Most of the elephant carcasses were recovered during the 1980s in the site complex of Neumark-Nord, a former coal quarry

 Most of the elephant carcasses were recovered during the 1980s in the site complex of Neumark-Nord, a former coal quarry

 Their abundant cut marks indicated that the resident Neanderthals had used flint tools to slice off meat, and had found the remains before other carnivores such as saber-tooth tigers. “It is the first clear-cut evidence of elephant-hunting in human evolution,” said Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who is an author on the paper.

By calculating the intensity and nutritional yields of the Neanderthals’ well-documented butchering activities, the research team offers further proof that our hominid cousins were cooperative hunters who knew how to preserve meat and might have lived a settled existence in large groups. The findings challenge the assumption that Neanderthals were basically nomads who lived in bands of no more than 25, in isolation from one another.

Dr. Roebroeks said that group size was the “elephant in the room” in the field of Neanderthal studies. “The idea that Neanderthals roamed about in small bands has been around since the 19th century,” he said. “But the rich Neumark-Nord elephant record points to the possibility of sizable collective-subsistence events.”