Characteristics of an Early Hominid Scavenging Niche [and Comments and Reply]

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Abstract
The characteristics of scavenging opportunities in the Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater [Tanzania] are here documented and applied to the Plio/Pleistocene East Turkana and Olduvai lake basins. The earliest stone-tool-using, meat-eating hominids are argued to have most regularly encountered abandoned felid kills of medium-sized adult herbivores in riparian woodlands during the dry season, kills from which little flesh but all marrow and head contents could have been obtained. Additionally, it is suggested that they may have encountered large quantities of scavengeable flesh if sabertooth predation was concentrated on large herbivores. Such reconstruction of a possible hominid scavenging niche is considered a prerequisite to the development of criteria for the archaeological recognition of scavenging.