Age (Mortality) Profiles as a Means of Distinguishing Hunted Species from Scavenged Ones in Stone Age Archeological Sites

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Abstract
Some ungulate species at Upper Pleistocene and Holocene archeological sites in South Africa exhibit catastrophic mortality profiles, while others exhibit attritional ones. The awareness by Stone Age people that some species are especially amenable to driving or snaring probably accounts for the catastrophic profiles. Natural catastrophic death immediately followed by human scavenging is a much less likely explanation because the species samples comprise material lumped from deposits that accumulated more or less continuously over hundreds or even thousands of years during which period there is no reason to suppose the repeated occurrence of natural catastrophes nearby.The inability of Stone Age people to obtain prime-age adults in species that are not particularly amenable to driving or snaring presumably accounts for the attritional mortality profiles. Although the species that display attritional profiles conceivably were scavenged, the high proportion of very young individuals in the profiles suggests active hunting. Very young individuals are much less abundant in attritional profiles from local non-archeological sites, probably because their carcasses were removed from the record before burial, primarily by carnivore or scavenger feeding. Scavenging would account for the abundance of very young individuals in the archeological sites only in the unlikely event that people could regularly locate carcasses before other predators did.In general, geomorphic/sedimentologic context is probably the best criterion for determining whether a species characterized by a catastrophic profile in an archeological site was hunted or scavenged. At the majority of known sites, active hunting is suggested. In the case of a species characterized by an attritional profile in an archeological site, the proportion of very young individuals in the sample probably provides the best criterion for distinguishing hunting from scavenging. A relatively high proportion of very young individuals suggests active hunting.

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