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One spring, after a long winter, an old elephant lay dying on the banks of a small river near the coast of what is now northern Italy. Soon after, some scavengers arrived to dine on this vast store of food.
More than 400,000 years later, one of the elephant tusks has been unearthed in construction activities at Castle Lumbroso on the outskirts of Rome, prompting archaeological excavations to investigate the immediate surroundings.
A newly published study led by Anja Spinapolis and Francesca Alhaik provides information not only about the elephant’s death, but, perhaps more interestingly, about the lives of the scavengers who eat it.
These sweepers were not hyenas. They were a strange species of bipedal primate – early nomadic humans, who lived Europe At a time when people built houses or even lit fires, those who stayed for a short time sought to benefit from this unexpected windfall.
The discovery is a successful example of how archaeological heritage management can be integrated within development and construction activities. Since 1992, a European-wide treaty makes it mandatory European Union Nations must protect their archaeological heritage. But each country can decide for itself how to do so.
In my native Netherlands, the mere discovery of an animal fossil does not necessarily lead to excavation. Therefore such a site can be easily destroyed without being noticed.
But in the case of the elephant, Roman archaeological superintendence went beyond the bounds of duty. They conducted an ambitious research project that revealed – and solved – a complex puzzle of early human behavior: what exactly did these nomadic scavengers do with this animal’s body?
Solving a 400,000-year-old puzzle
Four million years ago, humans were few in number in Europe, but were probably most abundant on the shores of the Mediterranean. Their fossils are extremely rare, but there are skulls from Sima de los Huesos (literally “pit of bones”) and Swanscombe in northern Spain. England Show that people around at this time were early Neanderthal,
Lucky for us, they left behind more than just their skeletons. We can also study their tools, which have been recovered across large parts of Europe – from the north to the south of England.
The river where the Castle Lumbroso elephant died was carrying ash from a volcanic eruption that can be accurately estimated at 404,000 years ago – so the elephant must have died after this. But the condition of the sediments suggests that the ash deposits were from a warmer period 395,000 years ago. From that point on, cold conditions began to prevail.
So, this puzzle for archaeologists was posed in a very narrow (from the archaeological point of view) time segment.
About the author
Gerrit Dusseldorp is Associate Professor of Stone Age Archeology at Leiden University.
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the original article,
In these warm periods, Italy was inhabited by a fascinating community of animals, including wolves, lions, hyenas, hippos and rhinoceros. But only elephants with straight teeth were beautiful. This species was much larger than the African elephant and was a true ecosystem engineer, opening up landscapes that would otherwise have been densely forested, thereby improving the productivity of many other species.
This particular animal was in its late 40s – about as old as an elephant. It may have got stuck in the mud on the river bank and died a natural death. We know this happened in other places too – for example, at Poggetti Vecchi in Tuscany, where seven elephants died in a hot spring and were later partially butchered. At Castle Lumbroso, we also know the season in which the elephant died: fallen red deer and fallow deer antlers suggest it was spring.
Humans moving across the landscape in small groups would naturally be attracted to this mountain of flesh. While the elephant bones do not show the distinctive cut-marks produced by cutting and chiseling, they do show hammer marks and were found next to several small flint tools.
We can see that people opened some bones by hitting them with a hammer, probably for the fat marrow inside. But they also used the bones to make tools. This is unusual behavior that has only been documented on a few other sites.
In most cases, it seems that early Neanderthals preferred to make their tools from flint and we suspect that other materials such as wood are also rarely preserved for us. Making bone tools is sometimes seen as a technologically complex behavior, indicating modern-like intelligence.
I think the explanation is simple: we rarely find them because they are more likely to decay than stone tools. Their use in Castle Lumbroso may have been a matter of “necessities”.
After all, the ancient Italian environment may have been beautiful, and people depended on good stones for their tools, but it had one serious drawback: flint was only available as very small pebbles.
The technology of these humans was not as sophisticated as that of the “classic” Neanderthals of later times, who distilled birch tar, gave wooden handles to stone tools, and regularly lit fires – all of which we do not see in such ancient times. This group was so versatile that it not only modified its technological repertoire to make very small flint tools, but also explored using other materials such as elephant bone.
They adapted smaller flints using the “bipolar technique” – a technique already in evidence at the first archaeological site of Lomekwi, 3.3 million years old in Kenya. In this, the stone you want to peel has to be placed on the anvil of a larger stone, then the top of it has to be hit with another stone. This splits the pebble into two pieces and sharp pieces can be prepared from here.
Some of the flint tool edges found at Castle Lumbroso were old enough to be analyzed for microscopic traces of their prehistoric use. They indicate use on a softer material, which could mean cutting elephant meat – although it could also be due to other things.
These early Neanderthals also had more complex technological arsenals. They brought to the site a hand axe, which was carved on (and from) a large block of limestone – not the best material for tools as it is quite soft, but still suitable for making this large tool type.
Possessing only imperfect stones – either too small or too soft – this group also understood the potential of mammoth elephant bones for turning them into tools. They broke some bones and shaped them by scraping the bone with a hammer stone, in the same way they worked flint.
Perhaps for only a few hours, the sounds of flint striking an anvil, the sounds of bones breaking and the excited screams of people filled with a rich source of food would have filled the air. These early people would then have moved on again, perhaps to find a suitable place for the night.