Lucy wasn't a tool-using butcher after all

20:00 15 November 2010

Life

Michael Marshall, environment reporter
One of the human race's distant hominid ancestors did not use tools, and claims that it did were based on flawed science.
So says Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, of the Complutense University of Madrid, and his colleagues, writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1013711107). Their work is a response to a study published in August this year by Shannon McPherron, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues.
McPherron claims that the primitive hominid Australopithecus afarensis (famously represented by the fossil called Lucy) was using simple stone tools to butcher meat 3.4 million years ago - 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Below, Domínguez-Rodrigo explains why he thinks the findings are nonsense, and McPherron defends his results.
Our write-up of the research in August explains what McPherron found:

McPherron discovered the rib of a cow-sized animal and the thigh bone of a goat-sized antelope in January last year while carrying out fieldwork for the Dikika Research Project in northern Ethiopia. The surface of both bones carried deep markings suggestive of stone tools. Detailed analysis using environmental scanning electron microscopy ruled out trampling by other animals as a possible cause for the marks. The team concluded the markings were made by sharp-edged stone tools used to cut and scrape flesh off the bones, and a blunt tool used to crack the bones open to get at nutrient-rich bone marrow.

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