Our ancestors weren't bird watchers. They were bird food.

There was a time when many animals were scary. But today we just like looking at them,

even the really dangerous ones. People want to get put in cages and dipped underwater with

sharks. They want to hop in jeeps and drive around Africa to check out the lions.

Our day-to-day life is one where we worry about taxes. We worry about where we left our phone or whether or not we left the stove on.

We were about our grades or our income or our social status. getting eaten alive isn't on the list of fears.

We certainly aren't looking around worrying about massive birds swooping down and taking our kids away.

But our ancestors did worry about that.

Today we look at birds. Back in the day, we had to look out for birds.

Our lineage, the human lineage, separated from that of chimps and bonobos about five million years ago.

We evolved.

They did too, of course. We are still evolving and so are they, but we evolved, and we have many fossils from that in-between time period where we were very different from our chimp cousins,

but also very different from our modern selves.

One of those fossils is known today as the Tong Child, a young primate,

neither chimp nor human, but at once chimp-like and human-like. Scientists estimate that the

child died as a mere three-year-old.

Their skull was found among the bones of tortoises, baboons, rodents, bats, and birds.

It was also found near eggshells.

Inside the child's eye sockets were marks from the talons of an eagle.

This sounds like an unimaginable nightmare from a lost time when parents couldn't tell their

kids that monsters weren't real,

from a time when beasts could swoop down from the sky

...