Scientists have unravelled a very, very cold case – a savage killing from half a million years ago.

Their findings will make you very, very glad you live in the modern age and not the Middle Pleistocene.

Tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old thigh bone from an early human found in a Moroccan cave shows signs its owner was eaten by large carnivores – and quite possibly devoured alive.

Researchers examined the shaft of a femur from the skeleton of a 500,000-year-old hominin, found in the Moroccan cave Grotte a Hominids, near Casablanca, and found evidence of consumption by large carnivores.


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Their examination of the bone fragment, published in the journal PLOS ONE, revealed various fractures and tooth marks indicative of carnivore chewing, including tooth pits as well as other scores and notches.

Camille Daujeard, of the Museum National D’Histoire Naturelle in France, said: “Although encounters and confrontations between archaic humans and large predators of this time period in North Africa must have been common, the discovery is one of the few examples where hominin consumption by carnivores is proven.”