PREHISTORIC MAN'S KILLINGS OF 90 GIANT BABOONS SUGGESTS EARLY RITUAL
WAS it a strange ritual slaying by prehistoric man? Was it a mass slaughter of animals for food? Or were the killings for purposes so arcane that modern man will never fathom them?
In one of the most provocative anthropological findings in recent years, a team of researchers has discovered that 400,000 to 700,000 years ago hominids who were the immediate precursors of modern man killed 90 giant baboons at a butchering ground on the plains of Kenya.
Their findings are believed to be the first evidence of the systematic slaying and butchering of nonhuman primates by hominids in prehistoric times.
Dr. Pat Shipman, a Johns Hopkins University anthropologist who led the three-woman team of investigators, said in an interview that in terms of fossil records ''our data represent an odd and unique incident for which we have no real explanation. We know that hominids living around that time hunted antelopes, pigs, hippos and elephants.'' But only at Olorgesailie is there concrete evidence that Homo erectus engaged in the systematic killing and butchering of other primates, she added.
Although the investigators have no real explanation for the baboon killings and point out that they may have taken place over a period of years or been an annual rite of passage, they have reason to believe that the slaughtering and butchering were done systematically and selectively.
