"Fossil animal droppings, charcoal from ancient fires and bone fragments litter the ground of one of the world's most important human evolution sites, new research reveals. A team of scientists have used modern geoarchaeological techniques to unearth new details of day-to-day life in the famous Denisova Cave complex in Siberia's Altai Mountains." Source: Science Daily.
"...The latest evidence from southern Siberia shows that large cave-dwelling carnivores once dominated the landscape, competing for more than 300,000 years with ancient tribes for prime space in cave shelters."
Note: "The prehistory of Australia is the period between the first human habitation of the Australian continent and the colonization of Australia in 1788 which marks the start of consistent documentation of Australia. This period is estimated to have lasted between 40,000 and 60,000 years." Source: Wikipedia.
Prehistoric Australia had its share of giant creatures like the "thunder bird" Genyornis and the bizarre Thylacoleo, a carnivorous marsupial the size of a lion, and the first humans who settled in Australia may have encountered Megalania, a huge predatory monitor lizard thought to have disappeared about 50,000 years ago. Also known as the "giant ripper lizard," Megalania" is the largest terrestrial lizard known to have existed." (Wikipedia)
According to the BBC (2011), the venomous Megalania "could easily have caught prey of twice its own weight, and could have tackled animals of up to 10 times its own weight," so it wouldn't have had any trouble taking on a human being. Growing up to 23 feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds, "a fully grown giant ripper lizard would be able to tackle even the largest Diprotodon," a hippopotamus-sized marsupial. Aboriginal humans armed with little more than wooden spears would have had little chance against one of these predatory lizards.
It would be interesting to find out if some of the legends of the Australian aborigines could be traced back to prehistoric encounters with the Megalania. It's probably impossible to know, but Aboriginal mythology is full of creatures said to lurk in "swamps, billabongs [seasonal river channels], creeks, riverbeds, and waterholes." The Aborigines have at least two lizard deities: Adnoartina, the lizard guard of Uluru, and Mangar-kunjer-kunja, a lizard god who is thought to have created humans, but they hold protective and generative roles. If it's remembered at all, I'm guessing that Megalania would appear in Aboriginal legends as some kind of mythological monster.
"Despite the façade of modernity and a world under technical human control, being alone in the dark far from others can show us a different side of humanity. Alone in unfamiliar places we quickly become more cautious, more observant and sometimes even fearful. The genes that helped us survive a much more savage world still whisper to us the truth in the dark; we were prey before we were top predators." Source: Earth.com.
"One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland." Source: Live Science (2018).
"However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said."
Note: The bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, one of several caves in Ojcow National Park in Poland, are "the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland." The bird that ate the child's bones isn't identified, which is too bad. I've got this picture of a Neanderthal kid wandering off from its cave and getting gobbled up by a huge terror bird, but the terror birds, unfortunately, lived in South America during a different time period.
"Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorousflightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago." Source: Wikipedia.
Terror birds spread into North America around 2.7 million years ago after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents, leading to a cross-migration of flora and fauna known as the Great American Interchange.
It's possible that early humans coexisted with descendants of these monsters in South America. According to Wikipedia, "...reports from Uruguay of new findings of relatively small forms [of terror birds] dating to 18,000 and 96,000 years ago would imply that phorusrhacids survived there until very recently (i.e., until the late Pleistocene); the initial report of such a recent date has been questioned."
"In 2015, the frozen remains of two newborn P. spelaea cubs were found by researchers in Pleistocene-age permafrost in the Russian republic of Yakutia, Eastern Siberia. A third youngster was discovered in the same region in 2017, during mining works. The three small cubs were preserved in such pristine condition that scientists brought de-extinction [1] talks to the table." Source: The Vintage News (2018). More information here.
[1] De-extinction, aka resurrection biology or species revivalism, is a proposed process for bringing back extinct species or reviving endangered species, usually by cloning.
According to Wikipedia, the two cubs unearthed in 2015, "estimated to be between 25,000 and 55,000 years old, were discovered close to the Uyandina River in Yakutia, Siberia in permafrost. Research results indicate that the cubs were likely barely a week old at the time of their deaths, as their milk teeth had not fully erupted. Further evidence shows the cubs were hidden at a den site until they were old enough to join the pride. Researchers think that the cubs were trapped and killed by a landslide, and that without air, the cubs were preserved in such good condition. A second expedition to the site where the cubs were found was planned for 2016, in hopes of finding either the remains of a third cub or possibly the cubs' mother."
A third well-preserved cave lion cub was discovered at a different location in 2017. According to the Siberian Times (Nov. 2017), "[t]he prehistoric animal was found in permafrost on the bank of Tirekhtykh River of the Abyisky district of Yakutia by a local resident Boris Berezhnov." The remains, thought to be around 50,000 years old, are also so well-preserved that there has been talk of trying to clone the animal.
Note: Chirpy pop-science presenters are an abomination.
