Prehistory | Research: Neanderthals hunted giant elephants

Fresh According to the study, Neanderthals hunted giant elephants and may have lived in larger groups than previously thought.

According to the news agency AFP, the researchers arrived at these results by examining 125,000-year-old Palaeoloxodon antiquus – remains of elephants. Full-grown males of this elephant species could weigh up to 13 tons, and were three times the size of modern Asian elephants. The species became extinct about 30,000 years ago.

The remains of about 70 elephants were found in the 1980s in a coal mine near the city of Halle in what was then East Germany.

“This is the earliest evidence of elephant hunting in human evolution,” said one of the authors of the study Wil Roebroeks for AFP. He is a professor of archeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Researchers concluded from the bones of the elephants that the animals had been hunted and it was not a matter of eating the carrion. Most of the animals were adult males. Males were easier prey, as females moved in herds to protect their young. It was easier to harass individual males in, for example, mud pits or trap pits.

Cut marks from the flint tools of Neanderthals have been left on the bones of the elephants. Traces of bonfires have also been found in the area, so Neanderthals may have smoked elephant meat, for example.

Read more: The remains of the world’s oldest meal reveal Neanderthals to be good experiments

“They were the biggest calorie bombs that lived in the area,” Roebroeks says of the elephants.

According to him, the carcass of one adult male elephant weighing ten tons would have provided at least 2,500 daily food portions for Neanderthals.

According to Roebroeks, it is difficult to estimate how large groups Neanderthals lived.

“Processing a ten-ton elephant carcass before it rots has required the work of perhaps twenty Neanderthals.”

Roebroeks believes that meat was preserved or Neanderthals may have also lived in larger groups than previously thought.

The study was published on Wednesday In Science Advances.