A mammoth that died about 1.2 million years ago became a meal for both ancient humans and sabre-toothed cats, an analysis of its bones has revealed.
Southern mammoths (Mammuthus meridionalis) were larger than today鈥檚 elephants and roamed Eurasia during the Pleistocene.
The skeleton is one of only a handful throughout the world with evidence of cut marks that old. It was excavated about 20 years ago from a fossil-rich site in Orce, Spain, but an earlier study dismissed it as having no marks.
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The site also features many stone tools suggesting the presence of an early human species such as Homo erectus, but no human remains have been found there.
Now, the mammoth has been re-examined in more detail by at Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and his colleagues.
After checking 鈥渆very millimetre of the bone surface鈥� with a magnifying glass, the team found cut marks that may have been made by the many stone tools at the site or by sabre-toothed cats on the mammoth鈥檚 ribs and pelvic bones.
To determine what caused the marks, the team recreated flint and limestone tools matching those found at the site and used them to butcher pig limbs. After using scanners to build a 3D model of the new and ancient cut marks, they trained an artificial intelligence to distinguish between cut marks and tooth marks, says Yravedra.
The results suggest that both humans and cats scavenged the meatiest parts of the carcass, but it isn鈥檛 clear which species got there first, or whether either killed the mammoth. The team notes that the type of tools found at the site wouldn鈥檛 have been strong enough to kill an animal that large and sabre-toothed cats would only have attacked an adult mammoth if it were sick or dying. The age of this mammoth at death suggests it may have died naturally.
The carcass would have weighed about 3 tonnes and would have provided enough food for both humans and sabre-toothed cats. The fact that both species scavenged this mammoth indicates they didn鈥檛 battle in this case, says team member at the University of Granada, Spain. 鈥淟ife is not always red in tooth and claw,鈥� he says.
Quaternary Science Reviews
