"We decided to look at the ages of the animals that had been dragged there," said Benn.
The meat was then stripped from the animals' bones and eaten. The carcasses of wildebeest, antelopes and gazelles were brought there by ancient humans, most probably members of the species Homo habilis, more than 1.8 million years ago. In his study, Bunn and his colleagues looked at a huge butchery site in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. People have dismissed them as mere scavengers and I don't think that looks right any more." "But it has led us to downplay the hunting abilities of our early ancestors. "I don't disagree with this scenario," said Bunn. We developed language and other skills that helped us maintain complex societies. By the 80s, the idea had run out of favour, and scientists argued that our larger brains evolved mainly to help us co-operate with each other. Extreme violence is in our nature, it was argued by fossil experts such as Raymond Dart and writers like Robert Ardrey, whose book African Genesis on the subject was particularly influential.
In the first half of the 20th century, many scientists argued that our ancestors' urge to hunt and kill drove us to develop spears and axes and to evolve bigger and bigger brains in order to handle these increasingly complex weapons. The hunting instinct of early humans is a controversial subject. We have now pushed that date back to around two million years ago." "Until now the oldest, unambiguous evidence of human hunting has come from a 400,000-year-old site in Germany where horses were clearly being speared and their flesh eaten. That finding has major implications, he added. They were selecting and killing what they wanted." This has shown that men and women could not have been taking kill from other animals or eating those that had died of natural causes. However, we have compared the type of prey killed by lions and leopards today with the type of prey selected by humans in those days. "What was not clear was the source of that meat. "We know that humans ate meat two million years ago," said Bunn, who was speaking in Bordeaux at the annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE). The appearance of this skill so early in our evolutionary past has key implications for the development of human intellect. Two million years ago, our human ancestors were small-brained apemen and in the past many scientists have assumed the meat they ate had been gathered from animals that had died from natural causes or had been left behind by lions, leopards and other carnivores.īut Bunn argues that our apemen ancestors, although primitive and fairly puny, were capable of ambushing herds of large animals after carefully selecting individuals for slaughter. The discovery – made by anthropologist Professor Henry Bunn of Wisconsin University – pushes back the definitive date for the beginning of systematic human hunting by hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient humans used complex hunting techniques to ambush and kill antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest and other large animals at least two million years ago.