While modern humans are typically the ones on the consuming end of a carnivorous relationship, new evidence discovered by a team of researchers from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France suggests that early hominins were not always quite so fortunate.
Writing in Wednesday’s edition of the journal PLOS One, lead author Camille Daujeard and her colleagues revealed that a 500,000-year-old hominin femur bone discovered in a Moroccan cave contained tooth marks, indicating that it had been eaten by large carnivores, possibly hyenas.
According to Live Science and Discovery News, the femur was discovered in a cave located near the city of Casablanca known as “Grotte à Hominidés,” and while the tooth marks indicate that it had been chewed upon by an extinct hyena or another large carnivore, they may be evidence that ancient humans were once both predators of and prey for other creatures.
Those hominins, Daujeard’s team explained in a statement, probably would have competed with large carnivores for territory and resources during the Middle Pleistocene period. However, there had previously been little proof of direct interaction between the two during this era, they said.
Credit: Daujeard PLOS ONE
Hominins could be either predator or prey, depending on circumstances
Upon its discovery, the femur bone fragment was closely analyzed, and the researchers found a series of fractures and tooth marks indicative of those left behind by a chewing carnivore, as well as tooth pits and a handful of other notches and cuts. These marking were said to be in clusters at either end of the bone, while the softer parts of the fragment had been crushed completely.
The markings were coated with sediment, which the study authors noted indicates that they were likely made a very long time ago. Furthermore, based on the appearance of the bites, the research team concluded that they were likely made by hyenas shortly after the hominin’s death, although they could not say for certain if he had been hunted and killed, or scavenged upon his demise.
“This bone represents the first evidence of consumption of human remains by carnivores in the cave,” Daujeard and her co-authors wrote, and it is also the first evidence that humans had been targeted by Middle Pleistocene carnivores living in this region of Morocco. Evidence previously discovered in nearby caves had already established that early humans had also hunted and eaten these carnivores, suggesting that the relationship of the two groups was complicated.
“Although encounters and confrontations between archaic humans and large predators of this time period in North Africa must have been common, the discovery… is one of the few examples where hominin consumption by carnivores is proven,” Daujeard explained. Until their weapons improved, she and her colleagues added, it is likely that early hominins were both predator and prey, depending upon the circumstances at any given moment.
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Image credit: Daujeard PLOS ONE
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