More than a meal: Hominin-animal interactions in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic of Southern Germany

Abstract

The caves of the Swabian Jura in Southern Germany are well-known for preserving some of the earliest artistic representations – flutes, carved beads, animal figurines - dating to the Aurignacian period (ca. 42,500 cal BP). In this presentation, I provide a regional background of subsistence strategies from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic in the Swabian Jura, drawing on models from Human Behavioral Ecology to examine diachronic changes in game use. I then zoom in on Hohle Fels, a large cave that preserves ample faunal and lithic remains, osseous tools, combustion features, and numerous examples of Upper Paleolithic art and symbolic behavior. Throughout the duration of its occupation, hominins competed with large carnivores (bears, lions, hyenas, and wolves) for use of the cave, sometimes hunting the animals for meat and fur. I hypothesize that hominins used the cave as a predictable patch to hunt cave bears, a behavior that started in the Middle Paleolithic and persisted until the Gravettian. Finally, I will present my ongoing research on the oldest Middle Paleolithic layers (> ca. 62,500 BP) of Hohle Fels, where we recently uncovered a large concentration of lithic artifacts and burned bone. My work integrates zooarchaeology with ZooMS (zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) in order to increase the analytic resolution of bones identifiable to anatomical element but only general body size. In addition to this, the application of ZooMS to identify bone retouchers might indicate that Neandertals were selective in their choice of bone blanks used to knap stone tools. This suggests that, though the Swabian Jura is best-known for the novel use of animals in the Upper Paleolithic, Neandertals were well-aware of the material properties of the bones that they selected for tool use, a complex behavior typically not attributed to archaic hominins.

Bio:

Born and raised in Wyoming, Britt Starkovich received her B.A. and B.S. in Anthropology and Biology from the University of Wyoming in 2003. She then fled the cold to receive her M.A. (2005) and Ph.D. (2011) in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. She moved to Germany in 2012, where she is a senior researcher/curator with SHEP Tübingen and the head of Zooarchaeology at the University of Tübingen.