4.8 Hunting or Scavenging
Some of the initial speculation about why H. habilis made and used stone tools was because it allowed them to kill animals. Stone tools got linked to the killer ape hypothesis, which envisioned early humans not as scavengers but as active hunters. This conviction was on display in the remarkable opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s (1928-1999) masterpiece film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This highly speculative account is now discredited! While hunting eventually became central to human survival and our ability to spread around the world, this was not the case early in our history. The initial function of Oldowan technology was to scavenge meat and marrow from dead carcasses. Only later did they become critical for the hunting of large game animals. The benefit of even simple stone tools, which is what Oldowan flakes and pebble choppers are, become quite obvious when you think about what you would do if you happened upon a dead rhino and were exceptionally hungry.
Hominins lack the teeth or claws necessary to rip into thick animal hide or crush massive long bones. Vast food resources on the savannas of Africa were inaccessible to hominins without stone tools. If a H. habilis group happened upon a dead rhino, they could have done very little until lions or hyenas had ripped into the carcass. The ability to create sharp stone chips and sharpened chunks of stone meant that hominins could get to both meat and marrow. Tools meant better access to food resources, so greater survival and reproductive success.
Hunting large game with an Oldowan pebble chopper seems farfetched, but how might we know who was killing the large game found in association with H. habilis remains or their tools? Priority of access is one key indicator that H. habilis was chiefly a scavenger; simply put, they did not get first access to meat on game animals. At many early sites, stone tool cuts or abrasion marks made by H. habilis are present over tooth marks made by carnivores. This means that carnivores got there first and indeed, they probably made the kill. In short, various lines of evidence on skeletal elements indicate that H. habilis mainly got whatever was leftover.
In placing Homo sapiens, us, among the other apes, it is important to understand that early in our genus, tool use and cooperation led to rapid expansion of the brain. As a result, we began to use language, cook, hunt, create art, develop technology, and write and read digital textbooks.
