快猫短视频

Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.

The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.

The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It is a plain near the lake, and 2 million years ago it was a fairly open grassland.

Gazelles and wildebeest were common in the area at the time and dozens of their bones have been excavated. Many of them carry cut marks, suggesting ancient humans cut meat off them. But it wasn鈥檛 clear whether the humans were the first to the carcasses 鈥� suggesting they hunted them 鈥� or whether they merely drove off big carnivorous animals that did the hunting.

at the University of San Diego in California and her colleagues have re-examined the cut marks on the bones. They compared them with modern sets of bones that were either from carcasses experimentally butchered by people or given to carnivores such as hyenas.

Carnivores tend to eat particular parts of prey. If ancient humans scavenged the carcasses afterwards, meat would already be missing from these areas and so the cut marks left by the ancient humans鈥� tools would lie on different parts of the bones, where there was still meat.

Parkinson鈥檚 team found that the ancient humans at Kanjera South were cutting the bones in the places that would be expected to have been stripped of meat by carnivores. This suggests there was still meat there, and that the humans were first on the scene. 鈥淗ominins were not scavenging from felid [big cat] kills, because they were butchering places where there would not be flesh on felid kills,鈥� says Parkinson. The implication is that the ancient humans were hunters, and didn鈥檛 get meat just by scavenging.

鈥淚t does provide more evidence for human consumption of meat at this time,鈥� says at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The Kanjera South bones provide some of the oldest strong evidence of humans hunting, says Parkinson. There are reports of bones with cut marks earlier, 3.4 million years ago, but it isn鈥檛 clear the marks were made by hominins.

We don鈥檛 know which hominins were active at Kanjera South, because there are no hominin bones. 鈥淲e have thousands of stone tools, so we know hominins were there, but they didn鈥檛 happen to die there at Kanjera South,鈥� says Parkinson.

The most likely candidate is Homo habilis, an early member of the Homo genus to which we belong, and which is known from nearby sites. But other hominins were in east Africa at the time, notably Paranthropus. Parkinson says Paranthropus is less likely to have been a hunter, as it had big back teeth, suggesting it mostly ate plants 鈥� but we can鈥檛 rule out that it had some hunting ability.

It also isn鈥檛 clear how the hominins hunted prey. There are many possibilities, Smith says, from wooden spears to ambushes.

Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution