Our Carnivorous Past

Hominids were using stone tools to butcher animals and extract marrow from bones over 3.2 million years ago.

In 1973, near the Awash River in Ethiopia, a team of anthropologists uncovered one of the most complete hominid fossils ever found.  As the scientists mulled over their find, to the sound of the Beatles number Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds playing in the background, the three-and-a-half foot, 26 kg female hominid was nicknamed Lucy, a 3.2 million year old specimen of Australopithecus afarenesis. Lucy’s upright posture and small skull size suggested that bipedalism preceded the rapid increase in brain size that led to modern humans. But a recent find suggests that small brain size may be no evidence of a lack of intelligence. Lucy’s relatives, it turns out, were adept at using stones to butcher animals and crack apart bones to extract marrow.  In effect, this pushes back evidence of stone tool use and meat eating among hominids almost another million years.

An international team of scientists led by Dr Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Sciences has uncovered this evidence not far from where Lucy was found. “This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behaviour for our ancestors,” says Alemseged, “Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool making—a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as airplanes, MRI machines and iPhones.” 

Adds Dr Shannon McPherron, part of the research team, “Now, when we imagine Lucy walking around the east African landscape looking for food, we can for the first time imagine her with a stone tool in hand and looking for meat. With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones, animal carcasses would have become a more attractive source of food. This type of behaviour sent us down a path that later would lead to two of the defining features of our species—carnivory and tool manufacture and use.”

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