A CACHE of turtles, crocodiles and catfish butchered some 2 million years ago has been uncovered near the eastern banks of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The remains, which are some of the earliest evidence of meat-eating in our ancestors, suggest that early humans may have found it easier to get protein from aquatic animals than to compete with other land hunters.
The fossils lie alongside hundreds of stone tools that were probably used to butcher the animals (Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, ). 鈥淚t鈥檚 a massive amount of material,鈥� says David Braun, an archaeologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, whose team began excavating the remains in 2004.
There are no hominin bones at the site, making it difficult to determine who made the tools and ate the meat. The cache was found below a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption 1.9 million years ago, but before a 2-million-year-old geomagnetic shift. That鈥檚 too early for Homo erectus. Braun says smaller, stockier hominins such as Homo habilis or even late australopithecines were responsible.
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The site represents our ancestors鈥� transition from herbivory to omnivory, Braun says. He suggests smaller early humans turned to hunting in water as they would have had trouble competing with carnivores on land.
Aquatic animals may have also provided nourishment that allowed our ancestors to boost their brain size. Fish and reptiles are rich in fats and other nutrients that are needed to build up brain matter.
鈥淎quatic animals may have provided nourishment that allowed our ancestors to boost their brain size鈥�
鈥淭he discovery expands our understanding of the prowess of the earliest toolmakers,鈥� says Richard Potts at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. But without evidence that early humans regularly ate marine animals, we can鈥檛 say that this was what boosted our brain size.
