Today, the journal Nature reports on the findings of the Dikika Research Project, providing evidence that Australopithecus afarensis butchered animals with stone tools a full 800,000 years earlier than previously known.
Cut Marks on Bone from DIK-55, Afar Region of Ethiopia. Photo © Dikika Research Project
Investigators believe that tiny parallel scratches on the rib bone of an extinct antelope about the size of a cow represent marks made by an ancient hominid Australopithecus afarensis using a stone tool to butcher the animal. That news is astonishing, since the previous oldest-stone-tool use evidence was at Gona and Bouri. Both of those sites, like DIK-55 lie in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, but they date to ~2.7 million years ago, and are believed to represent the work of our direct ancestor Homo habilis. The discovery at DIK-55, if it turns out to be supported, will essentially reconfigure the Lower Paleolithic: pushing the dates back 800,000 years and including our Australopithecine cousins as stone-tool users. That is well worth a photo essay, don't you think?
- DIK-55: Reconfiguring the Lower Paleolithic, a photo essay
- Selam, or why "Dikika" sounds so familiar
- Lower Paleolithic Timeline
- Dikika Research Project home page
- Lucy's Kin Carved Up a Meaty Meal, Scientists Say, JN Wilford, NYT, 8/11/2010
- Discovery Pushes Stone Tool Use by Early Humans back 800,000 years, Science Blog, 8/11/10
- Human Ancestors Carved Meat with Stone Tools Almost a Million Years Earlier than Expected, Ed Yong at Discover, 8/11/10
- The First Butchers?, Ann Gibbons at Science Now, 8/11/10
- Lots of Ink: Old Scratched Bones Bring Lucy Back into the News with a Rock in her Hand. Maybe Knight Science Journalism News Tracker, 8/12/2010.
Comments
Very interesting. Thanks for bringing it to your readers. I appreciated and enjoyed it, as well as the link to the DRP’s website which is very informative regarding the paleo-ecological aspects. I always wonder what kind of tectonic movement has occured in this region in the last couple of million years in terms of regional uplift and plate movement which would presumably have had significant impacts on the local climate patterns, much as it must have for the ancient Tethys Sea area where some interesting ancestral fossils may one day add to our big picture understanding of primate evolution. Cheers.
when there is a date given and it is followed by bp what does dp mean. sorry to be so dumb.
Not a dumb question at all! BP is an abbreviation for “years Before the Present” and its one of several ways that archaeologists count time. Here’s a page that explains how that works:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/bterms/g/bp.htm
Does that help?