First use of stone tools and systematic meat-eating are earlier than thought
The ancestors of early humans used stone tools to butcher animal carcasses nearly 1m years earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists revised the date after spotting distinctive cut and crush marks made by stone tools on animal bones dating to 3.4m years ago.
The remains, including a rib from a cow-like creature and a thigh bone from an animal the size of a goat, were recovered from riverbed sediments in Dikika in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia during an expedition last January.
The marks show where stone tools were used to slice and scrape meat from the carcasses and where the bones were crushed to expose the nutritious marrow inside.
The discovery suggests meat was on the menu far back in our evolutionary history, and long before the arrival of the first human species, Homo habilis, 2.3m years ago.
“We were just walking along when we discovered the two bones,” said Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “We picked up the rib fragment, flipped it over and there were these two, clear marks. Soon after, we found the second bone, also with a lot of marks on it. Right away we knew we had something potentially important.”
Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/11/bones-stone-tools-meat-eating
Always dodgy, a single – if singular – piece of evidence. Perhaps the interpretation requires a ‘perhaps’?
And, even if a perhaps Australopithecine species did this, it may not have been in the direct line to H. sap. – a transient local discovery only. But that’s evolution for you, blundering about, more failure than success.
My county Norfolk recently turned up the most northerly early tools at Happisburgh, nearly 1M years ago. But even this use (H. antecessor?) may not connect with the perhaps ‘out of Africa’ H. saps spreading perhaps around 100,000 years ago.
But it is all great fun of course – and quite certainly much more interesting than religion!