Early humans may have begun butchering elephants 1.8 million years ago

Butchering an elephant is an extremely difficult feat, requiring serious tools and cooperation, and the reward is protein gold.

Now a group of researchers led by Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo at Rice University in Texas say ancient humans may have reached this milestone 1.78 million years ago at Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge.

“About 2 million years ago, people systematically consumed animals such as gazelles or waterbucks, but not larger game,” Dominguez-Rodrigo says.

A little later, evidence from the Olduvai Gorge hints that the situation has changed. The gorge is rich in animal and anthropoid fossils formed between approximately 2 million and 17,000 years ago, and around 1.8 million years ago there was a sudden change in the type of animal bones preserved, with much more elephant and hippopotamus remains. Despite this, proving that they were stabbed to death by people remains difficult, he says.

Then, in June 2022, Dominguez-Rodrigo and his colleagues discovered what appeared to be an ancient elephant slaughter site in Olduvai.

This site, which they called the EAK site, consisted of a partial skeleton of an extinct species of elephant called elephant surrounded by a large number of stone tools, much larger and more powerful than the stone tools used by hominins before the 2 million year mark. These new tools, says Dominguez-Rodrigo, were likely made by an ancient man named The man stood up.

“They include Pleistocene knives that were as sharp when we dug them up as when we dug them up. [ancient] people used them.”

Dominguez-Rodrigo and his colleagues believe that the stone tools were used to butcher the elephant. Some of the large limb bones appear to have been broken shortly after the elephant's death, although the bones were still fresh – or “green”. Scavengers such as hyenas might be able to tear flesh from carcasses, but they are not capable of breaking the bone shafts of an adult or near-adult elephant, he said.

“We recorded a couple of these bones at our site with green fractures, showing that people broke them with hammers,” he says. “These green broken bones are abundant in the landscape sampled 1.7 million years ago and also often have impact marks associated with them.”

However, there is little evidence of the scratches or cuts that can sometimes be left on the bones as a result of cutting meat.

It is unknown whether the people killed the elephant or simply stumbled upon its carcass and opportunistically took advantage of it.

“The only thing we can say for sure is that they butchered it, or part of it, but left some tools along with the bones,” Dominguez-Rodrigo says.

He adds that the shift to butchering elephants was not simply due to the invention of better stone tools, but was also a sign that hominin groups were beginning to expand, leading to social and cultural changes.

But Michael Pante at Colorado State University, the results of the study were not convincing.

Evidence that this individual elephant was exploited by human ancestors is weak, Pante says. This is because the interpretation is based on the proximity of stone tools and elephant bones, as well as the presence of fractures, which are interpreted to have been made by human ancestors searching for bone marrow, Pante says.

Pante argues that the earliest compelling evidence of the slaughter of hippos, giraffes and elephants at Olduvai Gorge came 80,000 years later in The 1.7-million-year-old site he and his colleagues analyzed was named HWK EE..

“Unlike the EAK site, the bones of these taxa [at the HWK EE site] have cut marks and are associated with thousands of other bones and artifacts in an archaeological context,” he says.

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