Neanderthals have been a species of archaic people that lived in Europe and Asia from round 400,000 to 40,000 years in the past.
The stays of hunted animals at Combe-Grenal, France, confirmed that they have been persistently sourced from open tundra-like habitats.
A research performed by Emilie Berlioz of CNRS/Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès and colleagues, and revealed within the journal PLOS ONE, has discovered that Neanderthals in Combe-Grenal, France, favored looking in open environments and maintained this technique regardless of durations of climatic change. This analysis was a part of the ANR DeerPal undertaking and supplies beneficial perception into the looking habits of Neanderthals on this area.
For many millennia in the course of the Middle Palaeolithic, from round 150,000 to 45,000 years in the past, the Neanderthals made Combe-Grenal in France their residence. These historic people hunted the native animals, whose stays have been found on the website. The area underwent frequent fluctuations in local weather and environmental situations in the course of the Neanderthals’ occupancy, affecting the conduct of the native wildlife.
Dental molds for dental microwear evaluation, aiming at deciphering the paleoenvironments exploited by Neanderthal populations. Credit: Aurora Diaz Obregon, CC-BY 4.0
In this research, Berlioz and colleagues investigated the habitat preferences of species hunted by the Neanderthals to investigate whether these environmental shifts affected Neanderthal hunting strategies.
The authors examined nearly 400 specimens of hunted animals from the site, including bison, aurochs, red deer, and reindeer, using wear on the animals’ teeth to infer their diets during the final days of their lives. The animals were found to have fed predominantly on plants growing in an open, tundra-like environment. This pattern was consistent across the many millennia recorded at Combe-Grenal, suggesting that these hunted animals continued to prefer an open-habitat feeding ecology, even during times of significant climate fluctuations.
From dental facets to paleoecological reconstructions. Credit: Emilie Berlioz, CC-BY 4.0
As a result, Neanderthal hunters “stayed in the open”, and were not forced to switch to hunting tactics adapted to close encounters in forested environments. In Combe-Grenal, these results put into perspective the link generally established between the evolution of the production of lithic tools and the adaptation of hunting strategies of human populations in response to environmental changes
This information is essential to understanding the influences of local environmental changes on material culture or human history. Further examination of similar data at other sites will allow researchers to investigate whether this trend holds true at different times and in different regions.
The authors add: “Dental microwear texture analysis of ungulate preys at Combe-Grenal shows Neanderthal hunting strategies were unaffected by climatic and environmental oscillations throughout millennia.”
Reference: “A long-term perspective on Neanderthal environment and subsistence: Insights from the dental microwear texture analysis of hunted ungulates at Combe-Grenal (Dordogne, France)” by Emilie Berlioz, Eugénie Capdepon and Emmanuel Discamps, 18 January 2023, PLOS ONE.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278395
