• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Early Humans Hunted And Ate Beavers 400,000 Years Ago

December 9, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Although pork and beef are some of the most popular meats for modern humans, it’s easy to wonder if the same could be said when we couldn’t just pop to the supermarket to pick them up. Researchers previously thought that humans in the Middle Pleistocene stuck to hunting and eating large mammals – but a recent study has revealed a far smaller, somewhat unexpected item on the menu: beavers.

In examining the bones of at least 94 beavers from 400,000 years ago, excavated from the Bilzingsleben site in Germany, a team of archaeologists uncovered what they described in their paper as “systematic exploitation of beavers” by humans at this time. 

Advertisement

Under magnifying glasses and digital microscopes, the beaver bones showed signs of cut marks made by stone tools, something of an unusual find. “Until now, cut marks on Palaeolithic beaver bones had been identified very rarely and on isolated bones only,” said Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, one of the study’s authors, in a statement.

The distribution of the cut marks suggests that humans may have targeted beavers for both their skins and as a source of meat. As for why they took to eating them, it might have something to do with these rodents’ characteristic rotundness. Fat was a pretty important food resource during the Pleistocene and the beaver remains largely belonged to young adults – fully grown and fat-rich, but not yet experienced in dealing with threats, making them an ideal target for hunters.

The study’s findings contradict the previous assumption that humans had a relatively narrow diet until later on in the Pleistocene. “Until now, it was generally thought that people in Europe fed primarily on large game until around 50,000 years ago, and that this was an important difference to the more flexible dietary strategies of modern humans,” said Gaudzinski-Windheuser. “We have now demonstrated that the hominin food spectrum was much broader much earlier.”

Gaudzinski-Windheuser also had an explanation for why it may have seemed as though early humans hunted mainly larger animals, such as bovids and rhinoceroses. “The remains of large mammals from this period are generally much better preserved than those of small ones, not to mention plant remains,” said the researcher.

Advertisement

Modern humans are also starting to explore some more unusual food choices on the particularly small side – you might find a bug-based meal on your plate at some point in the near future.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It
  4. Where Inside Us Do We Feel Love?

Source Link: Early Humans Hunted And Ate Beavers 400,000 Years Ago

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • This Pill Is Actually A Tiny Printer That Repairs Internal Injuries Using Biocompatible Ink
  • “This Is Amazing”: Scientists Have Found Evidence Of A Long-Lost World Deep Within The Earth
  • From The Shiniest World To Lava And Eternal Darkness, These Are The Weirdest Known Planets
  • Do Sharks Have Bones?
  • The Zombie Awakens: A Volcano Is Showing “First Signs” Of Unrest After 700,000 Years Of Quiet
  • Two Of The World’s Biggest Earthquakes Seem To Be Synched Together
  • California Has A New State Snake, And It’s A 1.6-Meter-Long Giant
  • Experimental Nanoparticle “Super-Vaccines” Stop Breast, Pancreatic, And Skin Cancers In Their Tracks
  • New Nightmare Fuel Unlocked: Watch The First Known Capture Of A Shrew By A False Widow Spider
  • Peculiar Glow In The Milky Way Might Be Dark Matter Signature
  • “I Was Scared To Death”: Missouri’s Great Cobra Scare Of 1953 Was Eventually Solved After 35 Years
  • Two Spacecraft To Fly Through Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Ion Tail – Will They Be Able To Catch Something?
  • Pioneering Heavy Water Detection Suggests Earth’s Water Might Be Older Than The Sun
  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version