
Hominin head-scratcher: who butchered this rhino 700k years ago? - fanf2
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/deadthings/2018/05/02/hominin-butchered-rhino/
======
patrickg_zill
There's a small carved figurine of a horse, dated to 32000 years ago, and we
know nothing about that society either. It is fascinating and it is fun to
speculate about...

~~~
dogma1138
Wasn’t that a lion?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
man#](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man#)

Or is it a different one?

~~~
patrickg_zill
I didn't know about that one, so thanks!

I was thinking of the horse figurine found in the Vogelherd cave:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelherd_Cave](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelherd_Cave)

~~~
dogma1138
I think what's more impressive is that if the dating is correct those
artifacts span 10,000 years. This means that that ISS is closer to the great
pyramids those are to each other.

~~~
stevenwoo
What's really interesting to me is they had a second expedition after the
first wholly within the sediment that the first archaelogical excavation put
aside as waste.

------
jessaustin
A time-traveling hunting guide operation will have to pay a big fine in
another couple of centuries...

------
sempron64
This might be a stupid question, but if the hominin needed a boat to get
there, then didn't the rhino also need one?

~~~
gus_massa
The rhino didn't get there by boat, it got there walking. Actually, their
ancestors got there walking when the island was connected by a land bridge to
Asia, and they lived there happily for a few million years while the sea level
changed and the position of the island changed.

The rhino family evolved something like 20 million years ago. See more details
in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros#Evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros#Evolution)
I still not sure how to read all the data in the table, but 20mya looks like
an good approximation.

In Google I got this two maps of the Earth 20mya. Notice the difference in the
shape of the Philippine area.
[http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~braile/edumod/flipbook/flipbook.h...](http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~braile/edumod/flipbook/flipbook.htm)
[http://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/geology/neogene-
period](http://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/geology/neogene-period)

I'm not sure that the rhinos reached that place (the current island) 20
million years ago, but they had plenty of time and a lot of difference in the
geography that makes a simple walk possible.

<oversimplification warning. See an accurate version in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#Evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#Evolution)
>

On the other hand, Homo Habilis evolved only 2mya and they lived only in
Africa, they had tool but they were not very smart. I think that at that time
the Philippines were already isolated from Asia.

Homo Erectus evolved 1.5mya. They were quite smart and hd more tools! They
went outside Africa to Europe and Asia, but they never crossed some big sea,
and never reached America or Australia. They neither crossed some smaller
extensions of water to reach some island that were not too close to the
continens. So ... the conclusion is that they didn't have good enough boats.

Homo Sapiens evolved 0.3mya. (I was going to write 0.1mya, the number changes
too often.) They could cross to some places no Erectus has gone before, so the
conclusion is that they have some kind of boats even in ancient times.

So if the rhino was butchered 0.7mya then it must have be killed by some
variant of Homo Erectus that have never been found in an island that is not
very close to a continent because they didn't have good enough boats because
they were smart but not smart enough. So the lack of boats is a problem for
the hominin.

------
CoolGuySteve
I'm just some guy, but why would hominins settle so high in what are now the
Philippines when a lower altitude would have given better access to water and
game.

Is it possible there are settlements, they're just under the ocean now, on
what used to be large flat land bridges?

~~~
mabbo
This is actually a really big problem for studying humans migration across the
Bering Sea- most of the lane that was coastal at the time is now deeply under
water. Beringia[0] was a huge land mass, possibly full of people and it
existed for thousands of years. What we consider the coast now was much higher
ground, probably less suitable for habitation, in part because the world was
colder (ice age)- and thus, no signs of human habitation in those parts.

All the answers, if any remain, are deeply under water.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia)

------
chx
My gut instinct says they misdated the bones.

~~~
Insanity
Could be I suppose - though before announcing something like this you'd think
they'd check more frequently.

In addition, I'm assuming the dating has a margin of error which was not
stated in the article, so I'm curious what this margin is. (But even so, I
doubt it's a large enough margin to get close to the 600k that was stated,
which is already 'far out there')

~~~
sizzzzlerz
The scientific paper stated that the rhino's age came out to 709000 +/\- 68000
years. The number was consistent with other measurements made of the age of
the depositional layer.

Before releasing a claim like this, I would have to believe they were
extremely careful in the testing and interpretation. If they have this wrong,
it could be a career killer.

------
pavel_lishin
> _According to the conventional view in paleoanthropology, only our species,
> Homo sapiens, had the cognitive capacity to construct watercraft. And to
> reach the island where the rhino was found, well, like Chief Brody says,
> “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”_

I think if you throw enough hominins in small boats at the ocean, at least a
few of them are bound to survive the trip, right? I wonder how many island
settlers in pre-history were just castaways who happened to hold on to a tree
long enough to survive a monsoon-spurred ocean trip.

~~~
bugs_bunny
Yeh, what concerns me is the boat the rhino used to get there.

~~~
Lordarminius
> Yeah, what concerns me is the boat the Rhino used to get there

I laughed out loudly at the office when I read this. My coworker is wondering
if I'm bonkers.

On a more serious note, the orthodox time line of human existence needs
revision. There is too much contradictory evidence: oral accounts, human
footprints beside dinosaur foot impressions, Gobeki-Tepli and other
structures, prehistoric sculpture like lion-man and vogelherd, now this.

~~~
aswanson
I did also. Needed that laugh.

------
EGreg
Maybe the dating is wrong??

------
ecounysis
visitors from another planet

------
cowpig
Why does it have to be a hominid? I saw some birds crack open bodes for the
marrow on Planet Earth

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Researchers working at a site in the northern part of the island of Luzon
> report the discovery of 57 stone tools found with more than 400 animal
> bones, including the mostly-complete remains of a rhino (the now-extinct
> Rhinoceros philippinensis, a poorly known subspecies… having a specimen
> that’s about 75 percent complete is an achievement in and of itself)._

> _Using the electron-spin resonance method on its tooth enamel, the team
> established that the rhino was about 709,000 years old. Thirteen of its
> bones, according to the study’s authors, showed signs of butchering,
> including cuts and “percussion marks” on both humeri (forelimb bones), which
> is typical of smashing open a bone to access the marrow._

Birds don't typically use stone tools heavy enough to split a rhino's bones.

~~~
dogma1138
Brides have been known to use tools and there are a few species of prey
dropping birds out there that drop their prey on the ground to crack it open.

Now I’m not suggesting that there was a bird capable of picking up a rhino but
possible capable of picking up individual bones and dropping them or like
crows picking up rocks and dropping them on the carcass.

The former is actually a thing:

The bearded vulture has learned to crack bones too large to be swallowed by
carrying them in flight to a height of 50–150 m (160–490 ft) above the ground
and then dropping them onto rocks below, which smashes them into smaller
pieces and exposes the nutritious marrow.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Sure, but the article makes it sound like these are very specifically hand-
tools - but I didn't read any of the actual research. And as I recall, the
Pacific is one of the places where some pretty damn big birds live, probably
big enough to crack open big mammal bones with just their beaks.

------
noetic_techy
Isn't it true that anatomically modern homo sapiens date back 400,000 years?
Go back further, and you probably have something close to a chimp. Chimps hunt
in packs, so I'm not surprised some hominid group could bring down a Rhino
700,000 years ago.

~~~
DougWebb
We couldn't have jumped from "close to a chimp" to homo sapiens. Evolution is
a gradual thing, and if we've been largely the same for 400k years, then
someone 400k years ago could look back another 400k years and also see someone
that's largely the same. So whoever butchered that rhino would be much more
like us than like a chimp.

~~~
radicaldreamer
Evolution isn't necessarily a gradual thing...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium)

