Dancing with wolves at Schöningen 13II-4

Abstract

The Schöningen 13II-4 site has produced a wealth of insight into the hunting and butchery activities of Middle Pleistocene hominins, highlighted by the famous Schöningen spears preserved with hundreds of cut-marked and broken horse bones. The bones of carnivores are rare at the site, but tooth pits, scores, and other markings that record their presence are abundant. Here we describe the carnivore remains from Schöningen 13II-4 and provide a detailed analysis of carnivore markings on different skeletal parts in the faunal assemblage and their spatial distribution. In studying carnivore activities at Schöningen, we aim to achieve a more comprehensive view of site taphonomy and, in turn, a better appreciation of the anthropogenic process that shaped the archaeological record. The placement and sequence of carnivore marks on the bones in relation to butchery marks indicates that carnivores scavenged from the remains of hominin kills. In the large horse bone assemblage, carnivore damage is more prevalent on limb bones of juveniles than adults. This pattern reveals that adult horse carcasses were fully butchered by hominins, but juvenile horse carcasses were abandoned earlier in the butchery process, leaving more consumable tissues that attracted scavenging carnivores. Tooth pits and scores on the Schöningen remains are very large and compare well with markings produced by wolves, especially those observed in a sample of modern wolf-gnawed bones we collected and analysed from Adler- und Wolfspark Kasteelburg. Clusters of carnivore-damaged bones appear around the periphery of dense concentrations of bones butchered by hominins, suggesting that wolves displaced some skeletal elements quickly after abandonment by hominins. Such a spatial pattern hints at the long-standing co-habitation of the Schöningen landscape by hominins and wolves during the Middle Pleistocene