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Hello. This video is meant for entertainment and educational purposes, and is 100% organic, AI-free.
A documentary-style look at prehistoric predators that could have hunted early humans, from giant crocodiles and hyenas to saber-tooth cats, and why our ancestors were once low on the food chain.
Key Takeaways
- Early humans were once a regular food source for many large predators and were not at the top of the food chain.
- Solitude increased vulnerability, and social group living was a key survival strategy.
- Fear of isolation is an evolved survival mechanism rooted in millions of years of predation pressure.
- Stone technology gradually reduced human vulnerability over time, though the video's claims rely on estimates and speculative reconstructions.
What the video covers
- The video opens by stating it is entertainment and educational content and is 100% organic, AI-free.
- Early humans, as weaker apes, were vulnerable especially when isolated from their group, since loners are easier targets than group members.
- Human meat is considered palatable to many carnivores and omnivores, and the video treats our species as ordinary prey in deep prehistory.
- Quinkana, an extinct Australian mekosuchine crocodile, is presented as a serrated-toothed apex predator from the Oligocene to the Pleistocene.
- The giant short-faced hyena, with specialized premolars and reinforced enamel, is described as a bone-cracking predator and kleptoparasitic scavenger.
- The Purussaurus brasiliensis, a giant caiman-like crocodilian, is compared to a school bus in size and credited with an estimated bite force of about 15,500 PSI.
- Bite-force comparisons contrast human (120-160 PSI), dog (200-300 PSI), and Tyrannosaurus rex (8,000-12,800 PSI) estimates.
- The Megantereon, a false saber-tooth cat, is linked to the Homo erectus skull D2280 from Dmanisi Cave, which has bite marks matching its teeth.
- A 500,000-year-old human femur from Thomas Quarry 1 in Morocco shows bite marks consistent with hyena predation or scavenging.
- The video notes a March 2026 description of Crocodylus lucius venator, a crocodile from Ethiopia's Hadar Formation living alongside Lucy 3.4 to 3 million years ago.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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bigger brain that's left all by itself is much easier to eat than if it were within the context of its group. Even our chimpanzee and bonobo relatives very rarely stray from their own respective troops. The truth is that human meat is
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Our fear of loneliness is one of the most useful survival mechanisms we have built right into our brains, and it dates back millions of years.
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we've collectively learned this lesson over and over and over again, but since the invention of Acheulean technology, we've learned to fear the creatures we share this earth with less and less.
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A weaker ape with a bigger brain that's left all by itself is much easier to eat than if it were within the context of its group.
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Instead, we were simply another animal of no particular consequence. A meal for some and a threat to others. The oldest, most dangerous animal we have on this list today is most certainly the crocodile. Not that one, this one. Their
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Even our chimpanzee and bonobo relatives very rarely stray from their own respective troops.
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brasiliensis, which was about 41 ft length, about the size of an average school bus. I'm not going to go too far into Purussaurus brasiliensis, but let's make something very clear here. The average bite force of a human being is
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The truth is that human meat is highly palatable to many carnivorous and omnivorous animals.
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lbs per square inch. That is 7 tons of force. Your femur, the strongest bone in your body, breaks with just 2,000 PSI of localized pressure. That guy stomped around on four legs, but earlier crocodiles were strangely bipedal. We
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Serial killers and cannibals have described human beings as being most akin to pork and beef.
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crocodiles called mekosuchines that are unfortunately now entirely extinct. Australia used to be just absolutely fat with megafauna. Other than the megalania, another monster that we'll cover in a different video, the Quinkana was the apex predator of the late
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The Smithsonian actually has a very interesting article about it if you'd like to go check that out.
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arrived. We're going to be noticing a lot of that in this video. This animal had teeth that were compressed laterally with sharp steak knife serrated edges.
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Anyways, we've collectively learned this lesson over and over and over again, but since the invention of Acheulean technology, we've learned to fear the creatures we share this earth with less and less.
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thick brush or bush, ambushed you and or chased you down, bitten you really hard, whipped you around a little, let you walk until you passed out, and then ate you. Not too far off from our own hunting style back in the day. Oh, and
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That being said, there was a time before then when we were much farther from the top of the food chain than we are today.
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reptile that chases you and lets you bleed out so that it can eat you with a little bit more leisure. Unfortunately, the Quinkana was not the only crocodile around at the time that would have eaten our ancestors. In March of 2026,
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Instead, we were simply another animal of no particular consequence.
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that lived in the rivers and wetlands of the Hadar Formation in Ethiopia between 3.4 and 3 million years ago, placing it in the same time and region as Lucy.
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A meal for some and a threat to others.
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Once upon a time, there was this hyena called the giant short-faced hyena that used the combination of its humongous lion-sized body alongside its specialized premolar teeth with microstructurally reinforced enamel to crack and crunch the bones of its victims with relative ease. The nickname
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The oldest, most dangerous animal we have on this list today is most certainly the crocodile.
