Neanderthals Hunted and Butchered Massive Elephants 125,000 Years Ago

A new analysis of 125,000-year-old bones from around 70 elephants has led to some intriguing new revelations about the Neanderthals of the time: that they could work together to deliberately bring down large prey, and that they gathered in larger groups than previously thought.

The bones belonged to straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), a now extinct species that stood nearly 4 meters (just over 13 feet) tall at the shoulder. That’s nearly twice the size of the African elephants that are alive today, and around 4 tons of meat would have been taken from each carcass.

The researchers estimate it would’ve taken a team of 25 people between 3–5 days to skin and then dry or smoke the elephant meat. It points to either a large group of Neanderthals being nearby, or that they had ways of preserving the colossal volume of meat. Some of the skeletons were virtually intact and had many cut marks from flint tools.

They died 125,000 years ago in a heavily forested lake basin of what would come to be east-central Germany

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