She who would not be Our Ancestor (2022) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

About 50 years ago I read an article about the remains of a woman who died violently some few million years ago. Part of her skull was intact and displayed two punctures near where the occipital and parietal bones meet. The woman was a Homo Habilis, (a "handy man"), an early toolmaking variety of humans that shared northern Africa with Homo Erectus.
She was about three feet tall, in her late teens, which meant she was an adult of childbearing age and probably had a mate about five to six feet tall that normally would have been the one dealing with sabretooth cats, an apex predator of the time.
She somehow became separated from her relatives and was stalked and killed by a hunting cat. The distance of the punctures indicated a feline smaller than an adult Smilodon, (Sabertoothed Tiger), possibly a juvenile or another related variety.
The cranial punctures were probably not what killed her. more likely the animal would have broken her neck with a swipe of its paw or choked her to death by closing its jaws on her neck. It then would have dragged her corpse to another site (leaving the punctures where it grasped her for dragging) and eaten her soft tissues, carrying some back to its cubs and burying the rest for a later meal.
The burying helped the remains to survive the intervening millennia. But the presence of other bones, besides the skull fragments, suggest the cat never returned to claim the corpse.
In this image I have attempted to suggest other details left out of this narrative. Beside her lies a bag made of bark and grasses, holding a collection of roots of some monocotyledonous plant. This provides an explanation for her separation from her family group. Seeking roots, she could have strayed too far away, and they were either unaware of her plight, or saw that she was lost and chose not to risk injury in a pointless rescue effort. She holds a broken femur as a digging tool. This goes with her suggested activity and provides a possible explanation for the cat not returning for her body. It is not shown, but I'm suggesting her kneeling position as she dug may have thrown off the cat's attack and it had to go for the neck bite. This left it vulnerable to a stab in the side or hind leg by the tool the woman held in her hand. The wound could have become infected, and the cat unable to return.
Another factor is that the corpse wouldn't have been preserved in dry, loose ground. Plants like onions, camas root, cattail, etc. tend to grow near water or damp ground. Flooding soon after the woman's death could have helped preserve her remains and that fits in with the rest of the narrative.
So, this picture is a sample of Paleontological forensic illustration, something with which I do not have great experience expertise. That's why I'm using a fifty-year-old National Geographic article as a source. My usual random squiggle approach led to a suggested image, and I developed it into this illustration as I progressed.
Why would I spend time on this? Just being able to know about something that happened this long ago is amazing. That it happened to a human being more like than unlike you or I is even more amazing. And I think it tells another sort of story, one about the tenacity of our ancestors living in a world vastly different but no less challenging than what most of us face today. This woman was probably more than halfway through her natural lifetime ... at less than eighteen years. We have come far and yet not far at all.

Related themes

Homo HabilusSabertoothed CatPaleontologyLifeDeath