Aug. 27, 2007 — Either modern humans were in Israel over 200,000 years ago, or our now-extinct ancestors behaved a lot like us when they hunted and cooked, suggest artifacts and bones from a newly excavated cave.
Together, the remains paint a picture of relatively sophisticated hunting and food preparation at the site, called Misliya Cave, in Mount Carmel, Israel.
According to lead author Reuven Yeshurun, the cave exhibits "the full array of modern hunting behavior."
This behavior included "systematic hunting of large, prime-age animals, transport of the animals — or parts thereof — to the site, systematic butchery in order to extract meat and marrow, and roasting the meat," Yeshurun, a University of Haifa archaeologist, told Discovery News.
He and colleagues Guy Bar-Oz and Mina Weinstein-Evron found "thousands of flint flakes, blades and tools, many of which could have been used for butchering large carcasses."
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Yeshurun thinks the flint points could have been used as hafted spear points and thrust into animals, which included fallow deer, mountain gazelles, a very large type of cattle called aurochs, wild boars, red deer, goats, and a smattering of smaller game. The researchers even found 28 fragments of ostrich eggshells, perhaps indicating the cave dwellers ate huge ostrich eggs too.
These latest findings from the Misliya Cave project, sponsored by the Dan David Foundation, the Leaky Foundation and the CARE Archaeological Foundation, are outlined in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution.