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place. Bone marrow is incredibly nutrient and calorie rich. It's also generally easier to digest compared to the thicker meat that surrounds the bone. Most mammals, including hominids, are able to eat it raw. So, early human beings developed sharp stone cleavers in
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Not that one, this one.
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have still occasionally actively hunted, they were more kleptoparasitic scavengers, which just means they would have tried to steal fresh kill from other predators. This giant hyena would have also had that characteristic sloping backward stature with those long forelegs, a trait adapted so that when
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Their lineage, by the way, goes back pretty far.
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500,000-year-old early human femur recovered from Thomas Quarry 1, an archaeological site in Morocco, shows bite marks consistent with hyena predation or scavenging.
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Modern crocodile body plans generally stabilized more around the Cretaceous period, roughly 95 million years ago.
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down and crunch your bones. If you were to ever come across this creature in real life, your best bet at survival would be the likely chance that it was just too lazy to come after you.
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Lucky for us, our genus would not have encountered the Lovecraftian beast that was the Purussaurus brasiliensis, which was about 41 feet in length, about the size of an average school bus.
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least nowhere in my research I was able to find that. So, that's why we're focusing more on the Megantereon, which is basically its smaller cousin in, you know, just to paraphrase it.
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I'm not going to go too far into Purussaurus brasiliensis, but let's make something very clear here.
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civets. Though their nickname is a touch misleading considering the fact that they are often met with the moniker of saber-tooth tiger, even though this species is not a tiger at all. So, what makes the false saber-tooth tiger false?
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The average bite force of a human being is 120 to 160 pounds per square inch.
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Their skull structure, their locomotion, even their claws exhibit distinct differences from true felines. That false saber-tooth cat likely would not have been around to hawk down your average solitary hominid at any point in our history given that their family
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The average bite force for a dog is 200 to 300 PSI.
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Now, carbon isotope analysis of its teeth does suggest that it preferred grazing animals over primates. So, while it could have eaten a hominid, it was likely not specifically targeting us as much as the Megantereon may have been.
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The average bite force for a Tyrannosaurus rex is 8,000 to 12,800 PSI.
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personally I find this more interesting piece of evidence from Dmanisi Cave is the D2280 skull, which is a Homo erectus cranium with bite marks on the occipital bone that match the dimensions of the Megantereon saber teeth exactly.
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And the average bite force for the Purussaurus brasiliensis was 15,500 pounds per square inch.
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say, for example, that you are a Homo erectus living around 1.8 million years ago. You sit at the river's edge peacefully listening to the flowing water. You're there for a drink. It's been a hot day. Your group isn't far,
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That is 7 tons of force.
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that tells us when we're being watched. You turn around too late. Now there's a pair of forward-facing eyes adapted for tracking prey locked directly onto you.
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Your femur, the strongest bone in your body, breaks with just 2,000 PSI of localized pressure.
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cat chomps down on your head so quickly and easily that you don't even have time to process the pain. It might have happened like that. It's certainly true that if a saber-tooth cat was hungry enough and there were no medium-sized
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That guy stomped around on four legs, but earlier crocodiles were strangely bipedal.
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versus the Megantereon. Interestingly enough, we did compete with these creatures for the same food sources, and similar bite marks to that of D2280 have been found on other saber-tooth cats in competitive encounters. Generally, however, this cat, along with most of
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We thankfully would not have run into either of these, but we would unfortunately have had to deal with this guy, the Quinkana.
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proves to be a pretty delicious opportunity for any animal willing to use their energy to take it out. On that point, eagles would have also attempted to take a bite out of a child or smaller species of our genus if it was hungry
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The Quinkana would have most definitely had an appetite for Homo sapiens and really anything made of meat.
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antelopes, rodents, or like we just spoke about, small hominids. The Taung Child skull possesses talon marks on its orbits, the bone cavity in the skull that houses your eyeballs, identical to the marks in the eye sockets of modern
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They belonged to a group of crocodiles called mekosuchines that are unfortunately now entirely extinct.
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while its family was distracted. I have to apologize for the shorter length of this section as this bird would have been very unlikely to attempt to attack a fully grown Homo erectus, Homo habilis, or Homo sapien for that matter.
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Australia used to be just absolutely fat with megafauna.
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Leopards. The most documented, most consistent, most relentless predator of our entire genus across millions of years of fossil evidence. If there is one animal on this list that was genuinely and persistently after us, it's most certainly the leopard. Back in
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Other than the Megalania, another monster that we'll cover in a different video, the Quinkana was the apex predator of the late Oligocene to the Pleistocene.
