Lucy’s kind used stone tools to butcher animals

African fossils bear 3.4-million-year-old traces of tool-using carnivores.

For Lucy and her ancient hominid comrades, raw meat sliced off animal carcasses was what’s for dinner. That’s the implication of a new study, published in the Aug. 12 Nature, describing butchery marks made by stone implements on two animal bones from about 3.4