It is impossible to overstate Raymond Dart’s contributions to the field of palaeoanthropology. Not only did his 1924 discovery of the Taung child (Australopithecus africanus) verify Darwin’s prediction that Africa was the birthplace of humanity, but by the mid twentieth century he had also developed an influential hypothesis of early hominid behaviour. The ‘killer ape’ hypothesis, popularised in Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis, contended that an inherent violence in early hominids propelled the evolution of our lineage. Australopithecus africanus was conceptualised as a murderous species, members of which regularly cannibalised other hominids and curated their heads as trophies. A more prosaic, but fundamental, component of the hypothesis argued that A. africanus was also a proficient hunter. In support of this contention, Dart argued that large faunal assemblages associated with A. africanus, such as those from Makapansgat, were its feeding residues. These ideas so provoked Bob Brain, at the time a young South African naturalist, that he tested them at the Paranthropus robustus and Homo erectus site of Swartkrans (South Africa). Brain’s work ushered into palaeoanthropology the developing discipline of taphonomy, resulting ultimately in a new standard of scientific rigour for the field. Further, the data Brain generated at Swartkrans, including numerous Paranthropus fossils damaged by the teeth of large carnivores, falsified Dart’s imaginative hypothesis of australopithecines as mighty hunters, and suggested they were instead common prey of large carnivores. Since Brain’s seminal work, other taphonomic studies elsewhere in Africa have concluded that even members of the genus Homo were acquiescent in competition with carnivores for carcass resources. These results were largely embraced by non-specialists (including, prominently, textbook authors) throughout the 1980s and 1990s, to the disregard of contradictory studies that concluded early and profitable access to animal carcasses by East African Homo. Until our recent re-analyses of the Swartkrans faunas, the South African record has been comparatively less informative on the issue of hunting in post-Australopithecus africanus hominids. This chapter summarises some of our results, which conclude that Swartkrans hominids regularly gained early access to fleshed carcasses and exploited them effectively for food. These zooarchaeological results make sense in light of what is known of the palaeobiology of H. erectus, a species with high energy needs, which, in turn, necessitated a high-quality diet. Our current knowledge suggests strongly that that necessity was satisfied by the consumption of meat and marrow. Brain’s important work, falsifying the ‘killer ape’ hypothesis, has allowed palaeoanthropologists to consider early hominid hunting and aggressive scavenging on its own merits, unburdened by the more imaginative aspects of Dart’s idea regarding australopithecine inter-personal violence. In doing so, recent data have revealed that Dart was likely correct in the broadest sense when he postulated a ‘predatory transition’ from the ape-like adaptations of the first hominids to a human-like pattern for the first ‘men’, H. erectus.