Humans eat meat by cutting up our food, then putting the pieces in our mouths. Turns out, we have been doing this much longer than previously believed. One of our ancestral species, Australopithecus afarensis, was already using stone tools to flay meat off bones 3.4 million years ago. We know because every cut leaves small nicks. Such marked bones near an A. afarensis site in Ethiopia were found in 2009. These little bones, showing cuts and scratches inflicted by sharp objects and dents produced by crushing hammers, pushed back our previous understanding of tool use by 800,000 years!
Of course, that’s if the archaeologists got it right. As another archaeologist pointed out, fresh bones trampled by animals can create marks that mimic stone tool cut marks. Luckily science is pretty advanced these days. Extensive statistical analysis, finished in 2015, concluded that the marks were indeed not caused by animals. Go australopithecus afarensis!
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