摘要：In the past five years, two exceptional discoveries have been made—the Dikika modified bones and the Lomekwistone tools. If genuine, they would change current views on human evolution by showing that Pliocene homininswere involved in stone tool use and meat-eating more than 3 million years ago. These paradigm-changing discoveriesrequire solid, unambiguous evidence. Here, we adopt a hypothesis-testing scientific approach in which weshow that neither of these discoveries, as reported, has provided compelling evidence of these behaviors in thePliocene. We do not reject the hypothesis of stone tool use and butchery in the Pliocene. We do however stress thatthe evidence presented in both cases remains disputable and the inferences drawn from it are not secure. We arguethat the hypotheses of non-hominin agency for the Dikika bones and the ex situ nature of the Lomekwi assemblage(probably involving a palimpsest of accumulations) have not been discarded.
