Damage signatures

The bone damage signature of carnivores can be distinguished from that of humans in late Pleistocene Siberia and elsewhere. However, in most of our Siberian assemblages there is a small fraction of the perimortem damage that cannot be attributed to either carnivore or human uses. Gary Haynes (2002a; see especially his figures 4-6) illustrates some strikingly similar bone damage done by humans and carnivores. Pickering and Wallis (1997) found similar bone damage done by chimpanzee bone gnawing.

We identify one such ambiguity as “pseudo-cuts.” The greatest number of pseudo-cuts was found in the Denisova Cave assemblage (29.6% of 115 pieces). For the vast majority of bone damage, cut marks and burning readily identify human processing. Unlike our sites evidencing both carnivore and human presence, a site in the Crimea with

Mousterian artifacts and carnivore remains yielded only four pieces out of 3500 with cut marks (Enloe et al. 2000). Some of our assemblages (Table A1.25) had as many as 20% of all pieces with cut marks. This significant difference could reflect a greater degree of game processing in Siberia than in the milder climate of the Crimea, or it could be due as well to differences in identification methods. Tooth dints, scratches, end-hollowing, and polishing characterize carnivore damage. The most common form of perimortem damage - breakage - is not diagnostic. Pickering and Wallis (1997) found that captive chimpanzees left perimortem damage to bone similar to that left by feeding carnivores. We have not found any bone damage that we could attribute with certainty to human chewing, but the Pickering and Wallis experiment suggests there could have been some human chewing of bone, but we had no way to empirically distinguish human from carnivore chewing. We believe that humans did, in fact, chew on bones, but our assemblages provide no clue to it having actually happened. Cut marks and burning are our diagnostic human bone damage characteristics. If our Siberian folk had chewed on bones without cut marks and burning, we are unable to distinguish whether humans or carnivores left the “chewing” marks. In other words, we question the assumption that all bones in an archaeological site represent the hunting and collecting activity of those ancient humans.

Cooking

As is well known, eating raw, unprocessed food takes a lot of chewing, sometimes several minutes per mouthful, and even then not all the nutrients are released. Some processing such as crushing plants and meat improves the nutrient yield, but cooking with heat provides the highest yield because plant cell walls burst and animal connective tissue breaks. A medium rare BBQ T-bone steak with some salad, such as the acidified stomach contents of a reindeer, says it all.

Our assemblages suggest that cooking of meat was either rarely practiced within the living area of archaeological sites, or it was cooked by hot stone and bag-basket boiling, or in earth ovens. Because there is so little evidence of thermally altered stones and no acceptable evidence of earth ovens, at least as reported by Russian excavators, we hypothesize that cooking was rarely done. There is effectively no evidence whatsoever of roasting in any of our Pleistocene sites.

An inference of minimal cooking in southern Siberia is largely counter-intuitive if one is unfamiliar with cooking practices in the New World Arctic. Many accounts of Eskimo cooking practices report that meat was essentially only warmed in slightly heated water. Whale and seal blubber was eaten rare, as were the stomach contents of herbivores.

Susan Keates (2003:48) discusses Chinese hominid diet, suggesting cut marks, burned bones, and limited species are indications of diet, but she does not discuss cooking per se. She also notes that there are Australian and Southeast Asian ethnographic examples of animals having been cooked in their own skins. Unbutchered cooking should leave heat damage to bones with little protective muscle tissue, such as tail bones, metapodials, phalanges, and horns. We have no examples of such burning,

So we infer that whole-body cooking was either not done, or it took place outside of the excavated areas of all our sites. However, since we did not systematically examine rodent bones (they usually did not meet our minimal-size criterion), these small animals would have been most likely the sorts that might have been cooked without butchering. (For a review of small-animal cooking in the American Southwest, see Turner and Turner 1999:32.) With respect to identifying diet, we have cut marks on a large number of species, as would be expected when food resources were limited; that is, everything edible was consumed. In sum, we have no evidence of any cooking practices.

