Markings On 3.4-Million-Year-Old Bones Suggest They Were Butchered, Not Trampled

Plants and Animals





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This is a detail of the marks on a fossilized rib bone, one of the two controversial bones. Zeresenay Alemseged.

A new analysis of 3.4-million-year-old animal bones suggests that our early ancestors may have been butchering animals with stone tools 800,000 years earlier than we thought. The findings were published in the Journal of Human Evolution last week.