A unique hominin menu dated to 1.95 million years ago.

R esearch on ancient foragers has tended to focus on their acquisition of large land mammals, but our ancestors in fact exploited a wider range of taxa. Depending on the local environment, this range included tortoises, birds, and hares from terrestrial habitats and mollusks, birds, and fish from aquatic habitats. These small terrestrial animals and aquatic species begin to appear occasionally in the archaeological record during the Middle Pleistocene (<780,000 y ago), occur irregularly until the Late Pleistocene (<130,000 y ago), and are abundant only within the past few tens of thousands of years (1–6). However, the exploitation of these resources in the Plio-Pleistocene has been difficult to detect because relevant samples are rare and have not always been studied in sufficient detail. Recent information on excavations at the 1.95 million-year-old Oldowan site of FwJJ20 in the East Turkana Basin of northern Kenya, published in PNAS, helps fill the void, and research shows that at least some early hominins, enjoyed a varied diet, including aquatic species that were typical of the well-watered surroundings of the site (7). This work highlights the opportunistic nature of early hominin foraging and the importance of sampling as many paleo-habitats as possible as well as the need for thorough analyses of all excavated animal remains. Ever since the seminal studies of Leakey (8) of sites within Olduvai Gorge, paleoanthropologists have contemplated the relationship between ancient Oldowan stone artifacts and the animal bones that often are found with them. Leakey (8) and Leakey and Roe (9) described the faunal assemblages, discussed the possible use of bones as tools, and noted the presence of infrequent carnivore damage (8, 9), yet it was Bunn (10) and Potts and Shipman (11) who first identified cut marks on the mammal bones associated with Oldowan artifacts. They, thus, confirmed that ancient hominins probably consumed these animals and that they played a significant role in accumulating bones at Oldowan sites. However, these landmark studies, as well as more recent work (12), emphasized mammalian bones, despite the abundance of crocodiles, turtles, and fish in some assemblages from Olduvai and other equally ancient sites. The major exception was a study by Stewart (13), who used criteria derived from analyses of Late Pleistocene fish assemblages to assess the degree of hominin involvement in accumulating the fish remains at five Olduvai Gorge sites. She examined site location, taxonomic diversity, the natural history of the species under investigation, skeletal part representation, and bone-surface modification, from which she concluded that early hominins likely played a role in accumulating fish remains at Frida Leakey Koronga (FLK) North-North Level 3, FLK-Zinjanthropus, and Bell’s Korongo (BK). Between 80% and 90% of the fish present in these assemblages were catfish, which Stewart argued could be captured with little or no technology. Catfish spawn, often in great concentrations in shallow waters, can become stranded in shallow areas as seasonal pools and channels recede. They can then be gathered by hand, which means that they would have been readily accessible to early hominins (13, 14). Despite the thoroughness of Stewart’s study, however, she lacked one definitive marker of hominin exploitation of catfish—cut marks on the bones.