Leakey and his team looked into the literature of humans being killed by ‘man-eaters’ and concluded that even when a human was killed, they weren’t immediately eaten. Hyenas, for example, said Leakey, can’t stand our smell, and will wait for a human to go putrid before touching the carcass, some 40 hours after he or she has died. That’s how terrible our natural smell is to predators apparently – they have to wait for the maggots to set in.
