Previous
File
Current
File
Barbeques
are very ancient
Washington:
Man used to make barbeques thousands of years
ago. He was perfect at making them. Reuven Yeshurun,
an archaeologist from the University of Haifa, Israel,
has discovered a Misliya Cave in Mount Carmel, Israel,
and found evidence of a relatively sophisticated hunting
and food preparation style. He said the cave presented
"the full array of modern hunting behaviour", adding
that this behaviour included "systematic hunting of
large, prime-age animals, transport of the animals
- or parts thereof - to the site, systematic butchery
in order to extract meat and marrow, and roasting
the meat". Together with colleagues Guy Bar-Oz and
Mina Weinstein-Evron, Yeshurun found "thousands of
flint flakes, blades and tools, many of which could
have been used for butchering large carcasses". Yeshurun
believes the flint points could have been used as
hafted spear points and thrust into animals, which
included fallow deer, mountain gazelles, a very large
type of cattle called aurochs, wild boars, red deer,
goats, and a smattering of smaller game. He said the
archaeologists also found 28 fragments of ostrich
eggshells, perhaps indicating that the cave dwellers
ate huge ostrich eggs too. For the study, the researchers
used a stereoscopic microscope to search for telltale
marks on the bones and tools. They discovered an abundance
of butchery and hammerstone marks.
According
to Yeshurun, the marks, along with the method in which
the bones were split, together with evidence of burning,
suggest that the animals were first dismembered, with
larger pieces roasted over a fire. Long bones were
then filleted and broken, probably to allow the diners
to extract marrow. When the feast was over, cleaned
bones were probably tossed into the fire, Yeshurun
said. He said the absence of certain missing bones
implied that the hunters at times would butcher animals
offsite for easier transport, taking only the meatiest
parts back to the cave. Yeshurun and his team say
if Homo sapiens were in Israel 200,000 years ago,
that could rewrite human history. They hope future
research at Misliya may help to resolve this, and
other unanswered, questions about the site. The findings
are scheduled for publication in the Journal of Human
Evolution, reports Discovery News.
- August 28, 2007
|