Archaic humans in the Middle Palaeolithic Levant conducted planned and selective intercepts of aurochs, but not mass hunting

Abstract

Abstract While archaeologically challenging, determining whether hominins practised mass hunting before ca. 50,000 years ago is crucial for demonstrating intergroup communication and cooperation. The premise is that killing and processing several herd animals in a single event implicates planning, food sharing, and aggregation at a scale greater than most other Palaeolithic activities. Here, we focus on Unit III in the deep Middle Palaeolithic deposits of the Nesher Ramla karst depression (~ 120,000 years ago) in Israel, an early contact area of archaic and modern humans. Numerous aurochs ( Bos primigenius ) remains were found in this thin, temporally constrained stratigraphic unit, featuring signs of human butchery and consumption. An aurochs tibia displayed an embedded flint chip enveloped by bone remodelling, consisting unique evidence of recapture. We apply ageing, sexing, tooth wear and isotopic techniques to test the hypothesis that this assemblage represents mass hunting events but conclude that the evidence agrees better with multiple isolated, planned, and selective hunting and processing episodes. Thus, our results lend support to the commonly accepted view that Middle Palaeolithic archaic humans lived in small, dispersed, and disconnected groups, which might have been a disadvantage when faced with the sympatric modern humans.