OUR ANCESTORS may have scavenged much of their meat from supplies left
in trees by leopards, according to two researchers at Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, Canada. Leopards have a habit of storing their kills,
usually gazelles and other small ungulates, high in trees. In such places,
the meat is safe from lions and hyenas, but it would have been within easy
reach of hominids.
John Cavallo and Robert Blumenshine believe that leopards’ kills are
a food resource that researchers have neglected. Scientists have debated
extensively whether our ancestors in Africa scavenged or hunted, or whether
they combined both activities, during a period lasting from about 2.5 million
to about 1 million years ago.
Cavallo and Blumenshine found that leopards in the Serengeti National
Park in Tanzania temporarily abandon partially eaten kills, or even complete
animals, that they have stored in trees. Between bouts of feeding, they
may remain out of sight of the tree for several hours. In all, it may take
two days or more for a leopard to finish eating its kill (Journal of Human
Evolution, vol 18, p 393).
Early hominids, such as Homo habilis, could probably climb trees easily,
and they were active during the day. Cavallo and Blumenshine believe, therefore,
that kills abandoned by leopards could have provided the hominids with a
regular source of meat and marrow. They say that hominids would have spent
much less effort on scavenging these carcasses than on hunting. They would
also have run fewer risks.
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Cavallo and Blumenshine also point out that leopards tend to reuse a
particular tree for their cache and keep the same, small territorial area
for a long time. This source could, therefore, have provided early hominids
with a predictable supply of food.
The researchers say that leopards could have retaliated by attacking
and eating hominids. Indeed, there seems to be evidence of such behaviour,
particularly at a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa.
At Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and at other hominid sites from the period
in East Africa, archaeologists have recovered the bones of small, medium
and large mammals. Many of them show signs of having their flesh removed
with sharp, stone tools. Many palaeoanthropologists believe that the early
hominids who carried out the butchering scavenged the larger animals from
lion and hyena kills whenever possible. However, the researchers have believed
until now that such opportunities were rare, because large carnivores usually
eat the whole of an antelope.
Cavallo and Blumenshine believe that early hominids could have relied
for their animal protein entirely on such opportunistic scavenging on the
ground and in trees. In other words, these hominids did not need to hunt
at all.
