Like other early Homo species, Homo rudolfensis may have used stone tools process their food. However, because more than one species of early human lived at the time tool manufacture and use originated, it’s hard for scientists to be certain which species is responsible for the making and using the first stone tools.

erectus lived between approximately 2 million to 400,000 years ago and is the first known primate to use significant tools and walk upright. The researchers say H. erectus is the only species they looked at that appears to have often crunched and chewed on foods, such as tough meat and crisp root vegetables.

Fossil have been found in Urhara, Malawi, and Lake Turkana in Kenya. The scientific name Homo rudolfensis was originally proposed for the specimen skull KNM-ER 1470, discovered in 1972.

Bernard Ngeneo

Europe’s earliest humans did not use fire for cooking, but had a balanced diet of meat and plants — all eaten raw, new research reveals for the first time.

Eating Meat and Marrow The diet of the earliest hominins was probably somewhat similar to the diet of modern chimpanzees: omnivorous, including large quantities of fruit, leaves, flowers, bark, insects and meat (e.g., Andrews & Martin 1991; Milton 1999; Watts 2008).

Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago (Mya). Evidence for the “microscopic traces of wood ash” as controlled use of fire by Homo erectus, beginning some 1,000,000 years ago, has wide scholarly support.

The Cro-Magnons were nomadic or semi-nomadic. This means that instead of living in just one place, they followed the migration of the animals they wanted to hunt. They may have built hunting camps from mammoth bones; some of these camps were found in a village in the Ukraine.