Technology, Tactics, Or Just Toughing It Out: How Exactly Did Neanderthals Take Down Mammoths, Anyway?

And yet, hundreds of thousands of years ago, we managed it. Not just early humans, but our Neanderthal cousins too – a species long stereotyped as brutish scavengers, who were in fact capable of organizing successful hunts of the many terrifying fauna that shared their landscape. 

Or, at least, we’re pretty sure they did. “It’s quite difficult to prove that mammoths were hunted,” points out Matt Pope, an archaeologist specializing in early prehistory and geoarchaeology and Associate Professor at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. 

“If you’re looking for that smoking gun, you’re looking for, you know, cut marks, [or] impact damage from a spear point, within a bone,” he tells IFLScience. “But with big animals, you can do a lot of damage without leaving that trail.”

Even the presence of mammoth remains at Neanderthal sites isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk. “There [would] be a lot of mammoth bones in landscapes,” Pope points out. “They would provide usable fuel. They might contain marrow.” They would, in short, be attractive targets for scavenging.

But “we’re talking about hunting,” Pope says. “Sometimes it’s hard to find that evidence.”

Hunting the mammoths

So, before we get onto how Neanderthals hunted mammoths, perhaps we should make sure that they really did. And, luckily, the evidence for this does exist – you just have to know how to look.

They don’t just fall over and die. They only die when they’re being targeted.

Matt Pope

“We’re actually often looking for it indirectly,” Pope explains. “Like, the mammoth bones that we’re finding at a site – they tend to be just adults, not the children. Not newborn, or you know, the ones that you’d expect to be dying [more often].”

“We have sites where it’s just prime age adults,” he tells IFLScience. “They don’t just fall over and die. They only die when they’re being targeted. They’re quite formidable.”

But here’s the thing: asking whether they hunted mammoths is… kind of underestimating the Neanderthals. Our cousin species survived for almost 400,000 years, witnessing the demise of the steppe mammoth and the emergence of its woolly successor; larger than both were the straight-tusked elephants that Neanderthals “definitely” hunted, Pope points out. 

“We have, at the site of Lehringen, a spear in the skeleton of one of these straight tusked elephants,” he tells IFLScience. “That’s about as ‘smoking gun’ as it gets.”

It also handily answers another question about the Neanderthals’ hunting ventures: their tools. Despite a reputation for low intelligence, the truth seems to be that for most of their existence, Neanderthals were just as smart as their Homo sapiens peers. 

As early as 300,000 years ago, we have evidence of long wooden spears being made and used – modern reconstructions have found that they could have given the paleolithic hunters a range of up to 20 or 30 meters (66-100 feet). That may not sound like much, but it’s easily the difference between coming home with dinner and getting stomped to death by an angry pachyderm.

And, like all humans, Neanderthals built on their technology. “Neanderthals at the beginning of their existence, by around 400,000 years ago, and those at the end, around 40,000 years ago, appear to have had a variety of developing capabilities,” points out Rick Potts, Director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “They changed over time […] and by 50,000 years ago, some groups made stone and bone points, thought to have been attached at the ends of wooden spears.”

Built for speed

There’s a bit of a balancing act involved with understanding Neanderthals. There’s a temptation – one that generations of popular culture has given in to – to oversimplify them; to reduce them entirely to their shorter, stockier anatomy, and to therefore characterize them as unintelligent brutes. That’s unfair – but so is ignoring their physiological differences entirely. 

“We can tell from the muscle markings on their bones that Neanderthals were stronger than we Homo sapiens are,” Potts tells IFLScience, “which almost certainly would have helped in their capacity to hunt animals, including elephants – if they decided that’s what they wanted or needed to do for some reason.”

The entire human story has been, for at least two and a half million years, developing technologies that give us abilities to access wider resources, more diverse resources, at different times of the year. 