One part of the story which is missing from most of the mass media reports is that the third "cave lion cub" may not be a cave lion after all:
"A Russian man hunting for mammoth tusks in Eastern Siberia made an unexpected discovery in September: the incredibly furry, slightly squished mummy of a cat from the last ice age. Scientists are celebrating the rare discovery, but they're not certain on one major point — whether the mummy is a cave lion cub or a lynx kitten, paleontologists told Live Science." Source: Live Science (2017). It's possible that the cub is a prehistoric Eurasian lynx. I'm not sure where the question stands as of Oct. 2018.
Cloning these cave lions or lynxes or whatever they were probably isn't possible, at least in the foreseeable future, according to several experts quoted by Live Science.
"North American lions[1], cheetahs and short-faced bears: Those are just a few fearsome critters from 25,000 years ago paleontologists already might have found in their first excavation of a bizarre northern Wyoming cave in 30 years." Source: CBS News (2014).
"The only way in or out of Natural Trap Cave is a 15-foot-wide hole in the ground that's almost impossible to see until you're next to it. Over tens of thousands of years, several thousand insufficiently wary animals plummeted more than 80 feet into the chilly, dim, cathedral-like cavern." (CBS News)
Excavations in the cave were carried out back in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a period of inactivity until 2014. A later expedition (2016) discovered a new type of wolf in the cave: "A wolf with stronger jaws, an appetite for megafauna, and one that paleontologists never expected to find so far south. according to Scientific American (2016). Until this discovery, "the wolves of the Wyoming boneyard were categorized as either gray wolves or dire wolves."
In 2015, the Billings Gazette reported that "In addition to the American lion, the team has discovered bones from camels, the American cheetah and a tiny fragment of a mammoth’s tooth in the past two years. They also found remains from wolves, weasels, foxes, bighorn sheep, pronghorn and many horses."
Next video report is from 2014 and features a typically stupid intro.
"Scientists doubt that humans played a role in forcing wildlife into Natural Trap Cave. The bell-shaped cave, nearly impossible for humans to safely enter and exit, never yielded any evidence of human occupations. Scientists believe instead that the cave was located within a major wildlife migratory corridor. The cave is closed to protect paleontological resources." Source: National Park Service.
Comment: I'm probably suffering from a bad case of romantic primitivism, but I'd love to be able to go back in time to prehistoric North America when it was still a wilderness populated by jaguars, mammoths, dire wolves and short-faced bears. Of course, if I accidentally stumbled into a time portal and found myself stranded in Wyoming 20,000 years ago, I'd probably starve to death in a couple of weeks or end up getting eaten myself, but it might be worth it just to catch a glimpse of the country before it was overrun by strip-malls and thumb-typing Ipod zombies.
"In the early 1960's, when Dr. Jane Goodall began her now famous study of the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park, Tanzania, it was thought that chimpanzees were strictly vegetarian. In fact, when Goodall first reported this behavior, many people were skeptical and claimed that meat was not a natural part of the chimpanzee diet. Today, hunting by chimpanzees at Gombe has been well documented ... and hunting has also been observed at most other sites in Africa where chimpanzees have been studied ... At Gombe, we now know that chimpanzees may kill and eat more than 150 small and medium sized animals such as monkeys, wild pigs and small antelopes each year." Source: University of Southern California.
"The chimpanzee and another ape, the bonobo, are humans' closest living relatives," according to the American Museum of Natural History. Chimpanzees, it would seem, are inherently violent, though some argue that chimpanzee violence is the result of human interference:
"Of all of the world's species, humans and chimpanzees are some of the only to engage in coordinated attacks on other members of their same species. Jane Goodall was among the first to introduce the occurrence of lethal inter-community killings and since then primatologists and anthropologists have long debated the concept of warfare in this genus. Research theories have pointed to increased gains and benefits of killing off competitors and opening up increased access to key resources such as food or mates. In contrast, others have argued that warfare is a result of human impact on chimpanzees, such as habitat destruction or food provisioning, rather than adaptive strategies." Source: Archaeology News Network (2014).
Even if chimpanzee warfare is caused by human impact, the fact that chimpanzees are capable of coordinated attacks on each other suggests that this kind of violence is somehow inherent in their nature.
"About 65,000 years ago, a large carnivore — perhaps a cave hyena — chomped down on the face of a (likely dead) Neanderthal. Then, that carnivore partially digested two of the hominin's teeth before regurgitating them, a new study suggests." Source: Live Science.
"Mauricio Antón Ortuzar (born 1961 in Bilbao, Spain) is a paleoartist and illustrator specialized in the scientific reconstruction of extinct life, well known for his influential paintings of hominids, extinct carnivores and other vertebrate fossil groups. His works illustrate a great number of books, scientific papers, private collections and museums in many parts of the world. He currently works in association with the Natural Science Museum in Madrid. " Source: Wikipedia.