Horse was a fine meal in the old days
Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 1:43 pm
The Horse Butchery Site is one of many excavated in quarries near Boxgrove, an internationally significant area that is home to Britain’s oldest human remains.
During the excavations in the 1980-90s, archaeologists recovered more than 2,000 razor sharp flint fragments from eight separate groupings, known as knapping scatters.
These are places where individual early humans knelt to make their tools and left behind a dense concentration of material between their knees.
Embarking on an ambitious jigsaw puzzle to piece together the individual flints, Dr. Matthew Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and his colleagues discovered that in every case Homo heidelbergensis were making large flint knives called bifaces, often described as the perfect butcher’s tool.
“This was an exceptionally rare opportunity to examine a site pretty much as it had been left behind by an extinct population, after they had gathered to totally process the carcass of a dead horse on the edge of a coastal marshland,” Dr. Pope said.
“Incredibly, we’ve been able to get as close as we can to witnessing the minute-by-minute movement and behaviors of a single apparently tight-knit group of early humans: a community of people, young and old, working together in a co-operative and highly social way.”
“We established early on that there were at least eight individuals at the site making tools, and considered it likely that a small group of adults, a ‘hunting party,’ could have been responsible for the butchery,” he said.
“However, we were astonished to see traces of other activities and movement across the site, which opened the possibility of a much larger group being present.
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/hom ... ce+News%29