Matt Pope

The precise physiological details are difficult to know for sure, he cautions – but compared to modern humans, they were likely heavier, more powerful, and very strong. They were sprinters, rather than long distance runners. And, to pay for all that, they probably had huge dietary loads, and may have struggled to survive in environments that couldn’t easily provide the nutrients they needed. 

Would all of that have made the difference in hunting? It certainly wouldn’t have hurt – but “these differences, I think, ultimately have been relatively overplayed,” Pope tells IFLScience. “We’re still dealing with basic human body shapes, basic human body types.” 

“And these differences need to be considered in light of their technology,” he adds. “The entire human story has been, for at least two and a half million years, developing technologies that give us abilities to access wider resources, more diverse resources, at different times of the year. So to rest, at a relatively late stage in evolution – you know, in the last 100,000 years – on differences in anatomy, I think probably sells Neanderthals short in terms of their cultural solutions to acquiring food.”

The lie of the land

Like Homo sapiens, then, the most important part of the Neanderthal anatomy was found between the ears. “They lived in highly social and interdependent groups of hunter-gatherers, knowledgeable of making sophisticated stone technology and maintaining control of fire for cooking and defense – and useful in hunting,” Potts says. “All of these behaviors – social and technological – are considered intelligent from any perspective.”

But it’s perhaps most clear how smart these ancient hunters were when we consider their tactics – and they really were tactics, planned out in advance among the group, using communal knowledge passed down perhaps through generations.

“Neanderthal people were using places in the landscape as home bases, and coming back to those places year after year,” explains Pope. “They understood their landscapes.” 

While no place would necessarily be a year-round home for a group – it simply wouldn’t make sense to stay in one location while seasons changed and animals migrated away – there are sites, like La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey, where we find Neanderthals returning year-on-year for millennia. 

“Places may have had names. Places may have had stories associated with them,” Pope tells IFLScience. “Because, of course, if you’re going to the same place year after year, stories are going to accumulate on those places. It’s going to be places where people are born, where people die, and where things happened, and so places develop meaning.”

It’s yet more evidence of a sophisticated intelligence – but it’s not just that. It means “they would be able to communicate, you know, ‘now we are going to go to this place’,” Pope points out – and it’s a big clue to the Neanderthals’ biggest advantage in hunting: knowing, and exploiting, their environment. 

“When we look at some of the places where we’re seeing evidence of Neanderthal hunting, including hunting of rhinoceros and elephants, they’re using the landscape,” Pope tells IFLScience. 

“That’s key,” he says. “Understanding the landscape; understanding how animals will move through that landscape and will react to being ambushed; [knowing] where they might run away to and being able to trap them, corral them, get them against a hard rock area or into a depression or into boggy ground; making sure the landscape really works for you.” 

And as big, scary, and powerful as a mammoth or elephant may be, that’s the kind of planning and execution that’s hard to out-tusk. “If you put yourself at an advantage, and you’ve got weapon systems that can keep you 10 or 20 meters [33-66 feet] away, then suddenly [taking on a mammoth] is not quite such a scary – well, it’s not quite such a risky process,” Pope says.

The measure of success

So, how did Neanderthals take down mammoths? The answer is simple – just so long as you don’t underestimate them. They were intelligent, social beings, who could plan tactical attacks and work in teams using (literally) cutting-edge technology to hunt their prey. They had (relatively) long-range weapons, and, when all else failed, they were fast and strong.

And, to put it bluntly, they were pretty darn motivated, too. Neanderthals would have needed a ton of calories to power them through the Ice Age, and a mammoth or elephant would represent a boon to the entire group if successfully brought home. 

It makes sense, then, that they would get good at it over the few hundred thousand years that they inhabited the planet. 

“It’s impossible to know how successful they were at hunting any particular kind of animal, especially mammoths,” Potts tells IFLScience. “Yet the Neanderthals as a species were successful.” 

“They persisted for as long as about 400,000 years. From what we know so far from the fossil record, our own species has been around for about 300,000 years,” he points out. “Success is a difficult thing to judge.”