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Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior
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...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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American Association for the Advancement of Science
2023
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9891704/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36724231 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8186 |
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author | Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Sabine Kindler, Lutz MacDonald, Katharine Roebroeks, Wil |
author_facet | Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Sabine Kindler, Lutz MacDonald, Katharine Roebroeks, Wil |
author_sort | Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Sabine |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9891704 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | American Association for the Advancement of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-98917042023-02-08 Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Sabine Kindler, Lutz MacDonald, Katharine Roebroeks, Wil Sci Adv Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences 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. American Association for the Advancement of Science 2023-02-01 /pmc/articles/PMC9891704/ /pubmed/36724231 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8186 Text en Copyright © 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Sabine Kindler, Lutz MacDonald, Katharine Roebroeks, Wil Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior |
title | Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior |
title_full | Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior |
title_fullStr | Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior |
title_full_unstemmed | Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior |
title_short | Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior |
title_sort | hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: implications for neanderthal behavior |
topic | Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9891704/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36724231 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8186 |
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