If there was ever a statement that made me thankful for my proto-human ancestors’ inventing sharp tools, it is this.
Humans and near-humans were a lot stronger for their body weight than we are today, just as chimpanzees are today. As an example, according to The Wisdom Of The Bones, the fossil remains of the “Turkana Boy”, a nearly complete H. erectus skeleton from 1.5 m.y.a indicated a level of bone density that would have made him far stronger than just about any human living today.
If that’s typical I think anything a chimp can do today, early humans and their forebears could do, at least when it comes to the killing blow.
I remember reading a retort by some smart-aleck to a vegan heckler. He was enjoying his steak when the fellow made some comment about how could he eat meat. He pointed out that humans had evolved as meat-eaters too, by first sneaking down from the trees to scavenge the carcasses left by big-game hunters, perhaps using a stick or rocks to chase off the hyenas. As a result we evolved a capacity to eat meat to supplement or fruits and roots; but not fresh raw meat. We eventually hit upon fire as a means to produce the same effect as rotting had in breaking down the meat to make it more digestible.
So in a way, one answer is - at first we let those with bigger claws and teeth do the initial disassembly work for us. Any australopithecus with half a brain could watch a lion or sabretooth tear apart a carcass and figure out, maybe this sharp rock will do the same.
You guys act like you’ve never butchered an animal before. It isn’t hard. Skin on small to medium sized animals tears easily. Joints break apart with a little twisting and a little leverage. Bones break open when hit with a rock.
Chimpanzees have no trouble figuring out what to do when they get ahold of a monkey or a gazelle. They just grab it and rip it apart. It doesn’t require immense strength or sharp tools or specialized body parts.
Early human with knapped flint could skin that antelope.
Suitable stone tools pre-date the genus Homo.
Several paleo-anthropologists* who know how to make stone tools have demonstrated that you can use sharp bits of flint to skin a freakin’ elephant (said demonstration being done, if I recall correctly, on an elephant dead of natural causes, not one purpose-killed). Antelopes would be no problem.
As has already been said - there are no humans who do NOT use tools. Tool use is an integral part of not only Homo behavior but also that of our cousins the primates and our common ancestors.
- my reference for this is the book Making Silent Stones Speak by Schick and Toth. Among other things, there are pictures of said elephant skinning being done with knapped-flint tools.
It’s true - anybody who has taken apart a whole grocery store chicken has learned that you can pull the legs right off if you know how to do it.
A mastadon, that might take some more practice.
Dogs are some of the only animals that can mostly keep up with humans.
Your question answered the question. Big brains. The better question is why did the big brains evolve with relatively weak bodies.
Believe it or not, if you were in situation where you had to find food or die, you would probably figure out a way not to die.
Hence, us.
Chimpanzee’s using tools on You-Tube with superfluous musical soundtrack: - YouTube
Modern humans evolved from some sort of chimpanzee-like ancestor. Chimpanzees eat mostly plants in the wild, though they also hunt. And this armchair dweller is unaware of any tools used by chimpanzees while gathering fruit and the like. http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/nconklin/conklin.html
That said, Australopithecus may have eaten tubers, which I would guess involved digging sticks.
The answer, according to Wikipedia and this Smithsonian page, is that early humans didn’t have to worry about ripping apart a large carcass with their teeth and hands because they already had the tools. The oldest man made stone tools go back to the time of Australopithecus before Homo branched off, and they apparently were capable of butchering larger animals. It’s good to know, but it takes the fun out of speculating.:(: 
The theory goes that early hominids scavenged other food (carcasses left from big carnivores) before figuring out how to kill their own meat. They went from sneaking out of the trees to grab food to actively seeking it out on the plains. It was a convenient way to add protein to the diet.
The human body is build for endurance running. (Side note - best marathon runners mostly come from Kenya area). Even our sweat system is configured to handle the task. While big game can outsprint a human, a pack/tribe can harrass a large animal until it drops from exhaustion. Most of us just haven’t tried outrunning a large mammal on an open plain over the course of a few hours, nor are we physically fit enough to do so - so we imagine it cannot be done.
Watch a horse after a long strenuous run of a few minutes; “pee like a reacehorse” is not an exaggerration, plus they are saoking wet with sweat. Keep him from getting water or any decent food to replenish himself, and he’ll be steak tartar within a few hours. It doesn’t take a monkey brain to figure out that big rock nearby will ensure the beastie stops fighting back.
Of course our omnivorous diet means we can exploit any other convenient food source if big game is not avialable - but note that one theory says many of the large animal species in the americas did not survice the intial encounter with humans. Meat - good.
In terms of endurance. Tons of animals sprint faster than we do. Off the top of my head, horses, deer, rabbits - most prey quadrupeds of any size. Granted, we also have the big fat brains to stampede animals off cliffs and make snares and such, but you will not win a sprint against a deer. You have to run them down over the course of days to catch one purely on foot.
Upthread someone (sorry I couldn’t find it) fire was referred to.
In light (heh) of this talk of ripping carcasses, and again upthread someone said that carrion did the job of “pre-digesting,” it seems like tools=no more mandatory carrion-seeking.
Aren’t the time periods when fire control and physiology of cooked/raw meat digestion pertinent to this discussion?
ETA: I’ve just looked at title of OP. A pertinent question indeed.
That’s possible, but certainly is not the consensus thinking at this time.
As noted, our diet pre-stone tool invention was probably much like a chimp’s diet. Fruits, berries, certain leave, bugs, whatever can be scavenged or killed without stone tools. Meat would have gradually become more and more important in our diet as better tools were invented. Like some arctic populations today, Neanderthals got almost all their caloric intake from meat.
I can confirm about running things down by endurance. Back when I was young and in shape I would run dogs (that wanted to run with me) into the ground.
The though was we are not well adapted to digest raw meat, we prefer it easier to chew. ITGOD (in the good old days) before tools, this was because it had been aging in the sun for a while and thoughfully left behind by the bigger predators. Later, fire did something similar so we still prefer our meat preprocessed and softened up, more likely by fire than by bacteria and enzymes in sunlight.
At the least, a much larger rotisserie.
The oldest sites containing tools are dated to 2.6-2.55 million years ago.
Excavations dating from approximately 790,000 years ago in Israel suggest that H. erectus not only controlled fire but could light fires. Some more controversial recent finds push that back to 1million years or more.
Burn the end of a sapling, and scrape it with your stone knife. It’s called a spear. You can kill an elephant with it, if you bring a few friends with spears.
There has never been a homo sapiens sapiens that did not have access to both tools and fire. It is likely that earlier homonids lost their large canine teeth precisely because it was not a beneficial characteristic after tools and fire had been discovered.
Tris
Nope. The large canine teeth you see in other great apes are not present in Australopithecines with brains no larger than chimps’ brains, like A. afarensis. No fire builders, they.
