Humans Started Butchering Elephants 1.78 Million Years Ago In Tanzania

In East Africa’s ‘Cradle of Mankind’, a major shift in human evolution occurred just under 1.8 million years ago, when our ancestors began exploiting megafauna - including hippos and giraffes - for food. Known as Olduvai Gorge, this prehistoric hominin hotspot in Tanzania has now yielded its earliest known elephant butchery site, providing new insights into how, why and when this subsistence strategy first emerged.

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“We came across this site by pure chance,” said Professor Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of Rice University. “The rains had washed an area that we cover every year and suddenly the elephant started showing up, so we excavated it and we clearly saw that there was a functional link that hominins were there at some point, and they had butchered the elephant,” he told IFLScience.

Describing the 1.78-million-year-old butchery site in a new study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, the authors reveal that 46 sections of an elephant carcass were found alongside 80 stunningly preserved stone tools, which were likely used to process the giant proboscidean. Following this discovery, the team surveyed all other known hominin sites across Olduvai Gorge, demonstrating that it was precisely at this point in time that large-scale consumption of megafauna began to appear in the archaeological record.

“Something happens around 1.78 million years ago in which, when you start sampling the landscapes around that age across the gorge, suddenly there's abundant and conspicuous evidence that hominins are butchering megafauna in various places across the landscape,” says Domínguez-Rodrigo. Importantly, this coincides almost exactly with the spread of a new technological industry known as the Acheulian, which replaced the more primitive Oldowan toolkit used by earlier hominins.

Exactly how this innovation relates to the adoption of elephant butchery is hard to say, although Domínguez-Rodrigo points out that this wasn’t the only significant change that occurred at this point in our evolution. “[Around this time] we start seeing that the size of [hominin occupation] sites becomes much, much bigger, indicating that [human] group sizes were much bigger than what we document in other hunter gatherers,” he says. 

“This could potentially indicate that there was more need of food, of calories, and that's why [ancient hominins] might have gotten involved with megafauna.”

The first question, therefore, is whether this newfound love of elephant meat was connected to the spread of the Acheulian technology or changes in social structure leading to larger groups - or both. And while there’s currently no definitive answer, Domínguez-Rodrigo says that “we see more of a population trigger in the acquisition of meat from these animals than a technological trigger.”

Question number two, meanwhile, concerns which human species was responsible for this behavioral shift, and whether the various developments seen at this point in time correspond to a major leap in our cognitive evolution. Until fairly recently, it would have been easy to attribute these advances to the emergence of Homo erectus, although Domínguez-Rodrigo says that the picture is now somewhat more complicated due to the discovery that H. erectus was in fact present around two million years ago - long before the adoption of these new behaviors.

Because of this, the study authors refrain from fingering a particular culprit, although when pressed to identify a candidate as the original elephant butcher, Domínguez-Rodrigo says he would “speculate that it has to be Homo erectus.”

A preprint of the study can be found on bioRxiv.