An experimental lion-to-hammerstone model and its relevance to understand hominin-carnivore interactions in the archeological record

Abstract

Traditional scavenging models have emphasized that a secondary intervention of hominins to carcasses previously consumed by carnivores should yield high tooth mark frequencies on long bone shafts. It has also been shown that the most feasible scavenging scenario for early Pleistocene African hominins would have been acquiring carcasses from felid kills and prior to hyenid intervention. Oddly, most experiments conducted in the past 20 years have been mostly based on bone modification patterns created by durophagous carnivores. Previous works emphasized that a felid-hominin model would be reflected in low frequencies of tooth-marked shaft specimens. The present work intends to put this hypothesis fully to test by replicating the complete felid-hominin scenario. Hammerstone breakage of bones from wild lion kills was simulated and the resulting anatomical and bone portion distribution of tooth mark frequencies was documented. Here, it is shown that wild lions inflict moderate damage to long bone ends. In contrast, hammerstone-broken shaft specimens bear very few tooth marks (usually <10% of fragments). It is shown that most damage inflicted by lions on carcasses during consumption occur on upper limb bones. Distal portions of radius-ulnae and tibiae are the least affected areas. This referential framework can potentially be applied to the archaeological record to reassert primary access to carcasses in some early Pleistocene African sites and unravel hominin-carnivore contribution to middle and late Pleistocene Eurasian palimpsests.