Almost a million and a half years ago, a group of human relatives seems to have made their own food. Cut marks on an ancient shin from a site in northern Kenya show signs that it was cut to separate meat, possibly the earliest known case of cannibalism among hominids.

According to paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, the murder was likely carried out by people who needed food: “People are hungry and they eat dead people to feed themselves.”

The photograph shows a sectioned hominin bone and an enlarged area showing cut marks. All these signs are oriented the same way, so that the hand holding the stone tool can do it all in a row without changing hands.

While this seems to be clear evidence of 1.45 million cannibalism among our ancestors, neither the butchers nor the types of those killed could be identified. They were probably all Homo erectus, the dominant hominin in the area at the time, but they could have been Homo habilis or even Paranthropus boisei.

“If one species eats another, it’s technically not cannibalism, but instead a case of anthropophagy, or hominin flesh eating,” said Pobiner, lead author of the study. Still, he notes that these hominins may look somewhat similar, and that butchers were probably not picky about who they ate.

Another skull fossil, first found in South Africa in 1976, had previously sparked controversy over the earliest known example of human relatives killing each other. Estimates of the age of this skull range from 1.5 to 2.6 million years.

Besides being uncertain of age, two studies examining the fossils (the first published in 2000, the second in 2018) disagree about the origin of the scars under the right cheekbone of the skull. One says the marks are the result of stone tools used by hominin relatives, while another says they were made by contacting sharp stone blocks found near the skull. Also, even if ancient hominins made markings, it’s unclear whether they intercepted each other for food given the lack of major muscle groups in the skull.

To answer the question of whether the tibia fossil he and his colleagues examined is indeed the oldest notched hominin fossil, Pobiner said he wanted to re-examine a skull from South Africa, which is said to have notches, using the same methods observed. this work.

He also said that this new shocking find is proof of the value of museum collections.

“You can make some pretty surprising discoveries by going back to museum collections and looking back at fossils,” Pobiner said. Said. “Not everyone sees everything the first time. It takes a community of scientists who come up with different questions and techniques to continue expanding our knowledge of the world.”