The dismembered remains of 50 adult giant baboons and several juveniles were unearthed at Olongesailie in South West Kenya. With them were hundreds of chipped stones from a site 20 miles away. Clues that tool users brandishing weapons killed these animals comes from the presence of percussion flakes from toolmaking and cut marks on the bones. Baboons are powerful animals. With their strong jaws they do not need to make stone tools. They also live in bands. The hunter that had disposed of them must have been skillful and far from cowardly. He apparently had only primitive tools to face ferocious troops of giant baboons. The hunter was the first true man, Homo erectus—the giant baboon is long extinct.
Anthropologists have found stone tool fragments alongside Australopithecus remains suggesting that A africanus was the tool maker. But the stone flakes are the same as those made by Homo erectus. The implements found with the australopithecine bones were discarded by Homo erectus after dinner. The australopithecines were extinct 1.4 million years ago, caught between the predatory attentions of Homo who found them easy game (just as slow as Homo was himself and too unsophisticated to defend themselves adequately) and the baboons who had no particular predatory intentions but competed more successfully for food.
About two million years ago mammalian evolution went into overdrive and the number of genera of mammals trebled in the next million years. The diversity of mammals peaked about one million years ago. Since then it has continuously declined as mankind became increasingly dominant. Most mammals other than domestic animals will be extinct within decades.
Compare it with the Cretaceous. Bakker writes:
It took no more than two million years—maybe much less—to exterminate the dinosaurs.
The prehistory of mankind has many examples of apparently unnecessary killing. Were men even in those early days as insensitive to other species as they appear to be today?
At the foot of a limestone cliff at Solutre, France, was a 50 feet deep mound of horse bones, killed by prehistoric man. Dr Sandra Olsen of the John Hopkins Medical Institute, Baltimore, examined the remains of animals killed by early man on sites like this, 35,000 years old, and showed that only seven of 3000 bones, mainly reindeer, had cut marks on them caused by butchery. So few signs of cutting could only signify that prehistoric men had not killed these animals primarily for meat. The experts decided they had killed for delicacies—liver and intestines. Maybe. Or maybe they just killed for fun! Maybe they got high on the smell of death. At any rate the slaughter continued for 25,000 years.
Carl Sagan tells us:
Shortly after man entered North America via the Bering Straits there were massive and spectacular kills of large game animals, often by driving them over cliffs.
Like their contemporaries at Solutre, these emergent men used the same technique, but thousands of miles away. Mass carnage was widespread and effective.
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