Oldowan Life in Spain

Oldowan tool functions are unknown. Those who believed the earliest pre-human species were hunters argued they were used for butchering and for breaking bones to retrieve marrow or brains. Others said wear patterns on stone didn’t support that interpretation. Mary Douglas Leakey suggested some were used to pound plants. Her husband, Louis Leakey, thought the hominins were scavengers who ate remains of large mammals killed by carnivores.

Stone tools found in East African sites are so old, they don’t reveal the same information specialists can tease from Neanderthal artifacts. Bones have cut marks that could have come from butchering or hyenas or weathering. Geologists have only been able to confirm the Gona river area supported C₄ grass. Pollen studies haven’t been able to identify available species.

At Sima del Elefante, in the Atapuerca, archaeologists have recovered bones of horses from every level, with bison, rhinoceroses, jaguars and lynx at the lowest level. They also found traces of conifers and oaks from the early years of the Pre-Pastorian glacial period around 1.3 million years ago.

In the higher strata they found evidence the climate alternated between colder and warmer. Right above the first layer, they found antlered deer, Irish elk, foxes and rabbits. Still higher, they again found bison, this time with charcoal. Then, the cave yielded antlered deer, Irish elk, foxes, lynxes, bears, and rabbits. At the top of that segment were remains of hippopotamuses, bison, bears, foxes, and rabbits.

More is known from the Aurora level of Gran Dolina at the close of the Pre-Pastorian period that ended just before the Brunhes-Matuyama polar reversal 781,000 years ago. The climate became progressive drier through strata that included remains of Homo antecessor. The number of species of small animals was increasing in an open environment with few forests.

One of the tools had been used to cut a hide, and another was used on wood. However, there is no evidence they used fire. Most tools were used to butcher animals. Evidence of plant use has not survived.

Carlos Díez’s group noted that most of the animal bones butchered in the cave were from small to medium sized mammals, like deer and boars. Deer antlers were "intensively chewed." The larger mammals included bison, horses, and Irish elk. Only teeth were found from rhinoceroses and mammoths, suggesting they were dismembered elsewhere and only the meatiest pieces brought inside. They didn’t mention rodents and rabbits. Any carnivore marks on bones came later.

The Homo antecessor bones also showed they’d been butchered. They were all from children or youth, of both sexes, up to an estimated age of twenty years. Eudald Carbonell’s team concluded people in the cave were cannibals. The dismembered bones appear in every level of the Aurora stratum at Gran Dolina, with no signs of rituals or famine associated with them. They simply were left with the other bones, tools and debris on the cave floor.

Notes:
Ash, Patricia J. and David J. Robinson. The Emergence of Humans, 2010.

Blumenschine, Robert J. "Characteristics of an Early Hominid Scavenging Niche," Current Anthropology 28:383-407:1987, with comments by others.

Carbonell, Eudald, et alia. "Cultural Cannibalism as a Paleoeconomic System in the European Lower Pleistocene: The Case of Level TD6 of Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain)," Current Anthropology 51:539-549:2010.

Cerling, Thure E., et alia. "Woody Cover and Hominin Environments in the past 6? Million Years," Nature 476:51-56:2011.
Díez, J. Carlos, et alia. Zooarchaeology and Taphonomy of Aurora Stratum (Gran Dolina, Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain)," Journal of Human Evolution 37:623-652:1999. Their list includes:

Small mammals
Fallow deer, roe deer
Wild boar - Sus scrofa

Medium mammals
Red deer
Generic deer - Cervidae

Large mammals
Bovid, Bison - Bison voigtstedtenensis
Horse - Equus stenonian
Irish Elk - Megaloceros

Very large mammals
Rhinoceros - Stephanorhinus etruscus
Mammoth - Mammuthus (only one)

Carnivores
Fox - Vulpes praeglacialis
Bear - Ursus dolinensis
Spotted hyena - Crocuta crocuta
Lynx - Lynx sp.

Leakey, Louis. Cited by G. Teleki, "The Omnivorous Diet and Eclectic Feeding Habits of Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania," in R. S. O. Harding, and G. Teleki, Omnivorous Primates, 1981.

Leakey, Mary. Cited by Nancy M. Tanner, On Becoming Human, 1981.

López Antoñanzas, Raquel and Gloria Cuenca Bescós. "The Gran Dolina Site (Lower to Middle Pleistocene, Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain): New Palaeoenvironmental Data Based on the Distribution of Small Mammals," Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 186:311-334:2002.

Quade, Jay, et alia. "Paleoenvironments of the Earliest Stone Toolmakers, Gona, Ethiopia," Geological Society of America, Bulletin 116:1529-1544:2004.

Rosas, A., et alia. "The "Sima del Elefante" cave site at Atapuerca (Spain)," Estudios Geológicos 62:327-348:2006. The species were:

Antlered deer - Eucladoceros giulli
Bison
Hippopotamus - Hippopotamus
Horse - Equus estenoniano
Irish elk - Megaloceros savinii
Rabbit
Rhinoceros - Rinocerotidae

Carnivores
Bear - Ursus dolinensis
Fox - Vulpes alopecoides
Jaguar - Panthera gombaszoegensis
Lynx - Lynx issodorensis

Photograph: Mario Modesto Mata, "Sierra de Atapuerca," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 22 July 2006.