Humans systematically butchered and consumed elephants as early as 1.8 million years ago, marking a shift in human evolution towards hunting large animals, according to a new study published in the journal eLife.
Researchers discovered a previously undocumented elephant butchery site at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, which has been since named the Emiliano Aguirre Korongo (EAK) site, containing the partial remains of a juvenile elephant of the extinct Elephas recki.
The remains were found near a cache of 80 stone tools, mostly flakes used for cutting. The proximity of the tools to the carcass, the study explained, strongly suggests that the animal was processed on-site by early hominins.
Such a thing seems to represent a fundamental change in the behavior of early humans, moving away from opportunistic scavenging of available carcasses toward a more deliberate strategy of targeting large animals.
According to the study, rather than treating megafauna (animals weighing more than 800 kilograms) as the occasional windfall, early humans appear to have structured their movements and camp sites around reliable access to them.
May have contributed to early humans' 'large brains'
Elephant bones contain a large amount of nutrition, a resource that has no “modern competition since no carnivore alive today can break open adult elephant limb bones.” However, early hominins, using stone hammers, could.
The fat stored in elephant bones is thought to have played a role in supporting the growth of larger brains in the Homo erectus lineage.
A wider survey of the area consistently found evidence of elephant and hippopotamus butchery alongside caches of stone tools, a pattern that holds across three separate geological layers spanning hundreds of thousands of years.
This represents "a profound ecological and technological transformation," according to the study, distinguishing the findings from smaller-scale activity seen at other sites.