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February 1, 2023Science Advances72 citationsOpen Access

Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior

SGSabine Gaudzinski‐WindheuserLKLutz KindlerKMKatharine MacDonald

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Abstract

Straight-tusked elephants ( Palaeoloxodon antiquus ) were the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene, present in Eurasian landscapes between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago. The occasional co-occurrence of their skeletal remains with stone tools has generated rich speculation about the nature of interactions between these elephants and Pleistocene humans: Did hominins scavenge on elephants that died a natural death or maybe even hunt some individuals? Our archaeozoological study of the largest P. antiquus assemblage known, excavated from 125,000-year-old lake deposits in Germany, shows that hunting of elephants weighing up to 13 metric tons was part of the cultural repertoire of Last Interglacial Neanderthals there, over >2000 years, many dozens of generations. The intensity and nutritional yields of these well-documented butchering activities, combined with previously reported data from this Neumark-Nord site complex, suggest that Neanderthals were less mobile and operated within social units substantially larger than commonly envisaged.

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Gaudzinski‐Windheuser et al. (2023) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a3293debc39a01e6d585a69https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8186
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