A new study of giant elephants changes our knowledge of Neanderthals

0:00Now a new study of fossils has shown that Neanderthals hunted giant elephants which travelled hundreds of miles across Ice Age Europe. The researchers based their conclusions on 125,000 year old skeletal remains. They also found that Neanderthals were able to preserve the huge quantities of food provided by a single elephant, and it would sustain them for months. Will Robrux, whose professor of archaeology at Leiden University, is one of the authors of the research. Most of them were discovered already in the 80s and the 90s during large-scale brown-cold quarrying near the town of Halle in former Eastern Germany. So that was a huge quarry of thousands of acres large and 100 meter deep. And in the top layers of those quarries, archaeologists and geologists discovered the former existence of lakes. And within those lakes, at the edges of the lakes, they found the skeletons of at least 70 of these giant elephants. And they were stored in Halle for a few years until about a decade ago.

1:08The current team started to study these bones in more detail and discovered traces of human impact on those bones, showing that humans had been processing these animals extensively to get at the food of these giant animals. So what can we say for sure then about the Neanderthals who existed at the time and about how they interacted with these elephants? These elephants met their end in this lake area. Most of them were adult males, which are very big, twice the size of the biggest African elephants. So some of them could weigh up to 13 tons. That's a huge amount of elephant. And they were hunted by Neanderthals and exploited by Neanderthals, which suggests that these Neanderthal groups operated in larger groups than we commonly acknowledged, or that they were able to store the food that they derived from exploiting these

2:12animals for a significant amount of time. But it's not only elephants. So we're talking about elephants here, but this whole lake area is packed with the remains of other animals that had been hunted and butchered by Neanderthals, 125 last years ago. So we think about horses, deer, rhino, and there is also a lot of other, for instance, animals from the Carnivore Guild and all that is associated with tens of thousands of flint artifacts, tools that Neanderthals used to exploit these animals. So it may sound like an extremely dangerous enterprise to hunt these very large animals, but the adult males' elephant usually operated on their own, whereas attacking or killing a group of elephants that were guarded by very attentive female elephants would have been a much, much, much more dangerous and more difficult job for these Neanderthals. So it was just part,

3:13it was one item in there, let's say, on the meat side of their diet, these elephants. Does this change then how we think about Neanderthals and what we know about them? Well, that's a good question. What this exploitation of these huge elephants is changing or has changed, because it's not only at this location in Neumark-Lord, where we have found exploitation of elephants by Neanderthals. It's also in the whole area of former Eastern Germany, where there happened to be quarries, where you happen to get access to these periods in which these elephants were living, because they only lived in Europe. In warm, tempered periods, which are really rare, every 100,000 years there's a period that we call interglacial, something like with the temperatures that we're currently enjoying. What it showed is that these Neanderthals extensively exploited these large animals. Very, a minimum estimate suggests that one could live

4:14from the fat and the protein from an animal for at least a few months with a small group of 10 to 20 Neanderthals. And that again suggests that these people may have operated or at least temporarily aggregated in much larger groups than what we commonly acknowledge. We think about Neanderthals as primitive people roaming through the landscape in small groups of 10 to 20 individuals. The systematic exploitation of the largest mammals that ever lived in the place to see gives us a different picture. Much larger groups, probably more sedentary at some times than these constant nomads that we usually envisage. Will Robux bear of the University of Leiden?