Early human ancestors were making tools to carve up meat almost half a million years ago... in Britain, according to new research.

Razor sharp flint knives called bifaces, often described as the perfect butcher’s tool, have been unearthed in Sussex, alongside horse remains.

A detailed analysis shows the animal was stripped of flesh then each bone was broken down using hammers.

This enabled the marrow and liquid grease to be sucked out. The horse appears to have been completely processed.

Fat, internal organs and even partially digested stomach contents would also have provided a nutritious meal for the group of 30 or 40 individuals of a now-extinct branch of the human family.

The extraordinary treasures unearthed in Boxgrove, north of Chichester, even offer insight into the evolution of the human brain.

They show our early ancestors were much more dexterous than previously believed, which led to greater intelligence.

Co-author Dr Silvia Bello, of London’s Natural History Museum, said: “The findings provide evidence early human cultures understood the properties of different organic materials and how tools could be made to improve the manufacture of other tools.

“Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated.”

The tools date back 480,000 years – making them the oldest to be found in Europe.

They were made by members of a species known as Homo heidelbergensis.

The relative of modern humans was around before the first Neanderthals began roaming earth, some 50,000 years later.

Eating out was “a very social matter”.

The archaeological site offers unprecedented insights into their poorly understood lifestyle, said the researchers.

Project leader Dr Matthew Pope, of University College London, said: “This was an exceptionally rare opportunity to examine a site pretty much as it had been left behind by an extinct population, after they had gathered to totally process the carcass of a dead horse on the edge of a coastal marshland.

“Incredibly, we have been able to get as close as we can to witnessing the minute-by-minute movement and behaviours of a single apparently tight-knit group of early humans: a community of people, young and old, working together in a co-operative and highly social way.”

The Horse Butchery Site is one of many in English

Heritage quarries along the shore that were excavated in the 1980s and 90s and are home to Britain’s oldest human remains.

More than 2,000 razor sharp flint fragments were recovered from eight separate groupings, known as knapping scatters.

These are places where individual early humans knelt to make their tools and left behind a dense concentration of material between their knees.

Embarking on an ambitious jigsaw puzzle to piece together the individual flints, the archaeologists discovered in every case they were crafting the large bifaces, or knives.

Dr Pope said: “We established early on there were at least eight individuals making tools and considered it likely a small group of adults, a ‘hunting party’, could have been responsible for the butchery.

“However, we were astonished to see traces of other activities and movement across the site, which opened the possibility of a much larger group being present.

“We worked with our reconstruction artist

Lauren Gibson to bring the site and its social complexity to life.”

The horse provided more than just food. Several bones had been used as tools called retouchers.

Co author Simon Parfitt, also of UCL, said: “These are some of the earliest non-stone tools found in the archaeological record of human evolution.

“They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”

Co-operative activity among larger numbers of people suggests these temporary sites could have been highly social spaces for interaction, learning and the sharing of tools and ideas.

The Horse Butchery Site at Boxgrove shows this behaviour more vividly than any other so far discovered in the archaeological record.

The early Stone Age dwellers had modern-style human hands, despite the fact they belonged to a species ancestral to our own but which became extinct more than 300,000 years ago.

Questions still remain over where the Boxgrove people lived and slept and even what they looked like.

Answers may well rest in the 16-mile wide

ancient landscape, which lies preserved under modern Sussex.

Barney Sloane, national specialist services director at Historic England said: “This research is a timely reminder of the power of archaeology to illuminate details of remarkably intimate events across a vast gulf of time and at the same time to improve our understanding of how human beings evolved.

“The discovery, in a quarry site, demonstrates clearly the value of ensuring that our planning policies take

account of archaeology’s potential for scientific advancement.”

The latest findings are documented in a ground-breaking new book The Horse Butchery Site, published by UCL Archaeology South-East’s Spoilheap Publications.