Artificial intelligence has figured out who ate the first humans

More than 1.8 million years ago, an ancient man - Homo habilis, "skilful man" - lived on the territory of modern Tanzania. For a long time, he was considered the first hunter and creator of stone tools, an ancestor of the more advanced Homo erectus, and then of modern man. However, a new study using artificial intelligence has put this version in doubt: judging by the teeth marks on the bones, Homo habilis was not a predator, but a victim.

As The Conversation reports, an international group of paleoanthropologists led by Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo from Complutense University (Spain) used artificial intelligence to analyse microscopic bite marks on the bones of ancient humans found in the famous Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

The AI was trained to recognise the characteristic tooth marks of modern African predators - lions, leopards, hyenas and crocodiles - and compared them with the injuries on the bones of two Homo habilis individuals.

The result was unequivocal: the marks matched the bites of leopards. This means that early Homo habilis were not at the top of the food chain, as previously thought. They were themselves prey to big cats, and probably did not hunt, but only collected the remains of animals left by other predators.

Until now, palaeoanthropologists have believed that Homo habilis was the first of our ancestors to master the manufacture of stone tools and to begin hunting large animals. Bones of gazelles and zebras were found at sites about 1.85 million years old, with traces of cutting, indicating collective meat consumption. This was considered evidence that skilful man had already become an active hunter.

But if the remains of Homo habilis bear traces of leopard teeth, things look different. As Domínguez-Rodrigo explains, in the food chain, the hunter is not the prey. Modern examples from nature confirm this: lions and humans are at the top of the trophic pyramid and are rarely killed by other predators. Which means that if Homo habilis was regularly preyed upon, it could not have been the dominant species of its time.

To confirm this hypothesis, scientists used computer vision technology and "trained" neural network to recognise microscopic features of the bites of different animals. The AI was able to distinguish with high accuracy the traces left by different predators.

All applied algorithms converged in one: the bones of Homo habilis were nibbled exactly by leopards. These data, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, indicate that man skilful was not the main hunter of antiquity.

In addition, new archaeological findings show that Homo erectus appeared earlier than Homo habilis - about 2 million years ago. This collapses the usual scheme by which skilful man was considered the ancestor of erectus. The researchers now suggest that both species may have existed in parallel, occupying different ecological niches.

Thus, the picture of human evolution is becoming more "bushy" rather than linear. Homo habilis does not appear to have been a formidable hunter, but a small omnivorous creature, able to use tools but forced to flee from predators.

"If Homo habilis was often preyed upon by leopards, it means it was not at the top of the food chain," Dominguez-Rodrigo explains. - Perhaps the real hunter was Homo erectus".