Can Mammoth Killing be Distinguished from Mammoth Scavenging by Humans and Carnivores?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The characteristics of human-killed and human-scavenged elephant carcasses differ in important ways. The bones of an elephant butchered immediately after humans killed it are identifiably distinct from bones taken from a "ripened" carcasses that was scavenged by humans. With newly killed carcasses, the butchering may be light to full, resulting in variable modifications such as cuts made during meat-stripping or scraping marks made during removal of periosteum to prepare bones for breaking. The locations and intensity of carnivore gnaw damage also diagnostically vary when carnivores feed on elephant prey, versus when they scavenge human-killed elephants. Not all these differences may be equally relevant in analysis of fossil proboscidean assemblages, but some diagnostic patterns appear to be applicable for interpreting mammoth sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22986