In 2000, archaeologists discovered the 300,000 to 400,000-year-old remains of three ancient elephants along with 87 stone tools at the Pampore in the Kashmir Valley, India. In a new paper in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers describe their discovery of elephant bone flakes which suggests that hominins struck the bones to extract marrow, an energy-dense fatty tissue. In a separate paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, they describe the elephant bones, which belong to the extinct straight-tusked elephant genus Palaeoloxodon.
To date, only one fossil hominin — the Narmada human — has ever been found on the Indian subcontinent.
Its mix of features from older and more recent hominin species indicate the Indian subcontinent must have played an important role in early human dispersal.
Prior to the fossil’s discovery in 1982, paleontologists only had stone tool artifacts to give a rough sketch of our ancestors’ presence on the subcontinent.
“So, the question is, who are these hominins? What are they doing on the landscape and are they going after big game or not?” said Dr. Advait Jukar, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“Now we know for sure, at least in the Kashmir Valley, these hominins are eating elephants.”
The stone tools likely used for marrow extraction at the Pampore site were made with basalt, a type of rock not found in the local area.
Paleontologists believe the raw materials were brought from elsewhere before being fully knapped, or shaped, at the site.
Based on the method of construction, they concluded that the site and the tools were 300,000 to 400,000 years old.
Previously, the earliest evidence of butchery in India dated back less than ten thousand years.
“It might just be that people haven’t looked closely enough or are sampling in the wrong place,” Dr. Jukar said.
“But up until now, there hasn’t been any direct evidence of humans feeding on large…
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