Perception versus reality: Implications of elephant hunting by Neanderthals

Abstract

Neanderthals hunted elephants at Neumark-Nord 1 (Germany), a finding that has major implications for our understanding of social and cultural aspects of Neanderthal behavior.

Neanderthals hunted elephants at Neumark-Nord 1 (Germany), a finding that has major implications for our understanding of social and cultural aspects of Neanderthal behavior.

Few members of the hominin lineage have been more maligned in popular culture than Neanderthals. From their discovery and the earliest depictions of Neanderthals at the turn of the 20th century, there has been an “othering” of our closest hominin cousins, to the extent that calling someone a cave man or Neanderthal is taken as an insult that implies being stupid or backward. Scientists have not been immune to this, and, indeed, many have pushed aspects of the incompetent Neanderthal trope through much of the 20th century [e.g., (1)]. However, some researchers voiced the need to moderate the conversation, and by the 1990s, many archaeologists began to characterize Neanderthals as successful big game hunters (2). This view, though, did not seem to extend beyond standard large game on the European landscape (e.g., horses, cattle, and deer).

Consequently, whenever archaeologists find evidence of a “novel” hunting behavior by Neanderthals, it warrants a major discussion in the community. This is especially true for the procurement of charismatic megafauna, such as elephants and mammoths (Fig. 1). The mere presence of the remains of these species at a Neanderthal site leads to several questions: Were hominins responsible for the accumulation and modification of the remains? If yes, did they hunt or scavenge the animal? Scavenging is typically the null hypothesis because megafauna hunting is difficult to substantiate. In this issue of Science Advances, Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues (3) provide compelling evidence of Neanderthals hunting megafauna, specifically straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) 125,000 years ago in Germany.

Fig. 1. Reconstruction of Pleistocene hominins exploiting an elephant.

(Copyright Benoît Clarys, courtesy of the Schöningen project).

An ongoing problem with trying to understand megafauna hunting by past hominins is the nature of the archaeological record. In the Middle Paleolithic of Europe and western Asia (home to Neanderthals, ca. 300,000 to 40,000 years ago), there are around 26 sites with evidence for megafauna exploitation (4). Of these, the vast majority includes the bones of megafauna found in association with stone tools but with no direct evidence of cut marks on the bones. Thus, procurement by hominins is, in most cases, circumstantial at best. The next challenge is that cut marks do not necessarily indicate hunting because they can also be caused by scavenging. To establish hunting, archaeologists can seek direct evidence, such as impact marks from hunting implements making contact with the bone or instances of stone tools becoming embedded in the bone. Such evidence is vanishingly rare, however, and is only found at a small handful of sites.

A more promising method to resolve the question of hunting versus scavenging involves reconstructing the demographic profiles of the animal that are found at archaeological sites. In short, very young and very old animals are more likely to succumb to death due to disease, malnutrition, and predation by carnivores as compared to prime-aged adult animals. This is the case with most herbivores, which has led archaeologists to implicate hominin hunters in the accumulation of prime-aged adult animals (5). A similar pattern could also exist for hominins hunting megafauna. A challenge with establishing demographic profiles is that a large sample size of individuals is necessary, which is also rare among megafauna assemblages. Uniquely, Neumark-Nord 1 in Germany has a large enough sample (3).

Like many European interglacial lakeshore sites, Neumark-Nord 1 preserves a large number of faunal remains; central to this discussion are the straight-tusked elephants. Palombo and colleagues (6, 7) previously studied the elephants from a paleontological perspective and, in doing so, established that the demographics of the animals at the site skewed disproportionately toward adult males. Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues (3) argue that this constellation of elephants would not have resulted from natural deaths, and the combined age and sex data point to Neanderthals targeting solitary bull males. Further, the authors present taphonomic data (e.g., carnivore bite marks or cut marks from stone tools) for 57 different individuals. They find butchery damage on most individuals, repetitive cut marks on the left and right body parts of the same animal, and cut mark damage that indicates that hominins accessed the carcasses before carnivores. Considering both the demographic and cut mark data, Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues (3) suggest that Neanderthals at Neumark-Nord 1 hunted straight-tusked elephants and followed a butchery strategy meant to maximize carcass exploitation (8).

Establishing that Neanderthals hunted elephants is interesting, although it should not be shocking. What is impressive is the sheer quantity of meat seemingly fully exploited by Neanderthals at Neumark-Nord 1. Straight-tusked elephants were huge: Females weighed 6 tons and males up to 13 tons. For comparison, eight midsized cars weigh 12 tons. Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues (3) calculate the amount of meat available from the elephants at the site. Based on this, a 10- ton elephant would have taken 200 to 600 person-hours to process, which, at the average, hunter-gatherer group size of 25 people (9) would mean 3 to 5 days. The yield is mindboggling: more than 2500 daily portions of 4000 calories per portion. A group of 25 foragers could thus eat a straight-tusked elephant for 3 months, 100 foragers could eat for a month, and 350 people could eat for a week. It is worth noting that Neanderthals are thought to have lived in groups smaller than 25 people (10).

Neanderthals knew what they were doing. They knew which kinds of individuals to hunt, where to find them, and how to execute the attack. Critically, they knew what to expect with a massive butchery effort and an even larger meat return. On the basis of sedimentation rates and the number of individuals, Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues (3) estimate that an elephant was killed roughly every 5 to 6 years at the site. The ramifications of having access to such a large quantity of meat on a semiregular basis goes far beyond what we know about Neanderthal behavior, and there are only two plausible explanations for how they dealt with such an influx of resources. The first is that Neanderthals had the cultural knowledge and mechanisms to store meat—drying, freezing, or caching—and they spent much more time in a single location than we typically envision (i.e., months as opposed to days). The second is that, in some situations, Neanderthals lived in much larger groups or participated in temporary aggregations, which would have provided important opportunities for social, cultural, and genetic exchange.

It is fascinating that with solid evidence for Neanderthals hunting megafauna as a fairly regular part of their subsistence repertoire, the hunting itself is a subplot in its contribution to our understanding of Neanderthal behavior. All evidence points to Neanderthals being excellent hunters that periodically displayed broader diets than archaeologists realized even a decade ago. To the more recognizably human traits that we know Neanderthals had—taking care of the sick, burying their dead, and occasional symbolic representation—we now also need to consider that they had preservation technologies to store food and were occasionally semisedentary or that they sometimes operated in groups larger than we ever imagined. It is increasingly clear that Neanderthals were not a monolith and, unsurprisingly, had a full arsenal of adaptive behaviors that allowed them to succeed in the diverse ecosystems of Eurasia for over 200,000 years.