It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Human–wildlife coexistence is often far from straightforward, with predators particularly hard hit: their numbers tend to fall sharply in areas close to human settlements, fields and pastureland.
This is not, however, a simple case of inevitable decline but a question of choices, Postdoctoral Researcher Miquel Torrents-TicóOpens in a new tab of the University of Helsinki argues in his recent study. Human attitudes towards predators play a crucial role in determining whether coexistence is possible.
Torrents-Ticó’s study compared spotted hyaena populations at two Kenyan sites, both shared with humans, grazing livestock and wild prey. While spotted hyaenas were mostly limited to the southern regions of Sibiloi National Park, they ranged across a wide area in the Laikipia conservancies regardless of human and livestock presence.
The crucial difference between the two sites, Torrents-Ticó notes, lies in human attitudes towards spotted hyaenas.
“Whereas herders in Sibiloi carried firearms and used lethal measures against spotted hyenas, those in Laikipia protected their livestock without killing predators. In other words, the distribution of spotted hyaenas was determined not by the number of livestock or humans, but by the level of human tolerance."
Torrents-Ticó suggests that the observations bring a new perspective to the human–nature relationship.
“Human attitudes and actions can directly influence the distribution of predators. Predators tend to avoid areas where they face high human intolerance, but where they are allowed to exist, coexistence with humans is more likely to succeed.”
In Finland, the findings may offer a new angle on the debate on wolves and other large predators living alongside humans, and underline just how significant human attitudes are to the survival of predator populations.
Urban scavengers like spotted hyenas are preventing over a thousand tonnes of carbon emissions annually in Ethiopia’s second-largest city, according to new research revealing the predators’ role as accidental eco-warriors.
By consuming organic waste that would otherwise rot, these predators are saving the city of Mekelle over $100,000 USD in waste management costs while reducing the significant sanitation risk associated with routine roadside dumping.
In Mekelle, a rapidly urbanising city with a population of over 660,000, over one million chickens, goats and sheep are slaughtered in people’s homes for food each year. The leftover parts of the animals not consumed by people are then discarded, with two thirds of the organic waste being dumped at roadsides or other open sites.
The University of Sheffield-led study reveals urban scavengers such as spotted hyenas, African wolves and vultures are providing a vital ecosystem service by consuming waste that, left to rot, releases greenhouse gases and spreads disease.
Research lead Dr Gidey Yirga, from the University of Sheffield’s School of Biosciences, said: “At a time when cities across the world are struggling with waste and climate goals, we’ve found that scavengers are providing essential ecosystem services while significantly reducing potentially catastrophic sanitation risks.
“Animals like spotted hyenas have adapted to a high-density, urban environment and have become an essential part of the city’s ecosystem.
“This demonstrates a mutually beneficial coexistence between people and large carnivores that, in most circumstances, require vast natural environments free of human intervention.”
To understand the scale of organic waste discarded across the city, researchers interviewed over 400 randomly selected households to understand their waste disposal habits. This data was extrapolated across the entire city, revealing that approximately 1,058,200 animals are slaughtered each year in people’s homes.
This generates 1,240.6 metric tonnes of meat waste – the equivalent to the total weight of roughly 31,000 live sheep. In a city with generally poor waste management and sanitation, this mountain of meat waste is dumped along roadsides and other open sites throughout the city.
The study found that by scavenging the meat waste, urban predators are preventing over 1,000 metric tonnes of carbon emissions entering the atmosphere and saving waste disposal services worth over $100,000 USD annually.
Dr Yirga added:“In our conversations with residents we found that they recognise and appreciate the benefits of living alongside these urban scavengers, highlighting the further potential of a peaceful coexistence between wildlife and humans in urban areas.
“This model could be applied to other Ethiopian cities and across many other African states where organic waste is routinely dumped at road sides.”
Having established hyenas and other scavengers’ value to the city, the research team is now turning its attention to the animals themselves. The next phase of the research will investigate how their urban lifestyle could be physically changing the animals by comparing them to their wild counterparts.
Thursday, January 08, 2026
The Bright Side: Fossils found in Morocco shed light on humanity's African roots
Fossils of archaic humans found in a cave in Casablanca are helping to fill a gap in the history of humanity's evolutionary lineage, with researchers saying they may represent a population that existed shortly before Homo sapiens populated Africa.
Fossilised bones and teeth dating to 773,000 years ago, unearthed in a Moroccan cave, are providing a deeper understanding of the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, representing the remains of archaic humans who may have been close ancestors of our species.
Researchers said the fossils – lower jawbones of two adults and a toddler, as well as teeth, a thigh bone and some vertebrae – were unearthed in a cave called Grotte à Hominidés at a site in the city of Casablanca. The cave appears to have been a den for predators, with the thigh bone bearing bite marks suggesting the person may have been hunted or scavenged by a hyena.
