The first people to set foot in Australia were fossil hunters

"A team of archaeologists examined the fossilized leg bone of an extinct kangaroo and realized that instead of evidence of butchery, cut marks on the bone reveal an ancient attempt at fossil collecting. That leaves Australia with little evidence of First Peoples hunting or butchering the continent's extinct megafauna-and reopens the question of whether humans were responsible for the die-off of that continent's giant Ice Age"

"When archaeologists first noticed the cut in 1970 after carefully chipping away the crust of calcium carbonate that had formed over the bone, it looked like evidence that Pleistocene hunters had carved up the kangaroo to eat it. But in their recent paper, University of New South Wales archaeologist Michael Archer and his colleagues say that's probably not what happened."

Archaeologists examined a fossilized tibia of an extinct short-faced kangaroo from Mammoth Cave, Western Australia. The kangaroo walked on hind legs and died between 44,500 and 55,200 years ago based on uranium-series dating of the thin rock layer covering the fossils. A shallow, angled chunk was cut from the bone near one end. After removing a calcium carbonate crust in 1970, the cut initially appeared to be butchery. Detailed analysis suggests the cut marks resulted from efforts to retrieve fossils from the bone-rich late Pleistocene deposit rather than from carving the animal for food. This removes key direct evidence of hunting or butchering megafauna by First Peoples.

Read at Ars Technica