MAN’S ancestors were feasting on elephant and rhinoceros meat at a lakeside beauty spot in southern Britain 400,000 years ago, archaeologists have found.

Bones and the remains of flint tools found on the route of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link have provided the earliest evidence in Britain of an elephant being butchered by early man.

The huge animal, a fully grown male weighing ten tonnes and twice the size of today’s elephants, would most likely have been brought down by spear-throwing hunters.

Once the elephant, from the extinct species Palaeoloxodon antiquus, was dead its body was cut up with flint tools and eaten raw by man’s ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis.

The butchery would have been completed in as little as an afternoon and the bones left on the soft ground where they and the flint tools were preserved by layers of sediment.

About 25 yards away more flint tools and flint knaps and chippings, were found at a location that seems to have been revisited by early man over many years and may have been the spot where the hunter-gatherers slept after consuming the elephant.

A rhinoceros’s jaw bone was found close to the elephant’s remains and it is likely that it, too, was cut up and eaten.

Jaw bones were often removed from carcasses to be sucked clean of marrow later. The elephant’s lower jaw was missing.

The remains were uncovered at Ebbsfleet, Kent. The spot where the elephant was butchered now lies under a roundabout but 400,000 years ago a stream ran through it and into a small lake.

The remains are evidence of one of the earliest times that man is known to have used tools in Britain. It was during a period when the region was being repopulated after the Anglian Ice Age.

The elephant butchers would have been the descendants of Boxgrove Man, who was known to have hunted on the South Coast 500,000 years ago before being driven southwards by the Ice Age.

Francis Wenban-Smith, of the University of Southampton, said yesterday: “We can imagine these ancient people swarming over the elephant carcass to butcher it.

“The elephant was huge and it would have provided food for a lot of people — the problem would have been how much they could eat before it went off.”

He added: “It’s one of a very few undisturbed sites that we’ve seen. It gives us an important insight into how these people lived.”

The site supports theories that hand axes had not been developed in Britain 400,000 years ago.

None of the tools resembled hand axes, though notches in some of the flints provided indications that the people who ate the elephant knew how to make billhooks.

Archaeologists, reporting their preliminary findings in the Journal of Quaternary Science, were unable to find direct evidence that the elephant was killed by hunters but at about 40 years old it would have been in the prime of life and was found very close to a tool-making site. Ancient man is known to have been using spears at that period.

At the time the elephant and rhino were roaming the British countryside the climate would have been temperate and similar to that of today.

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