New data: Human ancestors eating meat 3.4 million years ago

New Scientist has published an article online reporting on new archaeological finds that indicate that Early humans were butchers 3.4 million years ago.  The article reports:

"Our ancestors were carving meat some 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. Marks on fossilised animal bones found in Ethiopia indicate that early-human butchers were using stone tools as early as 3.4 million years ago.

Shannon McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues say the find is evidence that Australopithecus afarensis – the only known hominin species present in the region at the time – used tools.

The finds suggest that the evolution of toolmaking and meat-eating among our human ancestors is more complex than existing theories admit.

They also add to a growing body of evidence that A. afarensis may have been more human-like and less primitive than some have assumed."

The new data indicates that A. afarensis used tools to butcher a large mammal similar in size to a modern cow.  This means that he very deliberately (not accidentally) ate the red meat so dreaded by modern people.   Apparently he understood the advantages of red meat over poultry...and of the fat found in marrow:

"What we have done is push back in time, rather dramatically, two of the more fundamental behaviours that played such an important role in our evolution – meat consumption and tool use," says McPherron. "This find forces us to rethink the idea that the origins of stone tool use, meat consumption and the origins of our genus Homo all occurred together, around 2.5 million years ago."

Instead, he says, it's likely that hominins at least experimented with stone tools to help them eat meat and marrow much earlier.

The article carries the following two images of the bones with cut marks from stone tools used to butcher the animal:

So now it appears that the ancestral group to which Lucy belonged relished red meat and had tools for the purpose nearly a million years before H. habilis showed up.  If so, this means that we have eaten red meat for at least 340 times as long as any human group has eaten grain-based diets found in agriculture.