food web. As a result of these gradual changes, some species flourished. All but one of them — H. sapiens — died out.

By 300,000 years ago, stone-tipped spears appeared. Archaeologists found dozens of these along with the bones of hunted and butchered animals at a site in Germany. The find suggests that people had become skilled hunters. They planned ahead and worked in groups to hunt big animals. No longer just surviving within their ecosystem, humans were beginning to dominate it.

Those leopard bites on ancient jawbones remind us that humans haven’t always been on top. Our ancestors came to survive by working together, sharing resources and developing new tools and skills. Over time, these behaviors helped people shift from fearing predators to competing with them.

That almost nothing hunts us is a fairly recent development. Our history has been shaped by our vulnerability and the behaviors that allowed our ancestors to survive long enough to thrive.  

One of Dublin's "lost" medieval castles has been found hiding in plain sight inside University College Dublin's Roebuck Castle. New research reveals that substantial remains of the Norman castle of Roebuck, an important fortress on one of the approach roads into the medieval city of Dublin, are preserved within the modern-day building.

A new study sheds light on how Syrian archaeologists risked their lives to rescue approximately 30,000 priceless artifacts from the Deir ez-Zor Museum during the summers of 2014 and 2015 as the city faced the imminent threat of capture by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Daesh.

About 40 years ago, researchers found ancient ship carvings on a temple wall in Cyprus, possibly all carved at once at the tail end of the Bronze Age, around the time of the infamous Bronze Age collapse. Then, decades later, a new study revealed they had missed nearly two dozen ancient carvings.

For many, the Bayeux Tapestry conjures images of clinker-built ships, prancing horses, the Normans feasting on chicken on the eve of the Battle of Hastings, and the arrow in King Harold's eye that ended centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule.

Sir John Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests. The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller—illicitly prized by Catholics in the Reformation—as belonging to Gage, exposes the split loyalties of one of Tudor England's great survivors.

Archaeologists have analyzed insect remains preserved in the 7th to 9th centuries AD funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina, Gran Canaria, and found that it was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage before being adapted into a burial site. The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists rarely identify a settlement from one object. They combine buildings, hearths, tools, food remains, activity areas, and patterns of rebuilding to understand a site.

The post How Do Archaeologists Tell a Settlement From a Ritual Complex? appeared first on Curiosmos.

Nearly 1,000 bones and teeth from three Granada caves show that Neolithic cannibalism was not one practice or one event. The dates and traces point to different stories.

The post What Happened in These Neolithic Caves? Human Bones Record More Than One Kind of Cannibalism appeared first on Curiosmos.

For many, the Bayeux Tapestry conjures images of clinker-built ships, prancing horses, the Normans feasting on chicken on the eve of the Battle of Hastings, and the arrow in King Harold's eye that ended centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule.

Sir John Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests. The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller—illicitly prized by Catholics in the Reformation—as belonging to Gage, exposes the split loyalties of one of Tudor England's great survivors.

Sir John Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests. The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller—illicitly prized by Catholics in the Reformation—as belonging to Gage, exposes the split loyalties of one of Tudor England's great survivors.

Archaeologists have analyzed insect remains preserved in the 7th to 9th centuries AD funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina, Gran Canaria, and found that it was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage before being adapted into a burial site. The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists have analyzed insect remains preserved in the 7th to 9th centuries AD funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina, Gran Canaria, and found that it was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage before being adapted into a burial site. The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity.

The Black Death is often remembered as a single catastrophic event that swept across Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing millions. Yet the disease did not disappear after that first devastating outbreak. For more than four centuries, plague continued to return in recurring waves, reshaping communities, economies and societies across Europe and beyond. A new study led by researchers at the University of Tartu sheds fresh light on this long and complex history by analyzing the DNA of the plague bacterium preserved in archaeological human remains. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Black Death is often remembered as a single catastrophic event that swept across Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing millions. Yet the disease did not disappear after that first devastating outbreak. For more than four centuries, plague continued to return in recurring waves, reshaping communities, economies and societies across Europe and beyond. A new study led by researchers at the University of Tartu sheds fresh light on this long and complex history by analyzing the DNA of the plague bacterium preserved in archaeological human remains. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines "digital unwrapping" with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically unrolled. The effort just got an additional boost. A team of researchers created their own contemporary model papyrus scrolls—charring them just like the originals—to validate a screening method to determine which of the Herculaneum scrolls were written in lead-based ink and hence are the most promising candidates for further analysis. They described the process in a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town of Pompeii wasn’t the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas, called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.

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© Seiler et al., 2026, PLoS ONE/CC0

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines "digital unwrapping" with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically unrolled. The effort just got an additional boost. A team of researchers created their own contemporary model papyrus scrolls—charring them just like the originals—to validate a screening method to determine which of the Herculaneum scrolls were written in lead-based ink and hence are the most promising candidates for further analysis. They described the process in a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town of Pompeii wasn’t the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas, called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.

