BUTCHERED BONES: These cut-marked animal bones, dating to nearly 3.4 million years ago, push the origin of butchery back a stunning 800,000 years, researchers say.
Image: Copyright Dikika Research Project
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Researchers working in Ethiopia's remote Afar region have recovered evidence that humans began using stone tools and eating meat far earlier than previously thought. The finds—cut-marked animal bones dating to nearly 3.4 million years ago—push the origin of butchery back a stunning 800,000 years. Furthermore, these ancient butchers were not members of our own genus, Homo, but the more primitive Australopithecus, specifically A. afarensis, the species to which the celebrated Lucy fossil belongs.
Scientists have typically viewed tool use as the purview of Homo. Indeed, in 1964 Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his colleagues named the earliest Homo species, H. habilis ("handy man"), for its association with stone tools. Subsequent finds have since extended the evidence of stone tool use back to between 2.5 million and 2.6 million years ago. But exactly which member of the human family made and wielded these older tools was unclear, both because no human remains turned up in direct association with the tools and animal bones, and more than one human species lived in the area at this time. The earliest example of a clear association between humans and tools dated to 2.3 million years ago, and the human remains belonged to an early Homo species.
Still, archaeologists suspected that earlier stone tools remained to be discovered, because these examples seemed too advanced to represent humanity's first foray into tool manufacture. "Nearly everyone that works with the earliest stone tool industries at between 2.3 [million] and 2.5 million years has commented on the surprisingly high level of skill and understanding that we see in these early knappers. Most have predicted that something older will be found," says archaeologist Shannon P. McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
That hunch helped motivate McPherron and his colleagues, who have been working at a site in the Afar region called Dikika—just a few kilometers from the Lucy site—to look in older geologic deposits in the area for earlier evidence of stone tool use or manufacture. They were rewarded with bones from two animals—one cow-size and another goat-size—that display cutmarks and percussion marks indicative of flesh removal and marrow extraction with stone tools. McPherron, along with Dikika Research Project leader Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences and their collaborators, describe their discovery in an August 12 paper in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).
Because the earliest Homo remains date to just 2.3 million years ago, scientists can be certain that an australopithecine made the cut marks on the 3.4-million-year-old Dikika bones. And because the only human species that is known to have lived in the Dikika area during this time period is A. afarensis, it seems reasonably certain that this species in particular butchered the bones. (The A. afarensis remains found at Dikika include a spectacularly well-preserved skeleton of a youngster, popularly dubbed "Lucy's baby.")
Australopithecines had teeth and jaws that were in many ways adapted for eating fruit, seeds and other plant foods. "[The discovery] shows that meat was added to the diet earlier than we had thought," McPherron observes, although he notes that it is difficult to say what portion of the diet was meat. "We could now be looking at an extended period of time when hominins were including meat in their diet and experimenting with the use of stone tools."
Although the Dikika finds prove that A. afarensis was using tools, whether they were fashioning implements from stone or just picking up sharp-edged rocks from the landscape and using those to carve up the carcasses remains unknown, because no stone tools have turned up at the site. Future discoveries may resolve this question. They may also reveal the extent to which Lucy and her kin relied on stone gadgetry, setting the stage for developments that would profoundly impact the course of human evolution.
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11 Comments
Add CommentWatch the left hand. Keep watching the left hand. What crap! This is not science. These people decided that they wanted to find older remains that PROVE hominids were using tools earlier than previously thought, and LO, they found it. Amazing! Paleo-Anthropology has now been reduced to the same guessing game as weathermen. They might be cut marks, so they are cut marks. Losing my faith in anthropologists. I thought they were smarter than that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Losing my faith in anthropologists" - and gaining faith in what , the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this" These people decided that they wanted to find older remains that PROVE hominids were using tools earlier than previously thought..." so, you come out against their science, but rely on your ability to read minds?
If you have objections try to be specific and scientific in your objections, otherwise you just lose credibility.
@gnomonklater: yup, 'cause those cut marks look totally natural. Obviously must've been an animal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Cut marks" do not prove butchering and meat eating.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf they are true cut marks, all they prove is cutting. We have no idea why Australopithecus has done this cutting - if they really did, anyway.
@Extremophile: well, then, you completely missed the point of the article, didn't you?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPaleo-Anthropology, specialy in analysing V-shaped grooves on bone surface, must not confuse component of prove with a definite prove. In order to reconstruct past hominid activity at a site it is crucially important to have a context : P.F. Puech and R. Pant. BLUEPRINT TO STUDY THE FOOD OF FOSSIL MAN
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/bmsap_0037-8984_1980_num_7_1_3777
@SponnmanWoS,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhich point have I missed?
Paleo-Anthropologists have conditioned themselves to presume hunting/butchering in every little thing they find.
This presumption has only been validated by mutual agreement between researchers. Looking at fossil findings, there is no clear evidence to support this presumption, especially if you take a strictly Darwinian perspective.
The article is just another example for this behavior.
Pierre,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisis there somewhere an English version of this article available?
Sorry, no smoking Ginsu here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no evidence here of any tool use for cutting meat.
A couple of cuts does not evidence butchering. If somebody had butchered that leg (or whatever it is), why would there be only those two little parallel cuts?
Anyway, and FIRST off, what is the proof that there was meat on the bones when the cuts were made? (none)
So, how do we know a tool was used on the bone rather than the bone being rubbed or banged against the sharp edge of a rock or something? It could just be a case of some bored, idle hands grabbing the nearest thing (an old dried bone) and hitting it against the next nearest thing (the edge of a sharp rock).
When looking for something in particular, it can be easy to make the evidence fit whatever story you're after. I saw the marks on those bones, and I thought to myself, "yes, I've made marks like that on plenty of sticks while outdoors."
additional references:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-The Diet of Early Man: Evidence From Abrasion of Teeth and Tools. Current Anthropology 20, 590-592
___http://independent.academia.edu/pfpuech/Papers/252579/Tooth-Microwear-and-Dietary-Patterns-In-Early-Hominids-From-Laetoli--Hadar-and-Olduvai
---[PDF] 4. Dental microwear and Paleoanthropology: Cautions and possibilities - 16:15 - [ Traduire cette page ]
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de MF TEAFORD - 2007 - Cité 4 fois - Autres articles
Keywords: dental microwear, diet, australopithecines, primates, ..... 1986a; Puech et al., 1986; Radlanski and. Jäger, 1989; Teaford and Runestad, 1992; ...
norwalk.bluerange.se/ark/files/eventfile215.pdf
----pfpuech@yahoo.fr
Are you sure those cuts were not made by Velociraptors, which had a specialized claw just for that purpose?
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