It seems our early ancestors had no qualms about dining on insects. They were a bit picky, however, about how they dug the bugs out of the ground, choosing bone tools of only certain shapes.
French and South African scientists have gone to great lengths to prove that fossils excavated at ancient sites in South Africa were tools, and that they were used to dig out termites. They describe their work in the US journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The bones show a particular type of scrape mark, suggesting their use as a digging tool of some kind. An earlier study suggested they were used by an ancient hominid, Australopithecus robustus, to unearth tubers and roots.
Not so, say the scientists. They created their own bone tools and used them on termite mounds, producing scrape marks similar to those found on the fossils.