Human ancestors butchered and ate each other, study reveals
As per the study, a 1.45-million-year-old hominin bone had cuts similar to butchery marks that have been found on animal bones from around the same time.
Cut marks found on fossils of human leg bones are one of the earliest pieces of evidence that show that in ancient times, humans butchered each other and ate the flesh for survival, a recent study by science journal Nature stated.
As per the study published by Nature on Monday, Early Pleistocene cut marked hominin fossil from Koobi Fora, Kenya, mentions that a 1.45-million-year-old hominin (human ancestral) bone had cuts similar to butchery marks that have been found on animal bones from around the same time.
One of the co-authors of the study, Briana Pobiner, a palaeoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, said, “The most logical conclusion is, like the other animals, this hominin was butchered to be eaten.” She added that the discovery was “shocking, honestly, and very surprising, but very exciting”.
Pobiner said that she had been examining a collection of fossils to look for animal bite marks at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, when she found “unexpected linear markings a few millimetres long on the fossil of a tibia belonging to an unidentified hominin species”, the report said.
She concluded that while the marks looked nothing like animal bites, they did resemble those that had been made by stone tools.
After taking these impressions, Pobiner compared them to around 900 marks, in a database, which had been made on new bones that had been marked by her colleagues using different methods.
The researchers then concluded that two of the 11 marks had been made by lion bites, however, the other nine were by stone tools, which suggested that one human might have butchered another.
As per the report, Pobiner said the authors then “ruled out other cut-making processes, such as wear or blemishes left by people handling the bone after it was were discovered; the colour of the marks match that of the bone’s surface, indicating they are of the same age”.
As quoted by Nature, Jessica Thompson, a palaeoanthropologist at Yale University has said that the context and position of the scratches made by humans on other humans is just as important to know.
The report stated that the flesh could be cut for other purposes than eating it, like ritualistic of funerary. However, such behaviour has not been found in Kenyan societies around that time.
Thompson said, “This discovery represents more than simply a single odd tale of an unfortunate and long-ago event. It suggests that hominins using stone tools to butcher and consume other hominins happened as a typical part of life for our ancestors.”
Zeresenay Alemseged, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, said, as quoted by the journal, “The evidence is so sporadic at this point, all we’re doing is connecting the dots. We are trying to go inside the brains of the early hominids, which means it’s going to be very complex.”
