Stone tools found at Nyayanga, Lake Victoria in Kenya (Photo courtesy: Science)
Many of you might have heard of the popular toy 'Hungry Hungry Hippos' where four toy hippopotamuses eat toy marbles. It is a fun game.
Well, this post is not about hungry, hungry hippos. It is about hungry, hungry hominins who ate hippos instead some three million years ago. And that does not sound like fun.
Hippo--MC
A paper published in the journal Science says that an archaeological excavation on the shore of Lake Victoria in Kenya has found hundreds of stone tools and fossils dating back to as early as three million years ago. This is the oldest known case of tools being used by hominins, which is a group of primates including us, homo sapiens. Until recently the use of stone tools was believed to go back to between 2.6 million and 2 million years ago. The Nyayanga, Lake Victoria excavation pushes that time back to between 3 million and 2.6 million years ago.
The paper by Thomas W. Plummer of the Department of Anthropology, Queens College, New York and others, says "Oldowan tools were not only present, but were also being used to process a variety of foods, including hippopotamus."
"Thus, it appears that these tools were widespread much earlier than previous estimates and were widely used for food processing. Which hominins were using these tools remains uncertain, but Paranthropus fossils occur at the site," the paper says. The find suggested distribution spread over an area of 1300 kilometers.
Hence my characterization of hungry, hungry hominins eating hippos. The team found tool-damaged hippo bones clearly suggesting that hippos were on the menu of Nyayanga hominins. I was just trying to visualize a bunch of hominins roaming around the lake with those tools butchering hippos.
"The behaviors preserved at Nyayanga are at least 600,000 years older than prior evidence of megafaunal carcass and plant processing and substantially predate the increase in absolute brain size documented in the genus Homo after 2 Ma," the paper says. Ma, for your benefit, is mega annum, the unit for one million years.