fancient ancestors of man may have been cannibals. This suspicion is suggested by striking Cut Marks on a shin bone that is almost 1.5 million years old. However, US researchers emphasize Journal “Scientific Reports”there are still too many unanswered questions to say for sure that early hominins actually ate each other.

Actually, the paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington was looking for clues as to which prehistoric predators could have hunted down and eaten ancient human relatives. In 2017, while researching the collection of the National Museum of Kenya, she came across the fossilized, 1.45-million-year-old tibia bone of an early ancestor of Homo sapiens.

For comparison: modern humans are around 300,000 years old.

When Pobiner examined the bone, she discovered several cut marks that reminded her of stone tool marks. She sent impressions of it to Michael Pante of Colorado State University – without telling him her suspicions. Pante compared 3D scans of those prints to records in a database of different types of prints.

The analysis came to a clear conclusion: Nine of the eleven marks on the tibia bone actually matched the type of damage caused by stone tools. The other two may have resulted from bites from a big cat, believed to be one of the three known species of saber-toothed cats that roamed the landscape during the individual’s lifetime.

As Pobiner points out, the cut marks alone do not mean that the person who caused them was eating the leg. However, this is the most likely scenario. So the scratches are at the point where the calf muscle is connected to the bone – and thus in a good position to detach the meat. Also, all of the cuts are oriented in the same way, suggesting that a hand with a stone tool made them one at a time without changing grip or angle.

“These cut marks look very similar to those I’ve seen on animal fossils that have been processed for consumption,” Pobiner said in a statement from the Smithsonian Institution, which runs the museum. “It seems very likely that the flesh of this leg was eaten.”

But even if this assumption were correct, strictly speaking one could not yet speak of cannibalism. Because it is completely unclear whether in this case the eater and the eaten belonged to the same species. For one thing, the petrified bone cannot be assigned to any specific hominin species. On the other hand, the use of stone tools does not allow any clear conclusions as to which species could have handled them.

In other words, the fossil could be evidence of prehistoric cannibalism. However, it is also possible that a species has eaten its evolutionary cousin, according to the research team.

The cut marks also do not reveal what exactly happened back then: A big cat could have found the remains after hominins had detached most of the flesh from the bone. It is also conceivable that the predator killed the individual before hominins took the opportunity and took over the prey.

Already In 1999 researchers had reported in the journal Science about possible cannibalism among Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago in the Rhône Valley.

Scratch marks on a 1.5 to 2.6 million year old skull found in South Africa in 1976 caused a controversy Study published in 2000 the tracks as evidence that early hominins had dissected the remains of another hominin. wrote in 2017 on the other hand, other researchers the traces were caused by contact with sharp-edged stones that were on the skull.

It is precisely this skull that Pobiner would now like to examine using the same techniques as in the current study. This could clarify the question of whether the recently examined tibia is in fact the oldest early human fossil with cut marks.

“The information we have tells us that hominins probably ate other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago,” Pobiner summarizes.

“Aha! Ten minutes of everyday knowledge” is WELT’s knowledge podcast. Every Tuesday and Thursday we answer everyday questions from the field of science. Subscribe to the podcast at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, deezer, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts or directly by RSS feed.