Before Fire, the Night Belonged to the Predators | Full Documentary

Two million years ago, our ancestors were not the confident hunters we like to imagine. They were small, lightly built primates with no claws, no fangs and no speed, sharing the African savanna with animals that regarded them as food. And the bones tell the story: some fossilized hominin remains carry puncture wounds and gnaw marks matching the teeth of large carnivores. This full documentary is the story of the predators that hunted us, and how a defenceless primate outlasted every one of them. It begins with the saber toothed cats. Smilodon, whose canines reached seven inches and curved like daggers, killed by grappling prey down and driving those teeth into the throat. In Eurasia and Africa, the taller, slender Homotherium held its own territory. The La Brea Tar Pits have yielded thousands of Smilodon skeletons. Then came the hunters that worked together. The dire wolf, Canis dirus, was heavier than any wolf alive today, with a bite strong enough to crack bone, and hunted in coordinated packs that exploited exactly what humans could not hide - an injured adult, a slow elder, a child at the edge of the group. Alongside it, the giant short faced hyena Pachycrocuta brevirostris outweighed any hyena alive now. Others overwhelmed by size alone. Arctodus simus, the short faced bear, stood over five feet at the shoulder and eleven feet when it reared - solitary, unpredictable, and impossible to negotiate with over a carcass. And the danger was not only mammalian: terror birds stood ten feet tall, thirty-foot crocodilians waited at the water everything had to drink from, and in Australia the monitor lizard Megalania grew past twenty feet.