Neanderthals Hunted Giant Elephants Much Larger Than The Ones Today [View all]

A new analysis of 125,000-year-old bones from around 70 elephants has led to some intriguing new revelations about the Neanderthals of the time: that they could work together to deliberately bring down large prey, and that they gathered in larger groups than previously thought.

The bones belonged to straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), a now extinct species that stood nearly 4 meters (just over 13 feet) tall at the shoulder. That's nearly twice the size of the African elephants that are alive today, and around 4 tons of meat would have been taken from each carcass
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Evidence of charcoal fires around the archaeological site suggest that the meat would have been dried, which is one way of making it last for longer. The haul would have been enough to feed 350 people for a week, or 100 people for a month, according to the researchers – that counters the conventional narrative of Neanderthals living in smaller groups of around 20.

The ages of the animals are telling too. These were almost all adult males – if the hominins were scavenging meat from dead elephants, children and females would be expected. Here, it looks as though they deliberately targeted the larger males for the extra meat, perhaps by driving them into mud or trapping them in pits.

https://www.sciencealert.com/neanderthals-hunted-giant-elephants-much-larger-than-the-ones-today

Personally, I've long thought that ambush hunters with thrusting spears hunted from above, in trees or on cliffs, the non hunting part of the group driving the selected animal toward the ambush point. Examination of mammoth skeletons that weren't butchered, meaning they'd died away from humans, has shown some with bone infections of the spine and adjacent ribs indicating penetrating injury from above. If I were an ancient hunter, that's what I'd do, it would have been insanity (and futile) to approach them on the ground and pits would have taken a huge amount of time to dig when your shovel was the scapula of an aurochs or deer.