Archaeological Evidence of Human Hunting and North American Megafauna Extinctions: A Statistical Reassessment of the Fenske Bone Surface Modifications

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists continue to debate what caused the mass extinction of North American megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene—human hunting, climate change, or a combination of both. This debate persists because archaeologists lack standardized methodologies to relate unobservable human hunting behaviors with fossilized animal remains. Some researchers suggest human-induced bone surface modifications (BSM), such as cut marks, are the most direct evidence of human hunting in the past. However, nonhuman agent behaviors such as carnivore gnawing can create marks similarly shaped to butchery BSM that researchers mistakenly attribute to human actions. Ultimately, the lack of a standardized method for discriminating and identifying BSM prevents archaeologists from accurately estimating the number of sites in North America with evidence of human-megafauna interactions. This study reevaluates BSM evidence on the Fenske mastodon using high-resolution 3D profilometry, geometric morphometrics, and Bayesian inference. We compare the shape of Fenske BSM to BSM experimentally generated under known conditions, such as human butchery and carnivore feeding trials, to identify what past actions created them. Preliminary results indicate that the Fenske marks are similar in shape to butchery marks, supporting its assignment as a North American site with evidence of human-megafauna interactions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37473.0