{"id":3990,"date":"2006-01-13T07:50:13","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T07:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groonk.net\/blog\/?p=3990"},"modified":"2006-01-13T07:50:13","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T07:50:13","slug":"prehistoric-ape-men-had-intense-bird-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/2006\/01\/prehistoric-ape-men-had-intense-bird-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Prehistoric Ape-men had intense bird-fear"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"blocked\">JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/apnews.myway.com\/\/article\/20060112\/D8F35RBGM.html\" class=\"external external_icon\">A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared,&#8221; Lee Berger, a paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg&#8217;s University of Witwatersrand, said as he presented his conclusions about a mystery that has been debated since the remains of the possible human ancestor known as the Taung child were discovered in 1924.<\/p>\n<p>The Taung child&#8217;s discovery led to the search for human origins in Africa, instead of in Asia or Europe as once theorized. Researchers regard the fossil of the ape-man, or australopethicus africanus, as evidence of the &#8220;missing link&#8221; in human evolution.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers had speculated the Taung child was killed by a leopard or saber-toothed feline. But 10 years ago, Berger and fellow researcher Ron Clarke submitted the theory the hunter was a large predatory bird, based on the fact most of the other fossils found at the same site were small monkeys that showed signs of having been killed by a predatory bird. <\/p><\/div>\n<p>CAW! CAW!<\/p>\n<p>Swoop.<\/p>\n<p>Snatch!<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re dead.<\/p>\n<p>(via 7d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) &#8211; A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds. &#8220;These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.groonk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}