Meat and marrow enter the diet
Cut-marked bones become common, and a primate starts regularly eating large animals.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 500 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 100 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
From around 2 million years ago, assemblages of bones bearing stone-tool cut marks and hammerstone percussion damage appear repeatedly across East Africa. Marrow is especially significant: it is calorie-dense, and a sharp stone is the only way a hominin can reach it. Whether early Homo hunted or scavenged is argued from the order of tooth and tool marks on the same bones, and the honest answer is that the evidence supports both at different sites and times.