OUR ANCIENT ancestors were far more clever than scientists could have imagined. An exciting fossil find in Ethiopia proves that these ape-like creatures were using stone tools to butcher meat 3.4 million years ago, 800,000 years earlier than previously realised.
The find also shows that this tool use was no accident. The stone implements needed for cutting flesh and breaking open animal bones were brought from another location.
The evidence was found during a dig in Dikika, Ethiopia, the details of which are published in the journal Nature. Two animal bones were discovered, the rib of a cow-sized animal and the thigh bone of a small goat-sized antelope. Both carried the telltale signs of butchery. A sharp-edged stone sliced away meat and sinew, leaving behind grooves cut into the bone surface. And markings show a blunt stone was used to smash bones to get at the marrow inside.
Nor is there any confusion about who used the tools. The international team led by Dr Zereseney Alemseged said the marks could only have been made by an Australopithecus afarensis,an extinct species that, like us, walked upright. And now we know they also – unexpectedly – used tools.
Palaeoanthropologists have long assumed that tool use only got started when our genus, Homo, first arose. Clearly, however, this behaviour emerged much earlier.
For many years, A afarensisranked as the oldest known human ancestor, a species made famous by the discovery in 1974 of the skeletal remains of "Lucy".
Lucy’s fossilised bones showed that while ape-like she walked on two legs like her later human relatives. Now this latest discovery shows that she could also find tools and carry them to where they were needed.
Lead author Dr Shannon McPherron and colleagues also point out that Lucy and her peers could extract a highly nutritious meal, most likely from carrion left behind by larger carnivores. It would have allowed A afarensis to venture into new territories knowing a useful food source was always at hand.