A study led by CENIEH researcher has just been presented looking at the subsistence strategies of Neanderthal groups at the Navalmaíllo Rock Shelter site (Pinilla del Valle, Madrid), whose results indicate that they mainly hunted large bovids and cervids
Abel Moclán, a researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviewswhich undertook a zooarchaeological and taphonomic study of the Neanderthal Navalmaíllo Rock Shelter site (Pinilla del Valle, Madrid), some 76,000 years old, whose results indicate that these Neanderthals mainly hunted large bovids and cervids.
Thanks to the taphonomic study, it has been possible to characterize the site as a “hunting camp”, meaning that it was used by these hominins as a staging post between where they caught their prey and the place of final consumption, at which the entire group would have made use of the resources the hunting parties obtained at different times.
Covering over 300 m2, this is possibly the region’s largest Neanderthal camp, and evidence had previously been found of different activities undertaken by these hominins here, such as manufacturing stone tools or the use of fire, at different moments, although little had been known about how important the faunal remains encountered were.
“We’ve been able to show with a high degree of certainty that the Navalmaíllo Neanderthals mainly hunted large bovids and cervids, which they processed there and then carried to a second place of reference. This point is very interesting, as this type of behavior has been identified at very few sites in the Iberian Peninsula. To do all this, we used very powerful statistical tools such as Artificial Intelligence”, says Moclán.
The other collaborators in this study were the researchers Rosa Huguet and Hugues Alexandre Blain, from the IPHES in Tarragona; Belén Márquez, César Laplana and María Ángeles Galindo-Pellicena, of the Museo Arqueológico Regional of Madrid; Nuria García, attached to the Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Diego Álvarez-Lao, of the Universidad de Oviedo, and the three co-directors of the Pinilla del Valle project: the geologist Alfredo Pérez González, the paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga and the archaeologist Enrique Baquedano.
Twentieth excavation campaign
The twentieth excavation campaign at the Pinilla del Valle sites is currently under way, from August 15th through September 15th. These excavations are being directed from the Museo Arqueológico Regional of the Comunidad de Madrid, and they are financed by the Comunidad de Madrid. The project is also sponsored by the company Mahou San Miguel and enjoys the collaboration of the Sierra de Guadarrama National Park, the Ayuntamiento de Pinilla del Valle, the Canal de Isabel II, the Fundación General of the Universidad de Alcalá and the Dirección General de Juventud.
Domingo Carlos Salazar and associate. Credit: Asociacion RUVID
Neanderthals, extinct cousins of modern humans, occupied Western Eurasia before disappearing and although it was once thought that they traveled as far east as Uzbekistan, in recent years an international research team with the participation of the University of Valencia discovered that they reached two thousand kilometers further East, to the Altai Mountains of Siberia. An international research team led by Domingo Carlos Salazar, CIDEGENT researcher of excellence at the University of Valencia, published today in the Journal of Human Evolution the first attempt to document the diet of a Neanderthal through a unique combination of stable isotope analysis and identification of plant micro-remnants in an individual.
The analysis of Neanderthal bones and dental stones from Siberia sheds light on their dietary ecology, at the eastern limit of their expansion. It is a very dynamic region where Neanderthals also interacted with their enigmatic Asian cousins, the Denisovans. The work refers both to western Siberia, where there are studies that explain that modern humans responded with high mobility, and to the eastern part, where there is a lack of work that analyzes the behavior and subsistence of Neanderthals, who inhabited this Siberian forest steppe, which is drier and colder than the western one. Studying the diets of eastern Neanderthals allows us to understand their behaviors, mobility and potential adaptability.
A team of researchers from Spain, Germany, Canada, The Netherlands and Russia, led by physician and historian Domingo Carlos Salazar García from the University of Valencia, took bone samples and dental calculus from Neanderthal remains dated to 60 and 50 ka BP from the site of Chagyrskaya in the Altai Mountains in Southern Siberia, located just 100 km from the Denisova Cave. Analyzes of the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes from one mandible (Chagyrskaya 6) revealed that this individual had a relatively high trophic level compared to the local food web, indicating that it consumed a large amount of animal protein from hunting large and medium-sized game. Using optical microscopy, the researchers identified a diverse assemblage of microscopic particles from plants preserved in the dental calculus from the same individuals as well as from others from the site. These plant microremains indicate that the inhabitants of Chagyrskaya also consumed a number of different plants.
These results can help us answer a long-standing enigma about the Altai Neanderthals: the region was tempting enough that Neanderthals colonized the area at least twice, but genetic data indicates they were barely hanging on, living only in small groups that were constantly at risk of extinction. The dietary data now indicates that this unusual habitation pattern was probably not due to a lack of adapting their diet to the local environment. Instead, other factors such as the climate or interaction with other hominins should be investigated in future studies.n
“Neanderthals were capable of having a diverse menu even in adverse climatic environments,” says Domingo C. Salazar García, “it was really surprising that these eastern Neanderthals had broadly similar subsistence patterns to those from Western Eurasia, showing the high adaptability of our cousins, and therefore suggesting that their dietary ecology was probably not a disadvantage when competing with anatomically modern humans.”
“These microremains provide some indication that even as Neanderthals expanded onto the vast and cold forest-steppe of Central Asia they retained patterns of plant use that could have been developed in Western Eurasia,” says Robert Power, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Dietary ecology
“A better grasp of Neanderthal dietary ecology is not only the key to better understand why they disappeared, but also to how they interacted with other populations who they coexisted with, like the Denisovans,” says Bence Viola, assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
“To really understand the diets of our ancestors and cousins, we need more studies like this one that make use of multiple different methods on the same individuals. We can finally understand both the plant and animal foods that they ate,” offers Amanda G. Henry, assistant professor at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University.
“The steppe lowlands of the Altai Mountains were suitable for the habitation of the Neanderthals 60,000 years ago. Despite the sparse vegetation and its seasonal nature, the absence of tundra elements and relatively mild climate allowed eastern Neanderthals to keep the same food strategies as their western relatives,” says Natalia Rudaya, head of PaleoData Lab of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography Siberian Branch Russian Academy of Science.
A Doggerland of the Great Lakes? Underwater rock formations on the lakebed of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron may have been created by hunters thousands of years ago.
An aerial view of Lake Huron. (Credit: EdgarBullon/Shutterstock)
In 2007, underwater archeologist Mark Holley was scanning for shipwrecks on the bottom of Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay. Instead, he stumbled on a line of stones thought to be constructed by ancient humans — including one stone with what appeared to be a carving of a mastodon. The subsequent press conference generated excited headlines about a “Stonehenge-like structure” found under Lake Michigan.
But these sensationalized headlines are misleading: there’s no “henge” to the structure. The stones are small and arranged in a V-shape instead of a circle. Plus, the supposed-mastodon image hasn’t been analyzed to prove whether it’s a carving or a natural feature of the rock.
The real underwater stone sensation lies 120 feet below neighboring Lake Huron: an area the size of a football field with dozens of 9,000-year-old artifacts and human-built stone structures that comprise the most complex prehistoric hunting structure ever found beneath the Great Lakes.
“It’s a Pompeii-type situation. Everything is totally preserved in cold, clear freshwater. You don’t get that often in archaeology,” says John O’Shea, an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who has led the research on underwater sites in Lake Huron.
These underwater antiquities give us a glimpse of how prehistoric human communities worked together to find meat.
Crossing the Alpena-Amberley Ridge
When these stone structures were built, great sheets of glacial ice extended south from the North Pole, and water levels were much lower than they are today. The depth of the Great Lakes was up to 300 feet below modern levels, exposing miles more land than we currently see.
Those exposed shorelines were productive, full of wildlife and plants that attracted hungry humans. Early hunting communities likely targeted migrating caribou in particular, a species that’s adapted to cold climates and is (and was) “very predictable,” according to O’Shea.
Each spring and summer, caribou migrated across a narrow strip of land called the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, which stretched diagonally across Lake Huron, connecting modern-day northeast Michigan to southern Ontario.
“This land bridge was only two to 10 miles wide, giving a huge advantage to early hunters looking to ambush animals,” says O’Shea.
Like deer and elk, caribou follow linear features and don’t like to step over a line of brush or stone. Early humans capitalized on this by constructing two long, converging stone lines that narrowed to a choke point. At the convergence to the two lines, hunters hid behind big boulders, ready to kill the migrating caribou.
O’Shea and his colleagues have found these stone lines and hunting blinds on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge beneath Lake Huron, most notably in a 300-foot-long ambush area called the Drop 45 Drive Lane. Because the artifacts are so deep, they haven’t been affected by waves and ice or covered by sand and algae.
“I’ve seen campfire rings with charcoal still inside them, stone tools, and even rings that were used to stake down the edges of a tent or tipi,” says O’Shea, who is also an expert scuba diver.
Divers collecting samples at the Drop 45 Drive Lane. (Credit: John O’Shea)
Similar hunting structures have been found throughout North America, particularly closer to the Arctic where they were used more recently by traditional native hunters.
“Comparing the Lake Huron structures to similar hunting techniques around the world gives us a clearer picture of how these rocks might have been used,” says Hans VanSumeren, a marine technology professor and the director of the Great Lakes Water Study Institute at Northwestern Michigan College.
The underwater artifacts and stone structures were carefully vetted to determine whether they were natural or human-made. First, teams use remote sonar mapping to find potential archaeological sites, then they deploy remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for more detailed investigations, or send down divers to recover samples for further testing.
“It’s really exciting because it’s the earliest signs of occupation,” says VanSumeren.
What’s the Story Behind Lake Michigan’s “Stonehenge”?
Back to the media-hyped “Stonehenge” Holley found in Lake Michigan: It might be a small version of a prehistoric hunting structure, similar to the one found in Lake Huron. As for why it was falsely labeled in headlines, VanSumeren says that a hunting blind underwater “doesn’t have the same ring to it” as an internationally recognized prehistoric structure like Stonehenge.
“There’s clearly a lot of rocks there. But the jury’s out on whether it was intentional construction,” says O’Shea, who dove to the site several years ago with Holley.
Unlike the Caribbean-clear deep water where the Drop 45 Drive Lane was discovered in Lake Huron, the shallow rocks Holley found in Grand Traverse Bay were 35 feet underwater. They are coated in algae, sediment, and invasive mussels, making it difficult to determine if the rocks are natural or human-built. O’Shea hopes Holley will submit his findings for peer-review, which he calls “the gold standard” for scientists.
“You need to produce the receipts to convince people that what you have is real,” says O’Shea, “especially if you’re working underwater where most people can’t go.”
Credit John O’Shea
Divers collecting samples at the Drop 45 Drive Lane. (Credit: John O’Shea)
“Man the Hunter” is a narrative of human origins developed by early 20th-century anthropologists armed with their imaginations and a handful of fossils. They viewed hunting—done by men—as the prime driver of human evolution, bestowing upon our early ancestors bipedalism, big brains, tools and a lust for violence. In this narrative, hunting also gave rise to the nuclear family, as women waited at home for men to bring home the meat.
As an anthropologist who studies hunting and gathering societies, I was thrilled by the discovery of female skeletons buried with big-game hunting paraphernalia, a pattern that raises important questions about ancient gender roles. But I found most of the media coverage it generated disappointingly inaccurate. Responding to the finding, journalist Annalee Newitz wrote: “Nicknamed ‘man the hunter,” this is the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling.“
In fact, that theory died a well-deserved death decades ago.
It was there in Chicago that real-life data confronted the myth of Man the Hunter. Researchers showed that women worked just as hard as men, and plant foods gathered by women were crucially important in hunter-gatherer diets. Hunter-gatherer movement patterns were driven by a variety of ecological factors, not just game. And many hunter-gatherers were quite peaceful and egalitarian. Hunting wasn’t the sole driver or unifying theory of human evolution after all.
But it is a mistake to conflate this pattern of “most hunters are men” among hunter-gatherers with the myth of Man the Hunter. That myth was born of assumptions, not careful empirical research.
Through decades of field research, anthropologists have developed a more flexible and capacious view of human labor. According to this view, women are not bound by biology to gather, nor men to hunt. In fact, several accounts of women’s hunting in foraging societies had emerged by the mid-1980s.
In this context, ancient female hunters are an expectation, not a surprise. And the focus on Man the Hunter distracts from the more important question of how a society with female big-game hunters might be constructed. After all, women are perfectly capable of hunting, yet in most hunter-gatherer societies they don’t do it very often.
These constraints play a role in shaping risk preferences. In hunter-gatherers, men’s hunting is risky, meaning it carries a high chance of failure. Men tend to hunt alone or in small groups and target big game with projectile weapons, which often requires fast-paced, long-distance travel. In contrast, women prefer to hunt in groups and focus on smaller, easier-to-capture prey closer to camps, often with the aid of dogs.
Women are often crucial to the hunting success of others, whether through logistical or ritual assistance. Husbands and wives sometimes work collaboratively; in these instances women may help trap an animal, then club it to death and carry the meat home. And in big-game hunting societies, women provide support to hunters by manufacturing clothing, weaponry and transportation equipment. They may also participate in hunting directly by locating, then surrounding and driving game toward a killing location, as seen among high-latitude reindeer hunters and Plains bison hunters. As the authors of the new paper speculate, this is likely how the Peruvian female hunters killed game.
Girls from the hunting and gathering Batek tribe playing with blowpipes. Credit: Kirk Endicott
Updated views on plant gathering provide insight into why women may choose not to hunt altogether. No one questioned that hunting is hard, but early anthropologists often assumed women’s gathering was simple and easy. This turns out to be wrong. Like hunting, gathering demands extensive ecological knowledge and skill that is socially learned and cultivated over a lifetime.
As a result, hunter-gatherers face tough choices about how to divide difficult labor in a 24-hour day. In this context, economic considerations show that it pays to specialize: modest comparative advantages—speed and strength, and the incompatibilities posed by child care—can lead to divisions of labor that increase overall food acquisition by the group. From this perspective, women’s decisions to hunt less than men may be a rational decision about allocating effort.
The Batek people
Many have assumed that by not hunting, women are relegated to lower status. But is that true?
I conduct my work among the Batek people, hunter-gatherers from the rainforests of Malaysia who are widely considered one of the most gender-egalitarian societies in the world. They have little material inequality, share food widely, abhor violence and emphasize individual autonomy.
When day breaks at camp, Batek men trek far, usually alone, to hunt monkeys with blowpipes. The women gather tubers or fruit in small groups closer to camp. Nothing prohibits women from hunting, as is the case with some hunter-gatherers where, for example, touching hunting weapons is forbidden. Batek women sometimes join in group hunts of bamboo rats, but it is otherwise rare. However, there are exceptions. Some teenage girls establish an interest in blowpipe hunting that carries into adulthood.
The Batek people say this division of labor comes down to strength differences, incompatibility with child care and differences in knowledge specialization. Hunting has great cultural significance, but women’s knowledge of plant distributions is crucial for collective decisions like moving camp. The Batek conceive of themselves as a co-operative and interdependent group in which each person makes a unique and important contribution toward a communal goal.
Beyond Man the Hunter
Contrary to news reports, the archeological findings from Peru accord well with current knowledge about how and why men and women divide labor among hunter-gatherers. And it has little to do with the myth of Man the Hunter.
The Peruvian hunter-gatherers were big-game specialists who used spear-throwing technologies that were likely relatively easy to learn. This may have enabled more flexible divisions of labor and broader participation in hunting by women, similar to what we see among some hunter-gatherers today.
The social implications beyond these facts are not clear. That’s because one’s role in food collection has no simple relation to status or power dynamics. New research on neglected topics like the determinants of women’s status and risk-seeking economic behavior in traditional societies promises to shed light on this issue. But as the case with the Batek people shows, among a liberated society of equals, status and power has little to do with who brings in the meat.
From slaying centaurs to biblical mentions, poison-tipped arrows are a staple of cultural stories in the west. But they’ve also proved highly effective in reality, so much so that indigenous peoples around the world are still making use of them today, to successfully feed themselves and their families.
The Kalahari San of southern Africa hunt with small bone- or iron-tipped arrows that may look quite dainty, but when coated with poison, they also prove quite lethal. The hunter-gatherers daub their weapons with larvae entrails of a beetle calledDiamphidia nigroonata. The larvae contain a diamphotoxin poison that is capable of bringing down an adult giraffe.
Some of the earliest solid evidence of poison use is traces of the highly toxic compound ricin on 24,000-year-old wooden applicators, found in South Africa’s Border cave. However, archaeologists have long suspected this hunting technique is much older, and new evidence now suggests humans have been shooting poison arrows through the last 72,000 years.
In a new study, archaeologist Marlize Lombard from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa examined the unique properties of known poison arrows, comparing them to those that don’t rely on poison, by analysing 128 bone pointed arrows.
Arrows that don’t use poison need to deeply pierce the bodies of prey to effectively kill or incapacitate, whereas those laced with poison just need to stab through an animal’s skin to access its bloodstream.
