(ORDO NEWS) — It is believed that Neanderthals lived in groups of a maximum of a couple of dozen individuals.
However, at their sites, the remains of exceptionally large animals are found, which can only be obtained and eaten by a team of hundreds of people.
An important feature of our species is considered to be exceptionally high sociality. Homo sapiens is able to maintain contact with dozens and hundreds of other people, forming numerous, jointly acting groups.
It is generally accepted that this was the most important advantage of our ancestors in the competition for resources with other types of people, primarily with Neanderthals, whose groups did not exceed a couple of dozen people.
Back in the 1980s, animal bones and stone tools were found in coal mines near Neumark in Germany , about 125 thousand years old – this is much earlier than the first modern humans appeared there.
In that era, there was a system of lakes near which Neanderthals lived, as well as the now extinct forest elephants Palaeoloxodon antiquus, whose sizes were almost twice as large as those of the current African ones.
In total, scientists have discovered the remains of more than 70 adult animals that have accumulated along the shores of ancient lakes.
Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser and her colleagues at the MONREPOS archaeological research center have studied over 3,400 of these ivory bones.
Traces of tools on them showed that in that distant era there was an active hunt on the widest scale, and the hunters carefully scraped off everything edible, down to the last piece of meat.
Even traces of the teeth of animals are practically not detected – they had nothing of value left.
The scientists noted that the harvested elephants reached a height of four meters or more, each of them could provide food for 350 people for a week or 100 people for a month.
A group of a couple of dozen Neanderthals simply cannot eat so much, and cannot process it before the tissues begin to decompose.
In addition, the very hunting of such large animals required exceptional coordination between all participants in the process.
Perhaps the Neanderthals gathered for this only from time to time, but perhaps they lived for a long time in such large “teams”.
One way or another, but it seems that the generally accepted ideas about the size of their groups turned out to be wrong.
Extinct Neanderthals could organize groups no less numerous than our direct ancestors Homo sapiens.
This means that the results of their meeting and coexistence, which ended with the complete disappearance of the Neanderthals, are associated with some other factors, in addition to the difference in the ability to cooperate.
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