BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—According to a report in Science Magazine, scrapes and cut marks found on animal fossils may have been made by the teeth of attacking crocodiles, rather than the tools of early human ancestors, as had been previously suggested by a study of 3.4-million-year-old animal remains. In that study, the researchers suggested the marks on the bones had been made by Australopithecus afarensis some 800,000 years before the oldest-known stone tools were used. Yonatan Sahle and Sireen El Zaatari of the University of Tübingen and Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, recently butchered a sheep carcass with stone flakes and compared the marks to those made on sheep bones by captive crocodiles. Even under a microscope, they found the cut marks to be indistinguishable from those made by the reptiles. “The resemblance is so stunning,” Sahle said. For more, go to “Earliest Stone Tools.”