The researchers said the most appropriate interpretation is that these fossils represent an evolved form of the archaic human species Homo erectus, which first appeared about 1.9 million years ago in Africa and later spread to Eurasia.
The bones and teeth display a mix of primitive and more modern human characteristics. They fill a gap in the African fossil record of species in the human evolutionary lineage – called hominins – from about one million to 600,000 years ago.
According to the researchers, the fossils may represent an African population that existed shortly before the evolutionary split of the lineages that led to Homo sapiens in Africa and two closely related hominins – the Neanderthals and Denisovans – that inhabited Eurasia.
"I would be cautious about labeling them as 'the last common ancestor', but they are plausibly close to the populations from which later African – Homo sapiens – and Eurasian – Neanderthal and Denisovan – lineages ultimately emerged," said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Collège de France in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"The fossils show a mosaic of primitive and derived traits, consistent with evolutionary differentiation already underway during this period, while reinforcing a deep African ancestry for the Homo sapiens lineage," Hublin added.
The oldest-known fossils of Homo sapiens, dating to about 315,000 years ago, were also found in Morocco, at an archaeological site called Jebel Irhoud.
Knowing the age of the Grotte à Hominidés fossils, based on the magnetic signature of cave sediments surrounding the fossils, helped the researchers assess how this population fit into the human family tree.
"Establishing the age was essential to the interpretation of this material," Hublin added.
The fossils were buried by fine sediments over time and the cave entrance was sealed by a dune, enabling exceptional preservation of the remains. Hundreds of stone artefacts and thousands of animal bones were also discovered in the cave.
The Grotte à Hominidés human fossils are roughly the same age as fossils from a site called Gran Dolina near Atapuerca in Spain that represent an archaic human species called Homo antecessor. In fact, these fossils share some traits.
"The similarities between Gran Dolina and Grotte à Hominidés are intriguing and may reflect intermittent connections across the Strait of Gibraltar, a hypothesis that deserves further investigation," Hublin said.
Hominins from this time possessed body proportions similar to ours but with smaller brains.
The jawbone, or mandible, of the Grotte à Hominidés child, who was about 1-1/2 years old, was complete, while the mandible of one of the adults was nearly complete and the other was partial. One of the adult jawbones was built more robustly than the other, suggesting one was from a man and the other from a woman. The largest of the fossils was the adult thigh bone, or femur.
These people were capable of hunting prey but roamed a dangerous landscape and sometimes found themselves as the hunted, with large carnivores, including big cats and hyenas, on the prowl.
"Only the femur displays clear evidence of carnivore modification – gnawing and tooth marks – indicating consumption by a large carnivore. However, the cave appears primarily to have been a carnivore den that hominins used only occasionally. The absence of tooth marks on the mandibles does not imply that other parts of the bodies were not consumed by hyenas or other carnivores," Hublin said.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters)
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
The Super Predator: How Humans Became The Animal Kingdom’s Most Feared Hunters – OpEd
Humanity’s evolution into a super predator has reshaped ecosystems and instilled a primal fear in much of the animal kingdom.
Hunting is considered critical to human evolution by many researchers who believe that several characteristics that distinguish humans from our closest living relatives, the apes, may have partly resulted from our adaptation to hunting, including our large brain size.
Over time, however, the need to hunt for survival has been replaced by greed, leading to the exploitation of natural resources, which is destroying the environment and causing the extinction of thousands of species.
There has been a 60 percent decrease in the wildlife population between 1970 and 2014, according to the Living Planet 2018 report by the World Wildlife Fund. Referring to the report, the Guardian stated that “the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.” Hunting for Survival
The San People, also known as the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, have for generations employed persistence or endurance hunting to chase down prey such as the kudu. Groups of three or more men find a herd and scatter it, targeting the weakest, slowest, or heaviest animal in the herd. During the hunt, one of the Bushmen serves as the main runner, who finishes the last legs of the hunt by tracking and finally killing the prey. Although the Bushmen do employ more familiar tactics like ambushing, shooting poisoned darts, and throwing spears, persistence hunting has been a standby of the San People in an environment that favors human endurance and stamina.
Over the years, however, persistence hunting has become a topic of debate. In a 2007 article published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Henry T. Bunn, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Travis Rayne Pickering, a professor of anthropology from UW-Madison, questioned the assumption that endurance training was “regularly employed” during hunting and scavenging. They argued that humans would have relied more on their brains than their legs to hunt.
Bunn and Pickering studied a pile of bones found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, dating back to 1.8 million to 2 million years ago—which were unearthed by paleontologist Mary Leakey—and discovered that “most of the animals in the collection were either young adults or adults in their prime… To Bunn and Pickering, that suggested the animals hadn’t been chased down. And because there were butchering marks on the bones with the best meat, it was also safe to assume that humans hadn’t scavenged animal carcasses after being killed by other predators… Instead, Bunn believes ancient human hunters relied more on smarts than on persistence to capture their prey,” according to a 2019 article in Undark magazine.
