The skull of the Taung child (Australopithecus africanus); the fragmentary remains of Orrorin; the scattered bones of Homo erectus from Dragon Bone Hill; a skullcap of a young Paranthropus from Swartkrans, South Africa. What do all these hominin fossils have in common? They all bear the tell-tale marks of predators, from birds of prey to gigantic hyenas, and run distinctly against the notion that humans have always dominated the landscape. There have always been toothy shadows that stalked the night during our history, and the significance of this fact is the focus of Donna Hart and Robert Sussman’s Man the Hunted, which has just come out in an expanded edition.

For much of the 20th century hunting and meat-eating were considered