We think of early men as hunters, but prehistoric people were hunted as well, by gigantic birds as well as big cats. But at least we got even with the cats?there is evidence that eating early humans gave them ulcers.

A fossil of a “missing link” that was once assumed to have been killed by a leopard or saber-toothed tiger is now thought to have been killed by a giant predatory bird. In LiveScience.com, Alexandra Zavis quotes paelo- anthropologist Lee Berger as saying, “These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared.”

But plenty of prehistoric people WERE killed by the giant cats that roamed the Savannah in Africa thousands of years ago. We now know that ulcers are caused by a certain type of bacteria, probably transmitted (in humans at least) by kissing. The microbes responsible for ulcers in humans are very similar to the ones that cause ulcers in big cats. Scientists don’t know why this is the case, but think it could be that these cats became infected after eating us, in a sort of early version of “Montezuma’s Revenge.”

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk

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