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hominid skull, SK 54, dating back roughly 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago. On both the left and the right parietal bones were two carnivorous puncture marks. Those marks conform almost perfectly to the canines of a leopard fossil found in the exact same cave
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The genus as a whole goes back around 25 million years, but the species we care about today, Quinkana fortirostrum, was the only one stomping around Australia right up until around 40,000 years ago, just after the time the first Homo sapiens arrived.
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most of the early 20th century, we assumed that our ancestors were the dominant species. Raymond Dart had a whole theory called the killer ape hypothesis, suggesting our ancestors were aggressive hunters who dominated the environments that surrounded them.
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We're going to be noticing a lot of that in this video.
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processes that affect organic remains from the moment of death to their final discovery as fossils. Across Swartkrans, where Bob Brain found his skull, and virtually every other major hominin site in South Africa, all point to the same gruesome conclusion, that leopards were
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This animal had teeth that were compressed laterally with sharp, steak-knife serrated edges.
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Leopards have this habit of dragging their kill into trees and elevated spots to keep them away from scavengers. Over thousands of years, those remains fall into the cave systems below and fossilize. Some of our most important fossil evidence exists because a leopard
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Those jagged edges would have allowed her to bite and instantly slice through flesh.
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Panthera pardus, an extant species that hunts modern primates today with a fossil record that dates back 2 million years. So, not only have they eaten humans, but they also eat humans, as in currently, today. Leopards kill dozens of people every year, primarily in India
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Rather than pulling the iconic crocodilian death roll combo, the Quinkana would have more likely had a human-like approach to hunting.
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Nope. But not that crocodile, this one this time. The Crocodylus Anthropophagus. That name, Anthropophagus, is from the Greek words anthropos, meaning human, and phagus, meaning eater, in reference to the evidence that this animal included hominids in its diet. It's
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By that I mean they would have hidden behind a thick brush or bush, ambushed you and/or chased you down, bitten you really hard, whipped you around a little, let you walk until you passed out, and then ate you.
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reminded for a moment of a line from Kindred Neanderthal Life Love Death and Art by Rebecca Rag Skee's, where she describes something as gobsmackingly huge, which I just absolutely adored.
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Not too far off from our own hunting style back in the day.
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latest find, scientists suspect that crocodiles not only ate our ancestors, but that they were, in fact, one of our biggest oppositions at that point in time. Their hunting style was more like the Crocodylus niloticus, Lucy's hunter, we spoke about for a moment previously.
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Oh, and it had long legs.
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same time as the newfound horned carnivore. Within roughly 300 ft from where the reptile skeleton was discovered. Quote, "I cannot guarantee these crocodiles were killing people, but they were certainly biting them. Our ancestors would have had to be cautious
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Picture a crocodile.
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Every other animal mentioned in this video has left us physical traces of their presence in our lives or rather deaths. Snakes are a little bit different. They swallow prey whole and leave no trace fossils behind. No bite marks on bone, no puncture wounds in
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Now, picture one with long legs.
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constrictors, the ones who kill with hugs, are some of the biggest, baddest culprits. The reticulated python, African rock python, green anaconda, boa constrictor, and Madagascan ground boa, just to name a few. Thomas N. Headland and Harry W. Greene published a
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That's the Quinkana.
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specifically. Six people died between 1934 and 1973. One of those incidents involved a python entering a family's home at night, killing two children, and being found coiled around one of them swallowing it head first when the father came home. We also have documented
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She was 3 to 6 meters, 10 to 20 feet in length, and weighed up to approximately 200 kg.
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right now covers both constrictors and venomous snake species and it's linked in the description if you wanted to go down that rabbit hole yourself. What makes this entire thing significantly more unsettling is the timeline.
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That's 440 pounds for my Americans out there.
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There's no living snake today that specializes in hunting humans, but for a good chunk of our evolutionary history, hominids were absolutely on the menu.
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Just a big, scary reptile that chases you and lets you bleed out so that it can eat you with a little bit more leisure.
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eat you. Unfortunately, now I'm just another YouTuber talking about cannibalism, but I'm not talking about modern cannibalism now. What I'm speaking about specifically is evidence of hominins eating other hominins who may or may not have been in the same
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Unfortunately, the Quinkana was not the only crocodile around at the time that would have eaten our ancestors.
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homogeneous Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens in particular carving each other up during the Pleistocene epoch.
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In March of 2026, researchers led by the University of Iowa formally described and named a brand new species of crocodile called Crocodylus lucius venator, literally translating to "Lucy's hunter."
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Being alone has never been a particularly safe or smart thing to do at any point in our lineage. So, let's all do our best to take care and stay close to one another. It's in our biology. Also, never stop ingesting as
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Yes, that Lucy.
Topics:prehistoric megafaunahuman evolutionsaber-tooth catPurussaurusQuinkanagiant hyenaHomo erectusAustralian megafaunabite forcepaleontology
