Redacción Ciencia (EFE).- 1.45 million years ago, evolutionary relatives close to humans fought among themselves, dismembered each other and probably practiced cannibalism, according to a study by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History published this Monday in Scientific Reports .
The research, led by paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner, is based on indentations found in fossil bones of human relatives from that time.
First evidence of cannibalism
The study describes cut marks found on a 1.45-million-year-old left tibia from a relative of Homo sapiens found in northern Kenya, which could be the oldest evidence of cannibalism.
The paleoanthropologist found the fossilized tibia in the Nairobi National Museum collections of the National Museums of Kenya while searching for clues about predators of ancient relatives of humans.
Examining it for the bite marks of extinct beasts, he discovered what immediately appeared to him to be evidence of butchery.
To find out, Pobiner made casts of the cuts, and sent them to co-author Michael Pante of Colorado State University, who scanned and compared them to a database of 898 individual tooth marks, butchery created through controlled experiments.
Damage dealt by stone tools
The analysis determined that nine of the eleven marks clearly corresponded to the type of damage inflicted by stone tools and another two were big cat bites, probably saber-toothed cats.
While the cut marks alone don’t prove that the human relative who inflicted them also ate the leg, Pobiner thinks it’s most likely because the marks are where the calf muscle meets the bone, a good place to cut. if you want to extract a piece of meat.
“These cut marks are very similar to ones I have seen on animal fossils processed for consumption. It seems most likely that the meat of this leg was eaten for nourishment and not for ritual,” Pobiner explained.
However, although it could be a case of cannibalism, Pobiner believes there is insufficient evidence to make such a claim because cannibalism requires that the eater and the eaten be of the same species.
The analyzed fossil bone was initially identified as Australopithecus boisei and later, in 1990, it was reclassified as Homo erectus, but experts currently agree that there is not enough information to assign the specimen to a specific hominid species.
The use of stone tools also does not clarify which species was able to make the cuts.
Recent research by Rick Potts, a professor at the National Museum of Natural History, has called into question the hypothesis that only one genus, Homo, made and used stone tools, so this fossil could be a case of cannibalism or a simple interspecies attack.
a south african skull
Another fossil, a skull first found in South Africa in 1976, has sparked debate over the oldest known case of human relatives killing each other.
The skull, between 1.5 and 2.6 million years old, has been studied twice (in 2000 and in 2018) and both works disagree on the origin of the marks just below the right cheekbone of the skull.
One of them maintains that the marks are the result of stone tools wielded by relatives of the hominids and the other that they were formed by contact with sharp-edged stone blocks found against the skull.
Furthermore, even if ancient hominids did produce the markings, it is unclear whether they killed each other for food, given the absence of large muscle groups in the skull.
For Pobiner, this shocking new find is proof of the value of museum collections, where “astonishing discoveries can be made by taking a second look at fossils.”