Human ancestors may have butchered and eaten each other, new study finds
Bones can tell researchers all kinds of stories – what era the owner of the remains hailed from, their gender, their age, where they lived or illnesses they may have experienced in life. A new study of a fossilized bone collection revealed information a little less mundane and a little more “Silence of the Lambs,” however, as a series of uncovered cut marks point toward the possibility of human relatives living 1.45 million years ago possibly butchering and eating each other.
Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, came across macabre discovery while studying the Nairobi National Museum collection of the National Museums of Kenya.
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Pobiner discovered a tibia, or shin bone, sporting nine cuts that appeared to be made not by animal interactions, but stone tools. Pobiner had originally been examining the bones for signs of animals that may have once hunted our ancestors. Instead, she said in a Smithsonian news release, her findings were consistent with cuts found on animal fossils prepped to become meals.
“These cut marks look very similar to what I’ve seen on animal fossils that were being processed for consumption,” Pobiner said in the release. “It seems most likely that the meat from this leg was eaten and that it was eaten for nutrition as opposed to for a ritual.”
The study, published in Scientific Reports on June 26, reported this finding as the oldest proof of this action known with such a high degree of confidence. In other words, this is the oldest example researchers have found related to an act of hominins butchering each other.
To verify her findings, Pobiner sent molds of the cut to co-author Michael Pante of Colorado State University, who rendered a 3D model of them. After comparing them to an existing database, Pante was able to determine that nine of the 11 marks present on the bone were made by stone tools, while the remaining two were likely made by the teeth of a big cat.
Additionally, Pobiner noted that the marks were located where muscle meets bone, a spot any meat processor or at-home chef will recognize as an ideal place to cut when prepping a body for consumption. The marks were also made at the same angle and oriented the same way, indicating one hand may have repeatedly swung the same tool in order to complete the job.
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While the bone belongs to some lineage ancestral to our own, it cannot tell scientists by itself whether it belonged to Australopithecus boisei, Homo erectus or another hominin species altogether. Because of this, it cannot be definitively determined if this was an act of cannibalism as we know it now (consuming another from one’s own species) or an example of members of related but not identical species using each other as a food source.
But Pobiner said available information does strongly point to this possibility.
“The information we have tells us that hominins were likely eating other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago,” Pobiner said.
“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.”