近来的一项研究可能过早地得出结论认为古代人类屠夫在埃塞俄比亚Dikika出土的340万年前的动物骨头上进行了切割。

由Dikika研究项目（DRP）报告的最初发现提示南方古猿阿法种（Australopithecus afarensis）——因为“露西”的骨骼而变得著名的早期人类祖先——在石器被认为出现之前的将近100万年屠宰了动物的肉。然而， Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo及其同事发现所谓的工具痕迹很可能是动物踏过骨头造成的擦痕，这些骨头在某一时间被埋在了浅的沙质土壤中。这组科学家比较了Dikika研究项目（DRP）的发现和此前检查了自然过程——如踩踏，这常常在化石表面留下痕迹，可能被误认为是工具的痕迹——的研究。

这组作者说，在Dikika骨头上的大多数所谓的工具痕迹可以被踩踏和地质磨损加以解释，而且并不能成为修订公认的人类行为进化时间线的依据。

英文摘要：

PNAS doi:10.1073/pnas.1013711107

Configurational approach to identifying the earliest hominin butchers
Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigoa,b,1, Travis Rayne Pickeringc,d, and Henry T. Bunnc

aDepartment of Prehistory, Complutense University of Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain;
bInstituto de Evolución en áfrica, Museo de los Orígenes, 28005 Madrid, Spain;
cDepartment of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706; and
dInstitute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 2050, South Africa

The announcement of two approximately 3.4-million-y-old purportedly butchered fossil bones from the Dikika paleoanthropological research area (Lower Awash Valley, Ethiopia) could profoundly alter our understanding of human evolution. Butchering damage on the Dikika bones would imply that tool-assisted meat-eating began approximately 800,000 y before previously thought, based on butchered bones from 2.6- to 2.5-million-y-old sites at the Ethiopian Gona and Bouri localities. Further, the only hominin currently known from Dikika at approximately 3.4 Ma is Australopithecus afarensis, a temporally and geographically widespread species unassociated previously with any archaeological evidence of butchering. Our taphonomic configurational approach to assess the claims of A. afarensis butchery at Dikika suggests the claims of unexpectedly early butchering at the site are not warranted. The Dikika research group focused its analysis on the morphology of the marks in question but failed to demonstrate, through recovery of similarly marked in situ fossils, the exact provenience of the published fossils, and failed to note occurrences of random striae on the cortices of the published fossils (incurred through incidental movement of the defleshed specimens across and/or within their abrasive encasing sediments). The occurrence of such random striae (sometimes called collectively “trampling” damage) on the two fossils provide the configurational context for rejection of the claimed butchery marks. The earliest best evidence for hominin butchery thus remains at 2.6 to 2.5 Ma, presumably associated with more derived species than A. afarensis.