New data indicate that early humans have always hunted the largest animals available to extinction over the past 1.5 million years.
According to a UN reportHuman activity over the past two centuries has driven more than a million species to extinction in recent decades, but humans are responsible for the sixth major mass extinction since much earlier, according to a new study by Tel Aviv University. About the first human hunting practices 1.5 million years ago.
The study shows that humans always hunted the largest animals available until they became scarce or extinct, and then hunted the next largest within range. When only small animals were left in their environment, humans began to domesticate animals and develop agriculture.
The researchers’ hypothesis is that technological advances throughout human evolution were due to the need to hunt smaller and faster animals. According to the authors, “Since the arrival of man, man has always devastated his natural environment, but he has also found solutions to the problems he created. However, the damage to the environment used to be irreversible. ‘
Hunting to extinction, from the biggest to the smallest
The researchers claim that, at any given time, early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, which provided the greatest amounts of food in exchange for a unit of effort. Unprecedented in scope and duration, the study presents a comprehensive analysis of data on animal bones discovered at dozens of prehistoric sites in and around Israel.
The findings indicate a continued decline in the size of animals hunted by man as the main food source: from giant elephants 1 to 1.5 million years ago to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings provide an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the past 1.5 million years.
Study director Jacob Dembitzer considers the south of the Levant (Israel, Palestine, southwestern Syria, Jordan and Lebanon) an ‘archaeological laboratory’ due to the density of prehistoric finds. The evidence for the presence of humans is concentrated in a relatively small area, starting with the homo erectus, which arrived 1.5 million years ago, passing through Neanderthals, who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared around 45,000 years ago, to modern man, who arrived from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago .
The study results indicate that one third of the bones left by the homo erectus in places dating back to about a million years ago, they belonged to elephants weighing up to 13 tons (more than double the weight of the modern African elephant) and providing humans with 90% of their food. The average weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found in almost every location 500,000 years ago.
However, around 400,000 years ago, humans living in this region appear to have hunted mostly deer, along with some larger animals that weighed nearly a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in places inhabited by modern humans, around 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles, an animal that weighs no more than 20-30 kg. Other traces found in these last places come mainly from fallow deer (about 20%) as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles.
REFERENCES
Exaggeration of the Levant: 1.5 million years chasing the body size distribution