These Extinct Elephants Were Neanderthals’ ‘Biggest Calorie Bombs’

 

These Extinct Elephants Were Neanderthals’ ‘Biggest Calorie Bombs’

In his 1931 book, “How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes,” the American satirist Will Cuppy noted that Neanderthals had fires, caves, marrow bones, mosquitoes, love and arthritis. “What more can you ask?” he mused.

If you answered “bush meat block parties,” you might be on to something. That is essentially the conclusion of a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The paper focuses on 3,122 bones, tusks and teeth thought to derive from more than 70 straight-tusked elephants — some skeletons of which were virtually intact — that died 125,000 years ago in a heavily forested lake basin

 of what would come to be east-central Germany. The researchers argue that, for at least two millenniums, Neanderthals hunted there for the giant, now-extinct herbivores as part of what the paper’s lead author, Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of the Monrepos Archaeological Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, Germany, called their “cultural repertoire.”