Paleoanthropological and paleoecological implications of the taphonomy of a sabertooth's den

Abstract

Abstract At least three species of sabertooth cats ( Homotherium, Megantereon and Dinofelis ) were sympatric with early Homo before 1·5 m.y.a. Sabertooth cats may have contributed significant scavengeable animal foods to early hominid diet (Blumenschine, 1987; Turner, 1988; Marean, 1989); however, to model this potential contribution it is first necessary, to gain data on sabertooth prey preferences, carcass disarticulation, carcass part transport, and completeness of carcass consumption. We may gain such data from studies of fossil dens attributable to sabertooths and functional analyses of sabertooth anatomy. Here we report on a Pleistocene den attributable to Homotherium , a genus found in both Pleistocene Africa and Eurasia, from the Friesenhahn Cave in Texas. Juvenile mammoths dominate the assemblage to the near exclusion of other species, suggesting that Homotherium specialised on the very young of mammoths in North America (Evans, 1961; Graham, 1976), and probably young mega-fauna in other continents. This indicates that the preferred prey size was approximately the size of an adult buffalo. Limb bones, of high flesh yield, of proboscidea are more abundant than other skeletal elements suggesting that Homotherium selectively transported parts of the skeleton away from the kill locality to more favorable locations. This shows that Homotherium was effective at carcass disarticulation and body part transport. Analysis of toothmarks shows that the toothmark frequencies are similar to those from hyaena and leopard dens, and this demonstrates that Homotherium was able to effectively deflesh long bones of its prey. These data suggest that Homotherium would have provided early Homo with moderate amounts of scavengeable mammal remains, not the massive amounts hypothesised previously (Blumenschine, 1987; Marean, 1989).