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 Neanderthals of Neumark-Nord either stayed put for months, as opposed to days, or that groups gathered at intervals to dig traps and feast together, which raises the possibility of a broad social, cultural and genetic exchange.

Straight-tusked elephants went extinct at least 30,000 years ago; many factors were probably to blame, Dr. Roebroeks said, including predation, climate change, reduction in food availability and competition from woolly mammoths moving into their territory. Neanderthals had already disappeared by then, pushed aside as Homo sapiens inherited Earth. As Mr. Cuppy observed, “That kind of progress is called evolution.”