The team calculated that an extended family
The team calculated that an extended family of 25 could go three months before going hungry, 100 foragers could eat for a month, and 350 people could eat for a week, provided they had cultural knowledge and mechanisms to store food over that period by drying, freezing or caching. Traces of charcoal fires have been found at the site, suggesting that the Neanderthals may have dried meat on racks and roasted it. (The researchers also assumed that even a Neanderthal on a Paleo diet would have needed more than meat to survive without nutrient deficiencies.) Based on sedimentation rates and the number of individual elephants, the team estimated that an elephant was killed roughly every five to six years at the site. “A fully grown male straight-tusk elephant would have provided quite a big pile of meat, about four tons, and it seems likely that the hunters would not have gone to all that trouble just to let most of it rot,” Dr. Roebroeks said. He and the team contend that the Ne...