Elephants and large butchery tools in the Lower Paleolithic of Western and Eastern Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Allocation, procurement, and butchering of proboscideans and megaherbivores were significant to the subsistence of Lower Paleolithic hominins, supported by the persistent Acheulian toolkit. In the Levant, a faunal change around 400 thousand years ago, characterized by the declining availability of megaherbivores and the extinction of elephants, coincides with the end of Levantine Acheulian lifeways and the increasing reliance on smaller-sized prey. A notable manifestation of this process is the abrupt and near-complete disappearance of heavy-duty stone implements, including chopping tools, handaxes, cleavers, massive scrapers and other types. These large tools may have been crucial for performing heavy-duty tasks that required significant loading force, enabling the effective processing of substantial megaherbivore carcasses. At the same time, the emergence of a new set of lighter tools may reflect the practical and ontological adaptability of Late Lower Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to the changing ecological conditions in a landscape devoid of elephants. A contrasting scenario may be observed in China, where the continuous presence of megafauna may have contributed to the prolonged use of traditional heavy-duty core tools and other butchery implements. In Northern China, significant changes in lithic technologies appear around 50,000 years ago, potentially in response to the late Quaternary megafauna extinctions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Elephant Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51055