Opposing this debate are researchers such as Eugène Morin, an evolutionary anthropologist at Trent University in Canada, and Bruce Winterhalder, from the Department of Anthropology and the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California, Davis. A 2024 article written by them, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, revealed that they scoured ethnographic records and identified almost 400 cases of long-distance running used for hunting around the world. Their research on energy expenditure shows that “running can be more efficient than walking for pursuing prey,” stated a Smithsonian magazine article.
Many other scholars have written about the “locomotor endurance” that humans possess compared to other animals, as well as the anatomical advantages of long legs, Achilles tendons, arched feet, and large, stress-bearing joints in our legs, which collectively contribute to our ability to run long distances.
Whether humans originally evolved as persistence hunters is a matter of debate. What is undeniable is that humans are among the most deadly predators on Earth. “From agricultural feed to medicine to the pet trade, modern society exploits wild animals in a way that surpasses even the most voracious, unfussy wild predator,” said a Smithsonian magazine article. Ways to Kill
We consider predation by humans broadly—and from the perspective of effects on prey populations—as any use that removes individuals from wild populations, lethally or otherwise… [ranging] from removal of live individuals for the pet trade, to harvesting by societies that rely heavily on hunting and fishing, to globalized, commercial fishing and trade of vertebrates, and interactions among these activities.
When a shark, a tiger, a boa constrictor, or even the rusty-spotted cat of South Asia kills another animal, its primary aim is survival. As carnivores, these animals must eat meat, and therefore, they must kill. But humans go beyond the necessary. In our years of remodeling landscapes and industrializing the wilderness, we have pushed animals toward extinction. Our activities have had maximum impact on the ocean, leading to the exploitation of 43 percent of Earth’s marine species. While these species are killed for several purposes, 72 percent of marine and freshwater fish species are being used for food. Taxonomically, birds were the most predated group, with 46 percent mainly being used as pets or for other “recreational pursuits.”
Meanwhile, “in the terrestrial realm, use as pets is almost twice as common (74 percent) as food use (39 percent),” according to the 2023 study. Sport hunting and other forms of activities (i.e., for trophies) accounted for 8 percent of the use of exploited terrestrial species.
Due to humanity’s alarming exploitation of 14,663 species, we are driving 39 percent of these species toward extinction. “We exploit around a third of all wild animals for food, medicines, or to keep as pets… That makes us hundreds of times more dangerous than natural predators such as the great white shark,” according to a 2023 BBC article, referring to an analysis by scientists. The article further stated that we were entering the Anthropocene, “the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.”
Today, human-induced climate crises and environmental damage are the forces that pulverize bones to dust. An analysis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2012 and 2020 revealed 99 percent consensus that human activity shapes climate change—a collective power that no other species on Earth has ever had. Not even the dinosaurs would have been able to out-roar the din of factories and exhaust pipes. Fearful Symmetry
Human beings have been termed “super predators,” surpassing other famous predators in the number of prey they kill. This has led to animals fearing us. “Consistent with humanity’s unique lethality, a growing number of playback experiments have demonstrated that fear of humans far exceeds that of the non-human apex predator in the system. In Africa, 95 percent of carnivore and ungulate species (e.g., giraffes, leopards, hyenas, zebras, rhinos, and elephants) in the Greater Kruger National Park ran more or faster on hearing humans compared with hearing lions,” stated the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.
An atavistic fear also afflicts animals when they see a human. We might be slower and weaker creatures compared to bears and lions, but to these animals, we look monstrous. “There is a threat level that comes from being bipedal,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to Live Science. So when, say, a kudu in the Kalahari Desert spots one of the San People or Bushmen jogging or walking toward it, the kudu bolts.
This ecology of fear has shifted the predator-prey paradigms, as ungulates such as white-tailed deer and moose will “shield” their offspring by giving birth close to houses and villages, utilizing the local predators’ fear of humans to create a safe environment for their offspring to grow up.
Wildlife researcher Hugh Webster said that research about animals fearing humans shows that “human impacts on animal behavior are even more wide-reaching than we thought. Perhaps the key point is that we need to identify the most disturbance-sensitive species and engineer protections for them that allow freedom from this pervasive fear,” writes Phoebe Weston, a biodiversity writer for the Guardian.
