Neanderthals Hunted in Groups, One More Strike Against the Dumb Brute Myth

[Judi Lynn]

The skeletons of deer killed 120,000 years ago offer more evidence of cooperative behavior and risk-taking among our hominin relatives

By Lorraine Boissoneault
SMITHSONIAN.COM
JUNE 27, 2018

On an autumn day around 120,000 years ago, in the dense forests of what would come to be Germany, fierce hunters prowled the landscape.

These hunters regularly brought down mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, deer, wild horses, aurochs (extinct bulls) and straight-tusked elephants. They competed for these prizes against other predators like hyenas and lions, sometimes losing their lives in the process. But today their skills and tools proved their worth: A group of Neanderthals used their hand-crafted wooden spears to kill two male fallow deer, both in the prime of their life and heavy with valuable meat and fat.

We know this because those skeletons, with bones bearing the signs the people who killed them, were recovered in 1988 and 1997 in a site called Neumark-Nord. This week, researchers argue in a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution that those punctured bones are the oldest example of hunting marks in the history of homininkind. That would mean that Neanderthals used sophisticated close-range hunting techniques to capture their prey—adding more weight to the argument that they were much smarter than we once gave them credit for.

“This has a lot of implications, as groups of hunters had to closely cooperate, to rely on each other,” said Johannes Gutenberg University archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, one of the study’s authors, by email. “Our findings must be understood as one of the best evidence known so far that provides insight into the social set up of Neanderthals.”

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/neanderthals-hunted-groups-one-more-strike-against-dumb-brute-myth-180969472/

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