Taphonomy and zooarchaeology of the middle pleistocene site of Orgnac 3 (Ardèche Valley, Southeastern France) [electronic resource]
Keywords: Anthropological Sciences

Human evolution researchers want to know what morphological and behavioral characteristics distinguish modern humans and other closely related past human groups and when, why and how those characteristics appeared. About behavior specifically, we would like to know: when our ancestors first used language similar to modern humans; when did we first live in monogamous bi-parental family units and what were social groups like; when did those social units begin coming back to a central place repeatedly and share food with one another; when did the level of parental investment increase over what we see in non-human apes, and how long was juvenile growth and development; were there sexual divisions of labor in daily activities; how were the animal foods acquired? It is only through understanding the dynamic processes by which all of these issues are related, and how those processes result in the static remains that we use to study the past, that we can accurately construct and test hypothesis about when, how and why these unique characteristics developed. This thesis aims to address these issues through a complete paleontological, zooarchaeological, and taphonomic analysis of the fossil faunal assemblages of the Middle Pleistocene site of Orgnac 3, and for comparison, from the early Late Pleistocene layers of Le Grand Abri aux Puces. Such an analysis can be used to reconstruct how these hominin groups were acquiring and processing animal carcasses in competition with other carnivores on the landscape, if they brought them back to a central place to share and how long they might have stayed at that central place, and through those reconstructions, try to infer other characteristics like division of labor, social behavior, etc. The results of the analyses presented here show that, for Orgnac 3, hominins were not the sole accumulators of the material, that they were most likely not pursuing a hunting strategy like later human hunters, and that they were most likely pursuing a confrontational scavenging or 'earlier access' strategy in close relation with the other mammalian predators with which they shared the landscape. For GAP, ~60 km away and ~200 kya younger than Orgnac 3 yet with broadly similar mammalian communities and paleoenvironments, these same analyses on newly excavated material have shown that Neandertals, with a completely different lithic toolkit, were pursuing a different subsistence strategy in which they did not rely on carnivores for carcasses, suggesting they were hunters in their own right and were in competitive exclusion with other carnivores. These results suggest that while the Orgnac 3 hominins were bringing back carcasses to a central place, they might not have been practicing a central place foraging strategy like that of modern humans or Neandertals. While animal remains are associated with stone tools and hearths, the presence of complete chaines operatoires and their products suggests that the knapping that took place in the site was to produce implements for immediate use. Few lithic pieces were knapped from material found farther away than the closest flint source, which suggests a lack of long term planning. The hearths that are present appear to be small and probably not burned continuously over long periods of time. For GAP, while it can in no way be considered a central place, the fact that the majority of tools were made elsewhere and brought in to the site as finished tools, and the fact that specific carcasses (lynx, beaver) were processed for specific goals (acquiring pelts), suggests that central place foraging strategies were probably in place.