Hominins: Eating meat for at least 3.4 million years

"Until now, the oldest known evidence of butchering animals with stone tools came from Bouri, Ethiopia, where several cut-marked bones date to about 2.5 million years ago. The oldest known stone tools, dated to between 2.6 and 2.5 million years ago, were found at nearby Gona, Ethiopia. Although no hominin fossils were found in direct association with the Gona tools or the Bouri cut-marked bones, at nearby Hadar an upper jaw from an early Homo species was found in deposits dated to about 2.4 million years ago and most paleoanthropologists believe the tools were made and used only by early members of the genus Homo.

The new stone tool-marked fossil animal bones from Dikika have been dated to approximately 3.4 million years ago. They were found a few hundred meters away from where Alemseged’s team previously discovered "Selam" ("Lucy’s baby" ), a young Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago. The location and age of the stone tool-marked bones clearly indicate that members of the A. afarensis species made the cut marks. "The only hominin species we have in this part of Africa at this time period is A. afarensis, and so we think this species inflicted these cut marks on the bones we discovered," notes Alemseged.
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"Most of the marks have features that indicate without doubt that they were inflicted by stone tools," explains Dr. Curtis Marean from the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, who performed the mark identifications. "And the range of actions includes cutting and scraping for the removal of flesh, and percussion on the femur for breaking it to access marrow."

"The bones come from 2 animals, one (a femur) the size of a goat and the other (a rib) at least the size of a cow," notes Marean. "Our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos, don’t hunt or scavenge animals this size, so this suggests that the Dikika australopithecines had already begun to engage in hunting or scavenging larger mammals. This places them in competitive and risky contexts."

While it is clear that the australopithecines at Dikika were using sharp-edged stones to carve meat from bones, it is impossible to tell from the marks alone whether they were making their tools or simply finding and using naturally sharp rocks. So far, the research team has not found evidence of stone tool manufacture at Dikika from this early time period.
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"The hominins at this site probably carried their stone tools with them from better raw material sources elsewhere. One of our goals is to go back and see if we can find these locations and evidence that at this early date they were actually making, not just using, stone tools."
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Publication references
Shannon P. McPherron, Zeresenay Alemseged, Curtis W. Marean, Jonathan G. Wynn, Denné Reed, Denis Geraads, René Bobe & Hamdallah A. Béarat
Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia
Nature, 12. Juli 2010

https://www.mpg.de/research/oldest-evidence-human-stone-tool-use

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nature.com/articles/nature09248