The bones of around 70 elephants from the Pleistocene era were discovered in the 1980s in a huge coal quarry that has since been converted into an artificial lake.
Elephants of the time were much larger than the woolly mammoth and three times the size of the present day Asian elephant, and an adult male could weigh up to 13 metric tons.
“Hunting these giant animals and completely butchering them was part of Neanderthal subsistence activities at this location,” Wil Roebroeks, a co-author of the study, told AFP.
“This constitutes the first clear-cut evidence of elephant hunting in human evolution,” said Roebroeks, a professor of archeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The researchers determined the elephants had been hunted—and not just scavenged—because of the age and sex profile of the remains found in the quarry.
Most of them were males and there were few young or old ones.
“It’s a typical selection made by hunters who went for the biggest prey,” Roebroeks said.
Adult male elephants would have been easier to hunt than females, who tend to move in herds protecting their young.
