RED DEER: THEIR ECOLOGY AND HOW THEY WERE HUNTED BY LATE PLEISTOCENE HOMINIDS IN WESTERN EUROPE
Year:
2002
School:
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
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Abstract:
Fossil hominid morphology, archaeology, and genetics indicate that in Europe 30,000-40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans and their Upper Paleolithic industries replaced Neandertals and their Middle Paleolithic tools. Neandertals had thrived for hundreds of thousands of years, so why were they replaced? One possibility is that modern humans were able to extract more resources from the environment. This dissertation tests this explanation by assessing variation present in ancient hunting practices and investigating the relationship between Late Pleistocene hominids, tool industries, and hunting. I examined the hunting of one species, red deer (Cervus elaphus), through time and across spaceusing prey age-at-death as an indicator of hunting strategy. In the process, I evaluated the ability of the Quadratic Crown Height Method to accurately assign age-at-death; compared how well histograms, boxplots, and triangular graphs reconstruct mortality profiles from fossil assemblages; and developed a novel method for statistically comparing samples on triangular graphs. My results show that Neandertals and modern humans did not differ significantly in their ability to hunt prime-age red deer. None of the mortality distributions from the archaeological samples resemble the distribution constructed from elk killed by wolves in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Like other carnivores, wolves usually take young, old, and infirm prey. Nevertheless, the samples included in this study show a shift in prey age-at-death during the Middle Paleolithic approximately 50 kya. Young adult prey are more abundant in recent assemblages than in more ancient assemblages. [...]
