HUMAN ancestors were using stone tools to carve meat from the bone of wild animals nearly a million years earlier than thought, according to a study.
Two mammal bones found in Ethiopia's Afar region with chips missing that could only have been removed by sharp-edged tools are about 3.4 million years old, said the study, published in Nature.
Cut marks show that implements were used to slice flesh, while hammer-like marks suggest blows used to crack open the bone to get at nutritious - and perhaps tasty - marrow.
Up until now, the oldest known evidence of butchering with stone implements was dated to about 2.5 million years ago.
The crafting and sophisticated use of tools is a watershed moment in human evolution, and is often said to set us apart from other animals.
"This discovery dramatically shifts the known time frame of a game-changing behaviour for our ancestors,'' lead researcher Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
"These developments had a huge impact on the story of humanity.''
The fossil bones - both from mammals, one the size of a cow and the other a goat - were unearthed only 200 metres from the site where, in 2000, the same team of paleontologists dug up the remains of the most complete skeleton of a distant human ancestor ever found.
Like the famous "Lucy'' discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia's Awash Valley, "Selam'' - who lived some 3.3 million years ago - was an Australopithecus afarensis, an extinct species between ancient monkey and modern man.
"In light of these new findings, it is very likely that Selam carried stone flakes and helped members of her family as they butchered animal remains,'' Alemeseged said.
With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones, animal carcasses would have become a more attractive source of food, the researchers speculate.
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