Bones of 70 animals 125,000 years old, about 3 times the length of today’s Asian elephants, discovered near Halle
According to a new study, Neanderthals would possibly have lived in larger teams than previously believed, hunting large elephants up to 3 times larger than today’s.
The researchers reached their conclusions, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, about examinations of skeletal remains of 125,000-year-old straight-tusked elephants discovered near Halle in central Germany.
The bones of about 70 Pleistocene elephants were found in the 1980s in a huge coal quarry that has since been remodeled into a synthetic lake.
The elephants of the time were much larger than the woolly mammoth and 3 times larger than the existing Asian elephant: an adult male could weigh up to thirteen tons.
“Hunting those giant animals and slaughtering them is absolutely part of the subsistence activities of Neanderthals there,” study co-author Wil Roebroeks told AFP.
“This is the first transparent evidence of elephant hunting in human evolution,” said Roebroeks, a professor of archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The study suggests that Neanderthals who lived in the domain for 2,000 to 4,000 years were less cellular and formed social assemblages “significantly larger than previously assumed. “
“Neanderthals were mere slaves to nature, original hippies who lived off the land,” Roebroeks said.
“They were really shaping their environment, through fire. . . and also having a huge impact on the largest animals that existed in the world at the time. “
The researchers decided that the elephants were hunted, not just recovered, because of the age and sex of the remains discovered in the quarry.
Most were men and there were few or old.
“It’s a typical variety created by hunters looking for the largest prey,” Roebroeks said.
Adult male elephants would have been less difficult to hunt than females, who tend to move in packs toward their young. “Whereas adult males are solitary animals most of the time,” Roebroeks said. “This makes them less difficult to hold, dragging them into dust traps and pits.
“And those are the calorie bombs that walk through those landscapes. “
The researchers said Neanderthals needed to preserve the massive amounts of food provided through a single elephant and that this would keep them for months.
“An average male elephant of about 10 tons would have produced at least 2,500 servings for an adult Neanderthal,” Roebroeks said.
“It’s possible that they just face it, whether it’s holding it for longer periods of time, this is already something we didn’t know, or just from the fact that they lived in much, much larger teams than we infer. “
The researchers said Neanderthals sacrificed the animals with flint tools, which left transparent marks on well-preserved bones.
“These are old cut marks that are generated by cutting and scraping the flesh off the bones,” Roebroeks said.
Traces of charcoal chimneys used by Neanderthals have also been found, suggesting they may have dried the meat by hanging it from grills and making a fireplace underneath.
Roebroeks said that while the supplies show that Neanderthals lived in giant social units, it is difficult to accurately estimate the true length of those groups.
“But if you have a 10-ton elephant and you want to operate on it before it rots, you need another 20 people to finish it off in a week,” he said.