Archaeological finds such as cut marks on bones found in the northwest and stone tools in the northeast indicate that Madagascar was visited by foragers around 2000 BCE. Early Holocene humans might have existed on the island 10,500 years ago, based on grooves found on elephant bird bones left by humans. However, a counterstudy concluded that human-made marks date to 1,200 years ago at the earliest, in which the previously mentioned bone damage may have been made by scavengers, ground movements or cuts from the excavation process.