Scientists again called the ancestors of people cannibals

Scientists from the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian University announced the discovery of the oldest evidence that human ancestors ate their own kind. They described the bone of an ancient hominin, 1.45 million years old, with traces of incisions made with a stone tool. The authors of the study believe that the most likely explanation is the eating of each other’s meat by hominins, but other scientists were skeptical about the find.

An article about the discovery was published at the end of June in the scientific journal scientific reports. The authors of the study studied the fossil remains of hominins – a subfamily of hominids to which humans belong, as well as chimpanzees, gorillas and some extinct species – whose age is estimated at 1.45 million years. On these remains, found in the Koobi Fora area in Kenya, the researchers found traces of being cut with stone tools.

The authors of the article, paleoanthropologists Briana Pobiner, Michael Pant and Trevor Keevil, considered this to be strong evidence that ancient human ancestors killed and ate other representatives of related species. Initially, Ms. Pobiner studied the bones of ancient human ancestors from the collection of the National Museum of Nairobi in Kenya to understand what prehistoric predators could hunt them. As a result, on one of their bones, she found traces of incisions.

Briana Pobiner sent a cast of the bone to her colleague Michael Pant of the University of Colorado. He made a 3D model of the bone and compared the damage to a database of nearly 900 animal bites, cuts and other types of damage. According to Mr. Pant, nine of the eleven damages on the bone correspond exactly to the incisions made by stone tools. The remaining two lesions were most likely caused by the teeth of a predator such as a saber-toothed cat.

Scientists admit that such cuts alone are not one hundred percent proof that the hominin whose bone they studied was eaten by relatives. But Briana Pobiner and her colleagues believe that this is the most likely scenario: the incisions indicate that, most likely, they tried to remove the meat from the bone with a knife.

“These cuts are very similar to what I saw on the remains of animals that were butchered for food. It seems most likely that the meat from… the leg was eaten… and for the purpose of nutrition, and not as part of a ritual,” notes Briana Pobiner.

“The information that we have suggests that hominins ate other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago. There are many other examples of how species from the human evolutionary tree ate each other, but these remains confirm that relatives of our species began to eat each other for survival much earlier than previously thought, ”she says.

Some scientists who did not take part in the study agree with the findings. So, a zooarchaeologist from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) Rafael Hanon said that these traces really look more like the ill-fated leg was eaten, and not used in some ritual actions. True, he made a reservation, just by the fact that the meat was cut, one cannot speak with certainty about cannibalism.

The authors of the study also emphasize that this is not necessarily cannibalism – because in this case, the hominins had to eat representatives of their own, and not just related species. At first it was believed that the studied bone belonged to Boyce’s paranthropus, after further research, that it belonged to Homo erectus. However, in the end, scientists recognized that it was impossible to determine the species of this hominin with sufficient accuracy.

The view that this study confirms that hominids eat each other is disputed by other scientists. Palmira Saladier, a zooarchaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, says scientists don’t have enough data to judge this. She notes that both eating this meat and ritually eating the meat of a defeated enemy, or even some ritual actions without eating meat, but simply cutting it off, can take place here.

University of Cape Town archaeologist Jonathan Sahle notes that this discovery, like many others, leaves room for interpretation. In general, Stone Age cannibalism, in his opinion, could have taken place, “but the current data are insufficient to reach such a conclusion.”

Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, who himself has studied these marks on bones, agrees. He called the discovery clickbait and “an interesting scientific curiosity that doesn’t change anything substantially.”

Debates about whether there is physical evidence of cannibalism by ancient hominins have been going on for about 100 years. So, in 1924, the Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart discovered a baby skull of a hominid belonging to a species that he later called the African Australopithecus. The scientist concluded that he was killed by a strong blow to the head, considering this to be irrefutable evidence that Australopithecus killed and ate their own kind. Now, after closer examination, it is believed that the child was killed by a large bird of prey.

Since then, more reliable evidence has emerged. In 1994, the remains of 11 hominins who lived 800 thousand years ago were found at the Atapuerca site (Spain). These bones bore many cuts and teeth marks from the hominins. In other cases, the remains of Neanderthals were found, the traces on which many scientists attribute to cannibalism.

“Archaeologists and physical anthropologists work hard to make their field a “real” exact science, but the further into the depth of years, the more obscure the data becomes. Cannibalism is always an attractive interpretation, and I myself have spent a lot of time questioning it. Why not a murder victim or the result of self-harm by an autistic hominin? Prove it if you can,” said former US Army Corps of Engineers senior archaeologist Peter Bullock.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya