14 DAY TRIAL // It is widely known among anthropologists and archaeologists that early humans living in the Paleolithic – a period of time spanning from 2.5 million years ago to approximately 10,000 BC – used to hunt and eat in groups, as they learned this maximized their chances for success. Experts have now identified a cave in Israel that features meat remains spanning from 400,000 to about 250,000 years ago, and determined that Lower Paleolithic (earlier) hunters shared meat differently than Upper Paleolithic (later) humans.
“The Lower Paleolithic hunters were skilled hunters of large game animals, as were Upper Paleolithic humans at this site. This might not seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but there's a lot of speculation as to whether people of the late Lower Paleolithic were able to hunt at all, or whether they were reduced to just scavenging. Evidence from Qesem Cave says that just like later Paleolithic humans, the earlier Paleolithic humans focused on harvesting large game. They were really at the top of the food chain,” explains University of Arizona (UA) anthropology professor Mary C. Stiner.
According to the data that experts could gather from the cave, it would appear that its inhabitants have through the millennia hunted cooperatively, then brought back the best pieces of meat from their prey back to the cave, where they used stone knives and fire to share and prepare it. By analyzing the pattern of cut marks on bones of deer, aurochs, horse and other big game, left at Qesem Cave by Paleolithic hunters, the expert was able to gain a deep insight into how the hunting and meat-sharing rituals evolved over time.
Unsurprisingly, earlier marks revealed that the earlier hunters were far less efficient, less organized and less specialized when it came to carving flesh from their prey. “This is somewhat expected, since the tools they made took considerable skill and locomotor precision to produce,” Stiner reveals. The trend naturally changed by the time of the Upper Paleolithic. “It's quite clear that meat distribution flowed through the hands of certain butchers. The tool marks made on bones by the more recent hunters are very regular, very efficient and show much less variation in the postures of the individuals cutting meat from any one bone. Only certain hunters or other fairly skilled individuals cut meat that was to be shared among the group,” the scientist believes.
“It's interesting that these earlier people were skilled predators and very social, but that their social rules are more basic, less derived than those of the Middle Paleolithic. What might surprise most archaeologists is that I'm seeing a big difference between Lower and Middle Paleolithic social behaviors, not between Middle and Upper Paleolithic social behaviors. Neanderthals lived in the Middle Paleolithic, and they were a lot more like us in their more formal redistributions of meat than were the earlier hominids,” Stiner concludes.