Using a measurement called the tip cross-sectional area (the part of the arrowhead important for both cutting into prey hide and the arrow’s flight dynamics) allowed Lombard to compare arrows through time. She focused her study on bone-tipped arrows because a lot of previous work looked only at stone-tipped arrows, given more of these have been preserved.
Lombard then assessed 306 Late Stone Age bone-point arrows, for these established properties.
Six of the bone-pointed arrows dated as far back as 72,000-80,000 years, from the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Three of these arrows have properties consistent with poisoned arrowheads.
“One is smaller, which if used as an un-poisoned arrowhead would have been ineffective,” Lombard wrote, which would make these the oldest known poison arrows in the world.
The sample size for the oldest arrows is small, and Lombard cautions that such a metric approach to weapons function can only tell us what the weapon had the potential to achieve, rather than the way they were actually used. Other clues are also required to establish probable use.
“When dealing with the human past, numbers alone can seldom reveal the nuances necessary for a deep understanding of techno-behaviours – for that a measure of qualitative assessment and interpretation is required,” she wrote.
Another of the bone points found at Klasies River Mouth in South Africa, older than 60,000 years, was found to have micro-cracks, which are consistent with use as an arrow. This arrow was also found to have a black residue that Lombard and other researchers suspect is either poison, glue, or even both.
In more recent times, humans have made use of poisons from a large variety of life, including plants, poison dart frogs and even venomous lizards. Today, some of these poisons have the potential to be medically useful.
If Lombard’s findings hold true, they go to show how this ancient human technology became such an effective tool – one that has well and truly stood the test of time.
A new study shows that ancient Siberian hunters created heat resistant pots so that they could cook hot meals – surviving the harshest seasons of the ice age by extracting nutritious bone grease and marrow from meat.
The research – which was undertaken at the University of York – also suggests there was no single point of origin for the world’s oldest pottery.
Academics extracted and analysed ancient fats and lipids that had been preserved in pieces of ancient pottery – found at a number of sites on the Amur River in Russia – whose dates ranged between 16,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Potential
Professor Oliver Craig, Director of the BioArch Lab at the University of York, where the analysis was conducted, said: “This study illustrates the exciting potential of new methods in archaeological science: we can extract and interpret the remains of meals that were cooked in pots over 16,000 years ago.
“It is interesting that pottery emerges during these very cold periods, and not during the comparatively warmer interstadials when forest resources, such as game and nuts, were more available.”
Why these pots were first invented in the final stages of the last Ice Age has long been a mystery, as well as the kinds of food that were being prepared in them.
Climatic fluctuation
Researchers also examined pottery found from the Osipovka culture also on the Amur River. Analysis proved that pottery from there had been used to process fish, most likely migratory salmon, which offered local hunters an alternative food source during periods of major climatic fluctuation. An identical scenario was identified by the same research group in neighbouring islands of Japan.
The new study demonstrates that the world’s oldest clay cooking pots were being made in very different ways in different parts of Northeast Asia, indicating a “parallel” process of innovation, where separate groups that had no contact with each other started to move towards similar kinds of technological solutions in order to survive.
Lead author, Dr Shinya Shoda, of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Nara, Japan said:”We are very pleased with these latest results because they close a major gap in our understanding of why the world’s oldest pottery was invented in different parts of Northeast Asia in the Late Glacial Period, and also the contrasting ways in which it was being used by these ancient hunter-gatherers.
“There are some striking parallels with the way in which early pottery was used in Japan, but also some important differences that we had not expected. This leaves many new questions that we will follow up with future research.”
Origin point
Professor Peter Jordan, senior author of the study at the Arctic Centre and Groningen Institute of Archaeology, University of Groningen, the Netherlands said:”The insights are particularly interesting because they suggest that there was no single “origin point” for the world’s oldest pottery. We are starting to understand that very different pottery traditions were emerging around the same time but in different places, and that the pots were being used to process very different sets of resources.
“This appears to be a process of “parallel innovation” during a period of major climatic uncertainty, with separate communities facing common threats and reaching similar technological solutions.”
The last Ice Age reached its deepest point between 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, forcing humans to abandon northern regions, including large parts of Siberia. From around 19,000 years ago, temperatures slowly started to warm again, encouraging small bands of hunters to move back into these vast empty landscapes.
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