Meat caches

Storage pits are well documented for Upper Paleolithic sites of the central Russian plain (Soffer 1985:253-258, 1987). They are associated with structures built with mammoth bone. Pit sizes vary, but their depths are limited to 1.0 m, the depth assumed to represent the limit of the summer-fall thaw depth. This further suggests that Paleolithic storage pits were excavated during the warm times of the year. Were they dug in anticipation of fall hunting success? Their contents included mammoth, horse, reindeer, and also some carnivore bones.

Storage of food for winter consumption must have been as important, if not more so, for the late Pleistocene Siberians discussed herein, just as it was for all terrestrial, riverine, and marine coast hunters and fishermen of northern Eurasia, northern North America, and Greenland in historic times. Caches of meat, fish, eggs, birds, and other edible items are well described in historic accounts and recent ethnographies of Arctic and sub-Arctic peoples. In the senior author’s experience, Aleuts dried summer-caught spawning fish - salmon for the most part - and stored them underground in oiled sealion stomachs. By chewing, their oral enzymes helped digest the raw fish. They also prepared a well-preserving oil called “stinky seal oil,” which was kept in containers made of driftwood, placed in pits dug into the cold but not always frozen winter ground of the Aleutian Islands. Eskimos buried in rock-covered pits meat, fish, birds, and blubber, any and all of which preserved well in the frozen Arctic winter earth. Forestdwelling Athabaskan Indians stored dried meat and fish high in trees, where it remained frozen all winter and out of reach of most carnivores. Meat and berries were crushed together by Canadian Indians to make pemmican, which kept very well above ground or below, frozen or unfrozen. All sorts of foods were cached by northern peoples to feed themselves when winter hunting expeditions failed to provide the necessary protein and fat to survive in the endlessly frigid far north. Of course, caching was practiced in many other parts of the world, but it is a major survival feature of northern peoples.

The problem with caching is that carnivores can be just as hungry in the winter when their own hunting fails to turn up a meal. Meat caches can be a windfall for them if discovered, and if the cache can be dug up or pulled down. Excluding bears, which retire in various sorts of shelter in the winter, all other carnivores are active, and even bears in late fall are well known for their tearing open of caches laid down from human summer

And fall fishing and hunting. Fall and early winter cabin break-ins by bears, even with humans inside, are not unusual in the far northern New World.

All of the middle-sized to big modern Alaskan and Canadian carnivores have their late Pleistocene Siberian counterparts, except for the cave hyenas, cave bears, and cave lions. Based on the modern problems of cache destruction in Alaska, and bears and wolves coming into camps to get food they can smell from far away, we need to think about what this addition could have meant for human winter survival. Was the meat of game animals killed by late Pleistocene human hunters ever cached with hyenas living in the vicinity? Bears and wolverines are able to get at tree and pit meat caches in Alaska because both species can climb, as well as dig and push aside protective piles of rock.

Without some storage of food for the winter, Siberian humans would have faced periods of starvation when hunting was impossible or difficult due to stormy weather. Native names for the winter months are sometimes poignant in this respect. It is our speculation that the addition of hyenas to the list of Siberian winter hazards was a serious contributing problem for human survival. Not only might the humans themselves be killed by these powerful, bone-crunching, social hunters, but so also would their meat caches be at risk. Meat caches function best when established some distance apart so that they can be drawn upon in emergencies during migratory winter hunting. The problem with this strategy is that they remain largely unguarded and vulnerable to carnivore thievery. We suggest that losses of meat caches to various winter-hungry carnivores contributed to the limiting of Siberian human population size and related northward expansion in late Pleistocene times.

Although we feel that the Siberian folk must have used storage pits, the evidence for them is not good. The index of the premier Engbsh-language synthesis of the Siberian Paleolithic (Derev’anko et al. 1998), has no reference to meat caches or storage pits, nor do the book’s site maps show any indications of storage pits. Examination of other Siberian site reports turns up no mention of storage pits. We suspect this absence is an excavation sampling error rather than a cultural practice of not storing food for winter needs.