Hominin head-scratcher: who butchered this rhino 700k years ago?

I was thinking of the horse figurine found in the Vogelherd cave: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelherd_Cave

Electronic spin resonance: ESR, which measures trapped electrons using magnetic fields, is related to magnetic resonance imaging, the medical technique that allows doctors to look for tumors or peek inside your creaking knee. Because ESR essentially tracks the activity — the “spin” — of the electrons without freeing them, the sample can be subjected to repeated dating attempts. ESR also has a longer range — some researchers claim up to 1 million years — but it’s more complicated than other trapped charge methods, leaving it more susceptible to error.

Before releasing a claim like this, I would have to believe they were extremely careful in the testing and interpretation. If they have this wrong, it could be a career killer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

Despite their homelands being situated among the harshest, most inhospitable climes on Earth, with year round temperatures frequently near or below freezing and constant powerful circumpolar winds from the 'furious fifties,' they were able to tolerate such extreme conditions despite their traditional attire consisting of little more than a loincloth and an occasional loosely draped shawl. They frequently went without protection on their upper body and lower extremities altogether. Darwin describes a vivid scene where a Fuegian mother is standing in a shallow boat that approaches the Beagle in order to conduct raid. She's wearing nothing but newborn nursing at her breast, and she and her child both seem indifferent to the the snowfall and freezing rain melting on their skin.

They did not use permanent dwellings, and basically lived as gatherers using simple temporary makeshift huts with one side facing the wind and the other side open, and of course a fire, which gave the region its name. But it was not uncommon for them to spend days foraging for mussels, drenched in the frigid crashing breakers of the Southern Ocean.

This is 30 years before he published the Origin of Species and long before he had developed an articulated concept of natural selection, but The experience did inspire him to remark how it made intuitive sense that as the population of mankind spread across the Earth, that it would have differentiated and adapted to different climates in accordance with whatever underlying principles had driven the same process he had observed this happening with other species.

If curious, Google around for Jemmy Button and York Minster, these being too individuals who had been kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego and taken to England on a prior Beagle expedition, and returned on the one accompanied by Darwin.

I laughed out loudly at the office when I read this. My coworker is wondering if I'm bonkers.

On a more serious note, the orthodox time line of human existence needs revision. There is too much contradictory evidence: oral accounts, human footprints beside dinosaur foot impressions, Gobeki-Tepli and other structures, prehistoric sculpture like lion-man and vogelherd, now this.

(Probably a species of rhino inhabitant swamps could swim among close islands. Elephants are surprisingly good swimmers so, why not rhinos?)

IMHO concern that the population wasn't large enough for multiple people to attempt the trick ignore the timescales involved. These events could span tens of thousands of years--longer than all of recorded history.

Now I’m not suggesting that there was a bird capable of picking up a rhino but possible capable of picking up individual bones and dropping them or like crows picking up rocks and dropping them on the carcass.

The former is actually a thing:

The bearded vulture has learned to crack bones too large to be swallowed by carrying them in flight to a height of 50–150 m (160–490 ft) above the ground and then dropping them onto rocks below, which smashes them into smaller pieces and exposes the nutritious marrow.