Scar marks on extinct cave lion bones (pictured) suggest that early humans hunted and ate the predator.
Posted on 06/18/2010 7:27:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The cut marks show that the animals were gutted, just like the many deer, horses, bison, and other common prey animals found at the site, according to study leader Ruth Blasco of Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. The gutted remains also show that the early humans might have had first crack at the corpse by killing it themselves, Blasco said. If other animals had killed the lion, she said, the tasty viscera would have been long gone by the time the early humans arrived... Blasco and colleagues unearthed 17 bones of the extinct cave lion Panthera leo fossilis, which was a bit bigger than today's African lion. The bones were found at the Gran Dolina site, which houses hundreds of fossils in 300,000- to 350,000-year-old rock layers from Europe's Middle Pleistocene period. (See a prehistoric time line.) Cut marks on the lion bones allowed the team to reconstruct how the Neanderthal ancestors skinned and defleshed the lion, as well as broke its bones to remove marrow. But bones alone can’t tell the researchers why H. heidelbergensis would have tangled with such a dangerous creature, Blasco pointed out. Clues from other societies may help answer that.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
Scar marks on extinct cave lion bones (pictured) suggest that early humans hunted and ate the predator.
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King of the beasts my ass. Homo heidelbergensis, 300K+ years ago didn't put up with some big cat tellin' him how to live.To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.The Neandertal EnigmaFrayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127] |
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"Yeah, we used to hunt lions. Survival of the fittest, you know.
You people whine when your cell phone battery dies. Imagine having to take on a lion with just a stone tipped spear."
Gee, I dunno, I specifically recall reading as a teenager in the late Peter Hathaway Capstick’s 1977 classic “Death in the Long Grass” that the big cats are practically inedible. It would be insanely dangerous to take one one with spears. Which is not to say it isn’t done. In addition to the Masai moran, the Mycenaean Greeks went in for spearing lions but it was a dangerous sport.
I’ll wager a lot more H. Heidelbergensis were eaten by lions than vice versa.
I went to the zoo a couple months back with my boy. At the African Lion exhibit you can stand right next to them as they continually pace behind 4" glass. Those beasts are massive! It would have been a dangerous game to hunt one or more of those back then, especially with flint tipped weapons.
Seems like there’s been a steady trickle of archaelogical evidence to suggest that cavemen weren’t pussies. Shouldn’t be too surprising I suppose. I’ve often wondered what people back then thought about.
To bad her boyfriend's leg was dinner for the cannibals.
The evidence most likely indicate that early humans found a dead lion and ate it. NO predator earns its living by killing other predators its own size or larger; you wouldn’t live long enough on average to reproduce.
More than a few modern day hunters like the sweet taste of lion stew.
At Lotte World in South Korea, they had custom busses with bullet proof glass sides, and hooks welded on the outside. They would hang raw meat on the hooks, then drive into three separate enclosures with grizzlies, lions and tigers respectively and the beasts would climb all over the bus to get at the meat. You got to see them up real close in virtual attack mode...something I'd never care to see without the benefit of the bulletproof glass!
I’d say this proves that , no matter what killed the lion, that our ancestors used knives or spearpoints to scrape the meat off the bones.
No reason to let anything go to waste when you have prehensile appendages and a sharp object.
More proof of your heritage?
That’s just wrong!
I would add to that that it would take more than a single instance to lead me to believe that early humans armed only with spears or even longer range edged weapons routinely hunted big cats.
Such a find could much more likely indicate that the cat was killed by a family group in self defense and the cat was eaten as they would any kill. The meat was simply to valuable to go to waste.
In a time of great hunger a family group could be forced to hunt any animal to avoid starvation.
Hunting the big cat could have been a rite of passage or the rite of coronation to be tribal chief.
LOL...when I went there, I kept thinking how PETA would have a collective aneurysm if they ever found out about it....
That’s just the males. The females aren’t much bigger than a german shepherd.
Someone else told me it’s a lot like beef tongue.
A dead lion fresh enough to eat and they scared off whatever killed the lion? There was no mention that the lion had arthritis and died from old age so maybe they killed it and ate it.
One guess is as good as another.
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