Humans were responsible for driving an ancient giant species of turtle to extinction almost 3,000 years ago.

It is one of the first cases that clearly shows that humans played a role in the demise of the giant, extinct animals known as “megafauna”.

An Australian research team discovered turtle leg bones – but not shells or skulls – on an island of Vanuatu.

The bones date to just 200 years after humans’ arrival, suggesting they were hunted to extinction for their meat.

However, the turtles lived far longer than other megafauna – which included the famed woolly mammoth; while Australian megafauna is thought to have died out almost 50,000 years ago, it appears that these turtles survived for far longer – until the arrival of a people known as the Lapita.

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Bones found in a Spanish cave show that cavemen cannibalized one another for food.

In the journal Current Anthropology, a team led by archaeologist Eudald Carbonell of Spain’s University of Rovira and Virgili, report fossil evidence of continuous cannibalism – cut marks and butchering remains – as a way of life among the Homo antecessor inhabitants of the Atapuerca Mountains archeological site.

From a sample of some 1,039 bones that included mammoths, buffalo, cats and other butchered species found in the cave level deposited more than 800,000 years ago, there also emerged 159 bones from 11 H. antecessor individuals, they report:

“Cut marks (slicing, chop, and scraping marks) on the cranial segment are abundant on the base of the temporal bones, face, and zygomatic bones: segments with a large amount of muscular attachments and ligaments. Cut marks found on the face indicate skinning and defleshing activities. Cranial fragments also display abundant evidence of breakage (percussion pits and adhered flakes) mainly located on the lower part of the cranium. The majority of zygomatic bones are broken in a similar manner to those documented in Native American cannibalized remains and Neolithic (post 9500 BC) individuals,” says the study.

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Evidence has been found that early humans were using stone tools to cut meat from animals 3.4 million years ago.

That pushes back the earliest known tool use and meat-eating in such hominins by more than 800,000 years.

Bones found in Ethiopia show cuts from stone and indications that the bones were forcibly broken to remove marrow.

The research, in the journal Nature, challenges several notions about our ancestors’ behaviour.

Previously the oldest-known use of stone tools came from the nearby Gona region of Ethiopia, dating back to about 2.5 million years ago. That suggests that it was our more direct ancestors, members of our own genus Homo, that were the first to use tools.

But the marked bones were found in the Dikika region, with their age determined by dating the nearby volcanic rock – to between 3.2 million and 3.4 million years ago.

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Hyena bones “processed” by humans have been found in an ancient den, suggesting our ancestors may have eaten their meat.

“It’s very common that hyena and humans used the same dens at different times,” said Lucinda Blackwell of the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution in South Africa. In fact in Africa there’s plenty of evidence that humans and hyenas have a long history of vying for resources including shelter. They are both, after all, large mammals that live in large social groups and eat herbivores.

“What interests me about this paper is that they only show one bone and I’d like to see more,” said Blackwell. She’d also like to look the cut marks with more powerful instruments to measure their depth and compare them to other samples.

Blackwell is not convinced humans were eating hyenas, however.

“They could have been processing them for their beautiful pelts,” she told Discovery News.

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Anthropologists have found the remains of a creature that came from the same species as Lucy, but is 400,000 years older.

This skeleton, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has a much longer name than Lucy: It was dubbed Kadanuumuu, which means “big man” in Ethiopia’s Afar language. Like the 3.3 million-year-old Lucy skeleton, Kadanuumuu was found in the East African country’s Afar region, and shares the species name Australopithecus afarensis.

Australopiths are fossil species that share some traits with chimpanzees – for instance, protruding faces and small brains – but share other traits with humans. Most importantly, their skeletons appear to have been built for upright walking. Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered Lucy back in 1974, said the latest discovery adds to a “treasure trove” of hundreds of australopith fossils from East Africa.

“It’s like the El Dorado of paleoanthropology,” he told me.

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