Straight-tusked elephants, now extinct, were huge animals, twice the size of modern African elephants, but 125,000 years ago, despite their impressive size, Neanderthals hunted this species, reveals a study released Wednesday.
This new research sheds new light on the understanding of these prehistoric men, who hunted these 13-tonne, four-meter-tall elephants.
“Neanderthals were capable of handling enormous amounts of food,” not just that resulting from hunting horses, cattle, or deer, Wil Roebroeks, co-author of this study published in Science Advances, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“EITHER [eram capazes] to maintain it for a long time – and this is something we didn’t know – or simply because they lived in much larger groups than previously thought,” with more mouths to feed, he added.
Cutting game that weighs an average of 10 tons before the meat rots would require several days of work for about 20 men, the researchers estimated.
This amount would be enough for 25 people to eat for three months, or one month for 100 people.
To preserve the meat, they may have dried it over open fires.
There is no certain answer to the question of how the Neanderthals managed to kill these colossal animals, but one hypothesis is that they immobilized the animal in muddy areas where they were trapped, or in dug traps, before slaughtering them with spears.
For a long time, researchers wondered about the presence, in various archaeological sites, of elephant bones together with stone tools: were the Neanderthals really capable of hunting them or did they simply feed on animals that died of natural causes?
Evidence of the animals hunting, such as an impact mark or a spear stuck in a bone, has never been observed, which is not surprising given the size of these elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), whose genetic studies have linked them to the African modern. elephants
But at the site known as Neumark-Nord 1, near present-day Halle, Germany, a clue alerted scientists: The remains of about 70 elephants, the largest known group, were mostly adult males.
This lack of diversity is due to the selection of hunters, according to the study.
Unlike females, who lived in packs, solitary males must have been easier to kill. These also represented more food, due to their larger size.
The researchers then analyzed the extremely well-preserved bones of almost 60 of these elephants under a microscope, which showed clear marks from the stone tools used by Neanderthals to cut them, traces a few centimeters at most.
“These are the classic cut marks generated by cutting meat and scraping it from the bones,” explained Wil Roebroeks, a professor of archeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The environment where these Neanderthals lived and where the animals were found, near a lake, could be conducive to trapping them in muddy soil, according to the researchers.
According to the study, Neanderthals practiced hunting elephants in that area for a period of at least 2,000 years, or tens of generations.
But Neanderthals lived on Earth for a long time, about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago.
In Europe, “most of the time it was much colder than today,” unlike the period analyzed in Neumark, Wil Roebroeks explained.
Faced with a more abundant diet thanks to the favorable climate, this human species was able to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle, in larger groups.
However, the question of the number of these groups remains extremely difficult to determine precisely.
In any case, the study shows, according to Wil Roebroeks, that “the world of Neanderthals was very diverse” and that they “were not mere slaves of nature, that is, those original ‘hippies’ who lived off the land.”
Source: TSF
