Mousterian Hunting
Hunting by Neandertals and their predecessors may not have been very extensive. Many bones in Mousterian sites indicate that other predators had killed and partially consumed the animals. There are instances where cut marks from stone tools overlay tooth marks from predators on fragments of animal bone, indicating that the humans got to the animal after the predator had done so. Also, the body parts left at some living sites are those that scavengers usually retrieve from carcasses and that have already been partially consumed.
Not everyone agrees. After all, at the German Mousterian site of Lehringen, archaeologists excavating in the late 1940's discovered a nearly complete skeleton of a woolly mammoth with a large sharpened wooden spear preserved in its rib cage. It is hard to imagine better evidence for hunting. In addition, several well excavated Mousterian sites have now yielded the bones of hundreds of individual animals of large bodied species such as aurochs (Bos primigenius) and bison (Bison priscus). For example, at the extraordinary Mousterian open air site of Maurens in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, an enormous Mousterian campsite yielded the bones of at least 500 bison, which the excavators consider to have been hunted by Mousterians some 70,000 years ago.
