Homo erectus, an ancient human ancestor, could have been the one being eaten or doing the eating (Picture: Getty)
To our early relatives, cannibalism may not have been such a no-go area.
New evidence, found in an old museum collection, suggests hominims were butchering and eating each other at least 1.45million years ago.
US Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner was re-examining the fossilised shin bone of a relative of Homo sapiens – humans – when she noticed a number of small, clean cut marks.
Suspecting these looked very much like the telltale signs of a stone tool chopping away, Ms Pobiner made a mould of the surface and sent them to Colorado State University associate professor Michael Pante.
With no knowledge of where the marks came from, Professor Pante analsyed a 3D scan against 898 individual tooth, butchery and trample marks created during controlled experiments.
The result?
Nine of the 11 marks matched the type of damage inflicted by stone tools.
The marks left on an ancient shin bone are thought to have been made by stone tools (Picture: Pobiner, Panter and Keevil)
‘The information we have tells us that hominins were likely eating other hominins at least 1.45million years ago,’ said 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 recognised.’
While the cut marks only indicate an ancient human cut the leg, and cannot determine what happened next, they are located where the calf muscle is attached to the bone via tendons – in other words, exactly where someone might cut if hoping to strip off the flesh.
The consistent orientation of the marks also suggests a repeated, deliberate effort to cut through the tissue.
‘These cut marks look very similar to what I’ve seen on animal fossils that were being processed for consumption,’ said Pobiner. ‘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.’
However, even if the end result was intended for eating, the team can’t be sure this was cannibalism in action because neither the species of the individual being eaten nor the species doing the eating are known. The definition of cannibalism is the consuming of a member of the same species.
Other fossils show similar cut marks (Picture: Pobiner, Panter and Keevil)
When originally discovered in modern-day Kenya, the shin bone fossil was identified as Australopithecus boisei, a small early hominim from east Africa living between 1.2 and 2.3million years ago. They were nicknamed ‘Nutcracker Man’ for their big teeth and strong jaw muscles.
In 1990 the fossil was reclassified as Homo erectus – the first of our ancestors to have human-like looks and body proportions, and the first to migrate out of Africa – but more recently it has been agreed that there isn’t enough information to classify it.
If in fact it was one early human species eating another, that is instead termed anthropophagy.
It is also unknown exactly how the individual died. Of the 11 marks on the bone, the two not identified as stone tool cuts are thought to have been inflicted by a species of big cat, of which there were several roaming the continent at the time. A lion is the best match, but there were also three different saber-tooth cats alive at the same time.
That suggests either the individual was mauled by a big cat who was scared off by other hominims before it could eat, or the remains of the individual were left out and scavenged.
Either way, it was a grisly end for this early relative.
The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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It was unlucky end for one individual.