Neandertals may have hunted in horse-trapping teams 200,000 years ago

Neandertals formed sophisticated hunting parties that drove wild horses into fatal traps around 200,000 years ago.

At Germany’s Schöningen site, wooden spears, double-pointed sticks, stone artifacts and butchered remains of more than 50 horses of various ages are some 100,000 years younger than previously thought, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Excavations of this material, now linked to a time when Neandertals inhabited Europe, occurred in the 1990s along an ancient lakeshore.

This new age estimate fits a scenario in which Neandertals learned enough about equine behavior to organize teams that guided horse families to ambush spots, say zooarchaeologist Jarod Hutson and colleagues.

By around 200,000 years ago at Schöningen, “Neandertals started to cooperate in new ways, for hunting and other complex social behaviors, probably on par with early Homo sapiens,” says Hutson, of the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center and Museum for Behavioral Evolution in Neuwied, Germany.

Previous dates for the German hunting weapons and horse remains had settled at around 300,000 years old. That estimate relied on linking temperature-related pollen types in different Schöningen sediment layers to the timing of ancient global climate shifts. Given such an early age for the spears and other artifacts, Neandertal ancestors or an ancient species called Homo heidelbergensis might have hunted horses at Schöningen.

But a 200,000-year-old date puts Neandertals in the thick of communal horse hunting. Hutson’s group assessed the extent that amino acids — the chemical building blocks of proteins — had changed into inactive forms after death in four snail shells, 15 tiny crustaceans and eight horse molars from the German site’s spear-bearing sediment. These molecular measures, combined with pollen and climate data, enabled calculations of the time that had passed since each creature’s demise, yielding the more recent date.

Discoveries at five other European sites — dating from around 57,000 to 130,000 years ago — suggest that Neandertals teamed up to ambush groups of bison, wild cattle, rhinos, horses and reindeer.