In the animal kingdom, humans now occupy a unique role, surpassing all other predators in lethality and reshaping the natural order through unchecked consumption and industrial-scale exploitation. Our presence instills a pervasive fear across ecosystems, altering animal behavior and disrupting millennia-old predator-prey dynamics. Yet this super predator status comes with unprecedented responsibility. Unlike other apex predators, humans possess the awareness, technology, and moral capacity to recognize the consequences of our actions and to mitigate the harm we inflict. The question before us is whether we will continue to exploit the web of life for short-term gain or harness our intelligence and ingenuity to protect it—ensuring that future generations inherit a planet where humans are not feared as destroyers, but remembered as stewards of the living world.
Author Bio: John Divinagracia is a writer and novelist. He is the author of It’s Always Snowing in Iberia (2021) and was a fellow at the 19th Ateneo National Writers Workshop in 2022. He is a writer at WorldAtlas and a contributing editor and author at the Observatory. He holds a cum laude degree in creative writing from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Saturday, October 04, 2025
The ‘big bad wolf’ fears the human ‘super predator’ – for good reason
Fear of the fabled ‘big bad wolf’ has dominated the public perception of wolves for millennia and strongly influences current debates concerning human-wildlife conflict. Humans both fear wolves and, perhaps more importantly, are concerned about wolves losing their fear of humans – because if they fear us, they avoid us and that offers protection.
A new Western University study shows that even where laws are in place to protect them, wolves fully fear the human ‘super predator.’
These findings by Western biology professor Liana Zanette – in collaboration with one of Europe’s leading wolf experts, Dries Kuijper from the Polish Academy of Sciences, and others – were published today in Current Biology.
Zanette and her colleagues conducted an unprecedented experiment across a vast 1,100 sq. km area in north-central Poland, demonstrating that wolves fully retain their fear of humans, even where laws exist to protect them. To conduct their experiment, the team deployed hidden, automated camera-speaker systems at the intersection of paths in the Tuchola Forest that, when triggered by an animal passing within a short distance (10 metres), filmed the response of the animal to hearing either humans speaking calmly in Polish, dogs barking or non-threatening controls (bird calls).
Wolves were more than twice as likely to run, and twice as fast to abandon the site, after hearing humans compared to control sounds (birds). The same was true of wolves’ prey (deer and wild boar).
By demonstrating experimentally that wolves fear humans, the study verifies that fear of humans, who are predominantly active in the daytime, forces wolves to restrict their activities to the night. Wolves were 4.9 times more nocturnal (active at night) than humans. In fact, wolves are not just nocturnal where Zanette and her team did their study, but everywhere humans are present, as shown in a recent continent-wide survey. This new experiment establishes that the reason is because wolves everywhere are fearful of humans.
“Wolves are not exceptional in fearing humans – and they have good reason to fear us,” said Zanette, a renowned wildlife ecologist. “Global surveys show humans kill prey at much higher rates than other predators and kill large carnivores like wolves at on average nine times the rate they die naturally, making humans a ‘super predator.’”
Consistent with humanity’s unique lethality, growing experimental evidence from every inhabited continent demonstrates that wildlife worldwide, including other large carnivores like leopards, hyenas and cougars, fear the human ‘super predator’ above all else.
Legally protected but still fearful
“Legal protection does not change wolves’ fear of humans because legal protection does not mean not killing wolves, it means not exterminating them. This is an important distinction,” said Zanette.
Humans remain very much a ‘super predator’ of wolves even where wolves are strictly protected, such as in the European Union, where humans legally and illegally kill wolves at seven times the rate they die naturally. France, for example, allows up to 20 per cent of the wolf population to be legally killed every year. Human killing of wolves in North America is comparable.
“At these rates, any truly fearless wolf that did not avoid humans would very soon be a dead wolf,” said Zanette.
Legal protection leading to fearless wolves – not scientifically supported
Wolves are now reoccupying areas in Europe and North America where they had been exterminated, leading to increased human-wolf encounters. This increase in encounters has been attributed to legal protection allowing the emergence of fearless wolves, but these new experimental results demonstrate this assumption is not scientifically supported.
“For wolves – like all creatures great and small – fear is primarily about food, specifically, how to avoid becoming food while trying to find food. Focusing on this fundamental risk-reward trade-off is critical,” said Zanette. “The certainty that wolves fear humans means we need to re-focus attention on what counterbalances this fear, rather than whether wolves are fearless.”
Humans are both uniquely lethal and unique in being normally surrounded by super-abundant, super high-quality food. Results of the study strongly indicate any apparently fearless wolf is actually a fearful wolf risking proximity to humans to get a bite of our ‘superfoods.’
The real problem, said Zanette, is how to keep the wolf from our human food.
“The critical significance of our study lies in re-focusing the discourse on human-wolf conflict toward public education on food storage, garbage removal and livestock protection – reducing wolf access to human foodstuffs,” said Zanette. “What our study establishes is that there is no alternate problem to contend with. There is no ‘big bad wolf’ unafraid of the human ‘super predator.’”
