2023-07-11 08:30:03
Evidence of fighting, maiming and possible cannibalism between close evolutionary relatives of humans was discovered 1.45 million years ago, according to a study published in Scientific Reports by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
The research, led by paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner, was based on the analysis of notches found in fossil bones of human relatives from that time.
Cut marks were found on a 1.45-million-year-old left tibia belonging to a relative of Homo sapiens discovered in northern Kenya, potentially the oldest evidence of cannibalism.
The fossilized tibia was discovered by the paleoanthropologist in the Nairobi National Museum collections of the National Museums of Kenya while researching predators of ancient human relatives.
To confirm his suspicions, Pobiner took casts of the slices and sent them to co-author Michael Pante of Colorado State University, who scanned them and compared them to a database of 898 individual tooth marks, created through controlled tooth-marking experiments. Butcher shop.
Analysis revealed that nine of the eleven marks clearly corresponded to the type of damage caused by stone tools, while the other two were bites from big cats, probably saber-toothed cats.
Although the cut marks alone do not prove that the human relative inflicted them with the intent to consume the leg, Pobiner considers it most likely, since the marks are found at the junction of the calf muscle with the bone, a suitable place to cut and extract meat.
Although there is not enough evidence to say with certainty that it is a case of cannibalism, Pobiner points out that cannibalism requires that the consumer and the consumed be of the same species.
The fossil bone analyzed was initially identified as Australopithecus boisei and later reclassified as Homo erectus in 1990. However, experts agree that there is not enough information to definitively assign the specimen to a specific hominin species.
The use of stone tools does not provide sufficient clarity as to which species may have made the cuts.
Recent research by Rick Potts, a professor at the National Museum of Natural History, has questioned the hypothesis that only the genus Homo made and used stone tools, suggesting that this fossil could be a case of cannibalism or simply interspecies conflict.
Another fossil, a skull first discovered in South Africa in 1976, has sparked debate over the oldest known case of human relatives killing each other. Studies carried out in 2000 and 2018 disagree on the origin of the marks found just below the right cheekbone of the skull.
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