The extinct Australopith, Paranthropus robustus, might not have been your ancestor, but they're at least a dead cousin.

They're a bipedal ape, living in Africa after our lineage's divergence with chimps.

It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out we're looking at a relative.

But Sherlock might have been welcome at one of the study sites all the same,

as one of the fossils we have from this species seems to belong to a murder victim.

The fossil belongs to a skull cap with two holes in it,

like someone tried to stab them through the brain.

One thing detectives sometimes do with victims who have been bitten during a crime

is they make a model of the teeth and try to line up the tooth marks with the wound and see if they fit.

In the 1960s, a paleontologist decided to utilize the same tactic. He took the

skull of a leopard, and he put its fangs on the skull cap, and, like Lego pieces, they fit perfectly.

As catalogued by National Geographic, this paleontologist was Dr. Bob Brain.

Yes, his last name is Brain.

No, you can't make this stuff up.

Brain came to the conclusion that a big cat must have carried out this attack,

and he suspected dynophilus, a large shabertooth cat from that

era, was the culprit. More recent analysis suggests instead that McGantarian was the killer,

another big cat. Scientists have now run carbon isotope ratio tests and found that

McGantyrian's ratios match those australopiths in the area.

You are what you eat.

But regardless of who did it, we know that long ago, big cats were trying to put their fangs into our brains.

Today, we're going to talk about the only living cat who kills the same way.

...