Paleoanthropologists have found multiple cut marks on a 1.45-million-year-old (Early Pleistocene) hominin fossil found in the Koobi Fora Formation in the Turkana region of Kenya.
“The information we have tells us that hominins were likely eating other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago,” said National Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner.
“There are numerous other examples of species from the human evolutionary tree consuming each other for nutrition, but this fossil suggests that our species’ relatives were eating each other to survive further into the past than we recognized.”
In July 2017, Dr. Pobiner undertook a pilot study of hominin fossils from the Turkana region of Kenya dated to 1.8 to 1.5 million years ago, with an expectation of potentially finding some carnivore damage on these fossils.
However, she unexpectedly observed potential butchery marks on a single fossil: a fossilized hominin tibia, or shin bone.
This observation was unexpected because while butchery marks left by hominins on animal fossils beginning by at least the Early Pleistocene point to increased meat and marrow acquisition during the evolution of the genus Homo and hundreds of cut marked fossils of other animals have been identified from the Koobi Fora Formation, no cut marks on hominin fossils from this temporal and geographic area have been reported.
Dr. Pobiner and colleagues compared the shape of the marks to a database of 898 individual tooth, butchery and trample marks created through controlled experiments.
The analysis positively identified nine of the 11 marks as clear matches for the type of damage inflicted by stone tools.
The other two marks were likely bite marks from a big cat, with a lion being the closest match.
“The bite marks could have come from one of the three different types of saber-tooth cats prowling the landscape at the time the owner of this shin bone was alive,” Dr. Pobiner said.
“By themselves, the…
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