Re: What would Hitchcock have thought...?

[Adrienne Mayor <afmayor@aol.com>]

This might help explain the traditional Native American stories of  
giant raptors that carried off folks to their nests, until now  
thought to be fanciful tales.

Many stories tell of giant predatory birds that were feared in the  
distant past before present-day humans. I found such tales among the  
Crow, Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Yakima, and Yaqui of Sonora, Mexico, and  
an ancient petroglyph in Arizona appears to depict a giant bird  
carrying a struggling human in its beak. (For details and  
illustrations by paleo-artist Rick Spears and others, plus the rock  
art, see my "Fossil Legends of the First Americans.")

This new discovery in South Africa proves that the idea of giant  
birds preying on early humans is not mere myth (birds were bigger  
then, and humans smaller). And it supports the controversial notion  
that some giant raptor-bird traditions represent ancestral memories  
of teratorns and other giant raptors that overlapped with early  
humans. The tales could also have been based on discoveries of the  
fossil or mummified remains of huge raptor-birds.

The Yaqui story can be traced back to pre-Columbian times, and  
appears to conflate ancestral memory supported by more recent fossil  
finds. The Yaqui story of "The Monter Bird of Skeleton Mountain"  
describes the discovery of the remains of a giant bird that used to  
prey on people in very primitive times, when they still lived in  
shelters made of sticks. The Yaqui found the giant bird skeleton by  
digging a pit on a hillside with rich Pleistocene deposits.
Adrienne Mayor

On Jan 13, 2006, at 8:49 AM, Tim Williams wrote:


Dinosaur-related, insofar as one lineage of theropods hunted our  
primate ancestors long after the K/T extinction...

(This report has been doing the rounds on the Internet, and this is  
just one version).

http://smh.com.au/news/science/stone-age-whodunit-is-solved/ 
2006/01/13/1137118970126.html

"Stone Age whodunit is solved

A TWO-million-year-old murder mystery has been solved - and it  
reveals that our ancestors were hunted by huge birds of prey.

New research shows that one such bird killed the so-called Taung  
Child, whose ape-like skull, unearthed in South Africa in 1924, is  
famed as one of the most important human evolutionary finds."

....

The article will apparently feature in an upcoming issue of American  
Journal of Physical Anthropology, but it's not yet mentioned at the  
journal site.

Cheers

Tim