been shaped over millennia to be afraid, but not just of anything. Possibly our ancestors greatest fear was that they might become a feast for a carnivorous predator. As science writer David Quammen has put it, 'among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat. There's certainly fossil evidence to back this up, suggesting that carly hominids were preyed on by carnivores and that they scavenged from the kill sites of large felines, and vice versa. Modern-day hunter-gatherers, such as the Ache foragers In Paraguay, still suffer high mortality rates from snakes and fcline attacks. Such threats have left their marks on our cognitive development. Research by Nobuo Masataka and others shows that children as young as three are especially