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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://gizmodo.com/neanderthals-hunted-cave-lions-skeleton-spear-1850921295 [gizmodo.com]

Marks on the ribcage of a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton suggest the animal was killed by Neanderthals, making it the first evidence that our nearest human cousins hunted the Ice Age predators.

A team of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists recently scrutinized the remains of four lions: the aforementioned skeleton, which was excavated in 1985 in Siegsdorf, Germany, and phalanges and sesamoid bones from three lion specimens excavated from Einhornhöle, Germany, in 2019. The former showed evidence of being punctured by a wooden-tipped spear—a known weapon of Neanderthals—and the latter three had cut marks that suggested they were butchered in a way to keep the animals’ claws preserved on the fur. The team’s research is published today in Scientific Reports.

“The notion that Neanderthals interacted with cave lions holds deep significance,” said Gabriele Russo, a paleoanthropologist at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the study’s lead author, in an email to Gizmodo. “It reveals that Neanderthals were actively engaged with their environment, which included encounters with formidable creatures like lions. These interactions encompassed not only the cultural use of lion body parts but also the ability to hunt them.”

Cave lions (Panthera spelaea) are now extinct, but they inhabited most of northern Eurasia during the Pleistocene, recently enough that some preserved cave lions look like they’re just sleeping. They made up a remarkable tableau of megafauna on the Ice Age steppe, alongside creatures like the woolly rhinoceros, ancient, extinct elephant species, and the woolly mammoth. And while the mammoth is a known quarry of Neanderthals, it now appears that the human group also hunted cave lions, one of the most prominent Ice Age predators.

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