Read full article

Comments

© Seiler et al., 2026, PLoS ONE/CC0

The Corps of Discovery Expedition set out in 1804, directed by President Thomas Jefferson to survey the United States’ newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. The exploration forms a core piece of early U.S. history. Picture a scene from the journey: It’s a cool morning, the silence punctuated by birdsong and the rustle of the breeze through the cottonwood trees. To one side, Commander William Clark, his rifle leaning against a plum tree and his rucksack nearby, squats over a latrine pit, unceremoniously heeding the call of nature. 

The Louisiana Purchase constituted a territory of around 828,000 square miles, which the U.S. had bought from France in 1803. This was, it is worth noting, largely without the consent of the Indigenous groups who had lived there for millennia. The purpose of the expedition was threefold: to find a practical trade route westward to the Pacific coast, to explore and document the territory, and to stake a claim to the area before any other European powers butted in. Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the 40-man team, plus their guide Sacagawea, spent more than two years trekking westward.

Believe it or not, the holes that were used as toilets along the march to the Pacific have been invaluable for archaeologists and historians. This is thanks especially to a type of treatment included in the expedition’s medical kit. 

How Lewis and Clark went to the bathroom

Everybody poops—it’s a universal human need. But most accounts of the Corps of Discovery’s journey leave out the details of how the Corps members dealt with bathroom business. 

Each of the campsites where the expedition spent time had an accompanying latrine pit, situated well away from camp for sanitary (and privacy) reasons. The latrines would have seen a lot of use, because the Corps of Discovery’s diet wasn’t the best for gut health. 

While the expedition members relied heavily on foraged and hunted food, they also carried backup rations. These included nearly 14,000 pounds of dry goods, including flour, salt, coffee, dried pork, and lard. All told, each member of the Corps ate around nine pounds of meat per day. All of that protein without lots and lots of fiber added up to frequent constipation. The untreated water they drank from rivers and creeks they encountered probably didn’t help their circumstances. Enter…Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills. 

The mercury constipation pills known as “thunderclappers”

In 1803, as preparation for the upcoming expedition, William Clark traveled to Philadelphia for a two-week medical crash course with Dr. Benjamin Rush. Rush was a prominent physician in his day, and a Founding Father of the United States. His signature is one of the 56 on the Declaration of Independence.

Rush taught Clark some basic field skills, such as bone-setting and wound treatment. Clark left Philadelphia with new skills and a well-stocked medical kit that included 50 dozen of Doctor Rush’s Bilious Pills. These were compounded tablets about the size of a raisin, composed of powerful laxative ingredients. The pills were nicknamed “thunderclappers” because of the speed with which they took effect. The main ingredient of the thunderclappers was calomel, or mercury chloride. 

Mercury, historically also called quicksilver, has been thought to have curative effects for centuries. It’s a metal that is liquid at room temperature, which seems miraculous in and of itself. 

It was also a popular treatment for syphilis. This is not to say it was an effective treatment for syphilis. When it was administered for that disease, slowly in low doses, patients were more likely to die from mercury poisoning than from the STI. 

When taken in larger doses, though, as in the thunderclapper pills, it prompted a quick evacuation, the body’s way of ejecting poison. The men of the Lewis and Clark expedition used these pills freely as a way to compensate for their high-protein and low-fiber diet. As a result, all the latrine pits they used between the Midwest and the Pacific coast were laced with high concentrations of mercury. 

Lewis and Clark pooped mercury. Today archaeologists use it to map their route.

As many an environmentalist will caution, mercury does not decompose when it’s in the ground. It stays put, and is detectable through modern soil testing techniques. The 600-plus latrines dug and used by the Corps of Discovery form a trail of their own, marked by mercury. 

The expedition was a government-sanctioned military expedition, so Lewis and Clark both kept copious notes on every aspect of their travels. Historians have tried to pinpoint the locations of these camps based on the expedition journals, with minimal success. 

The only campsite that archaeologists have been able to confirm so far is the Traveler’s Rest camp, just outside of Missoula, Montana. This is all thanks to the remains of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills, which left enough mercury in the ground to differentiate the remains of a latrine pit (or “sink” as they were called in the 1800s) from animal burrows or agricultural ditches. 

Archaeology is all about reconstructing the lives of people in the past, and it’s worth remembering that this means all aspects of life. Our own bodily functions remind us that we all share complex and interwoven histories, and that even the most mundane parts of our lives can be important in the future. 

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

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The post Lewis and Clark’s mercury-laced poop helped archaeologists trace their expedition appeared first on Popular Science.

A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romania’s Iași County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana Măriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza […]