The decomposing carcass of an adult African elephant
Human ancestors butchered and ate elephants 1.8 million years ago, helping to feed their large brains.
A new study, in eLiferevealed a fossil discovery in Tanzania that shows the oldest signs of carving of super-elephants by hominids.
Imagine a creature almost twice the size of a modern African elephant (which can weigh up to 6,000 kg). This was Elephas (Paleoxodon) reckia prehistoric titan that roamed the landscape of what is now Tanzania almost two million years ago.
Now, imagine a group of our ancestors standing over its carcass, then carving it and eating it. It happened.
For decades, archaeologists have debated when humans’ hominid ancestors first began eating megafauna – animals weighing more than 1,000 kg.
In a new study, the team of archaeologists studying the evolution of early humans in Africa has identified one of the oldest cases of elephant butchering.
The reported case occurred in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, a site famous for containing some of the oldest and best preserved remains of our human ancestors.
This discovery at the site – known as EAK – reveals that our ancestors were interacting with megafauna substantially earlier than previously thought (about 1.5 million years was the previous estimate at Olduvai), and in a more sophisticated way.
This discovery suggests that hominids (most likely, The man stood up) may have lived in large social groups during this period, probably because their brains were developing and requiring higher calorie dietsrich in fatty acids.
“Smoking Guns”
Part of the reason our ancient diet has been debated is that it’s not easy to find evidence of how much animal food early humans consumed and how they obtained it.
In traditional archaeology, “smoking gun” cut (carcass cutting) is a cut mark left on a bone by a stone tool. However, when dealing with large animals like elephants, these markings are difficult to find. An elephant’s skin is several centimeters thick, and its muscle mass is so vast that a butcher’s tool may never touch the bone.
Additionally, millions of years of burial can wear away the surface of the bone, erasing any subtle traces. And if a bone is deposited in an abrasive sediment, trampling by other animals can create marks on the bones that resemble cut marks.
At the EAK site, the partial skeleton of a single individual from The elephant of the king in the same location as Olduvai stone tools.
To prove this wasn’t just a natural death or the work of scavengers, the team turned to a new type of detective work: spatial taphonomy – the study of how stone and bone artifacts occur spatially in the same location.
More direct evidence was also used: fossilized elephant bones that had been shattered while they were still fresh (“green fractures”).
The geometry of a housing
To solve this 1.8 million year old mystery, the way the bones were spread across the site was analyzed. Each agent that interacts with a carcass – be it a pack of lions, a group of hyenas or a group of humans – leaves a unique “spatial fingerprint”.
Lions and hyenas tend to drag bones away, dispersing them in predictable patterns based on their weight and the amount of attached flesh. Natural deaths, like an elephant dying in a swamp, result in a different, more localized skeletal “breakdown.”
By using advanced spatial statistics, and subsequently comparing the EAK site to several modern elephant carcasses we studied in Botswana (not yet published), it was discovered that the spatial configuration in EAK was unique.
The grouping of bones and the density of stone tools among them did not correspond to “random” or “scavenger-driven” models, but reflected a focused, high-intensity processing event.
The spatial signature matched the hominin cut, which has also been documented at Olduvai sites that are half a million years younger.
This was confirmed by the presence of fractured long bones. Today, only humans can break diaphyses of elephant long bones; not even spotted hyenas, which have very powerful jaws, can do this.
Glimpses of this behavior can also be detected in other places. For example, a bone fragment with cut marks from a large animal (probably a hippopotamus) was documented in El-Kherba (Algeria), dated to 1.78 million years ago.
Why does an elephant meal matter?
This discovery isn’t just about a prehistoric menu. It can tell us a lot about the evolution of the human brain and social structure.
There is a long-standing theory in paleoanthropology called the “expensive tissue hypothesis”.
This theory suggests that, as the brains of our ancestors increased in size, required a huge increase in high-quality calories, specifically fat and protein.
Large mammals like elephants are essentially giant “packets” of these calories. Processing even a single elephant provides a caloric gain that could sustain a group for weeks.
Carving an elephant is also a monumental task. Requires sharp stone tools and, most importantly, social cooperation.
Our ancestors had to work together to defend the carcass from predators like saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas, while others worked to extract the meat and marrow.
This suggests that even 1.8 million years ago, our ancestors were already had a level of social organization and environmental awareness that it was truly “human”.
