Competition for food 1.5 million years ago: humans first, wolves last

Getting food was not an easy task in the Lower Pleistocene, approximately 1.5 million years ago, in what is now Orce (Granada).

Not in Orce or anywhere, really.

When it came time to find something to eat, humans had fierce competition from other carnivorous animals, usually also unfriendly beasts.

The meat that served as food to humans was the same with which the rest of the carnivores were fed.

Therefore, above all, humans were interested in organizing the order of meals.

The result of this priority, according to research carried out by the universities of Granada, Salamanca and Madrid's Complutense, indicates that when there was shared meat, the first to eat were humans and the last were wolves.

Specifically, the

, an ancestor of these animals, somewhat smaller and weighing just over 15 kilos.

In between, however, there were other species that took advantage of it.

In Orce, specifically in the area called Barranco-León, they are saber-toothed tigers or ancestors of the current wild dogs (hyena-dogs) and foxes.

El Barranco-León millions of years ago in the Pleistocene inhabited it: wolves, foxes, licones, saber-toothed tigers and humans.UGR

Juan Antonio Jiménez-Arenas, researcher and professor of Archeology at the University of Granada, with many years of research at this site in Granada, explains how difficult coexistence was between our ancestors and animals in that historical period.

“Humans lived in refuge areas.

In this specific territory they resided in the Sierra de la Umbría”, in what is now Albacete, “and they would go down to the hunting and animal area in the current Orce, just enough.

It was an area of ​​many vegetables.

There the herbivores fed while the carnivores prowled waiting for some death.

And if they didn't die, they were hunted.

It was what is known as the game of life and death.

In Orce, in a broad sense, there were habitation and shelter areas and hunting areas, ”he explains.

Going down from their quiet zone, if possible, to the hunting area, humans would find a scenario like the one described by the professor.

“In the lower area of ​​the Sierra de la Umbría there was a large saline lake that made human life impossible, but a period of torrential rains caused materials to be dragged into that lake.

Then began a regression of salt water and fresh water appeared.

That and the fact that many of the materials carried by the water were easily usable by humans to make tools, caused them to arrive and settle in the area.

And with them, he adds, many other animals.

Saber tigers, reptiles and ancestors of the bear, of the hippopotamus, as well as equines and deer have been described.

Also wild dogs and hyenas, the latter the only ones capable of breaking bones.

While the footprint of humans in the bones is basically that of the instruments used to break the bone or fragment the bone to remove the bone marrow from its interior, the rest of the animals did leave traces of their bites and tears.

Jiménez-Arenas recalls that humans “did not have the physical capacity to kill, or to dismember or dismember, except with the help of tools, because they had blunt and small teeth for this.

That could be done by the larger animals.”

A curious fact is that, despite the lack of definitive evidence of these human bites in Orce -there is indeed some in Atapuerca, for example-, it is precisely a tooth, a molar found in 2002, which has allowed us to identify the most ancient of Western Europe, with 1.4 million years.

The research team at the excavation.

UGR

Until now, it was difficult to identify the bite marks and marks found on the bones.

According to the researcher, the size of the animal could be speculated from the type of bite and, consequently, assign it to some living being by approximation.

Now, the new Artificial Intelligence techniques have made it possible to feed a database with 613 current animal bites of whose ancestors there is news in Orce.

By comparison with this

, it has been possible to define precisely, explains Jiménez-Arenas, which animals the different marks found on the bones that appeared in the different excavations correspond to.

Just over 3,500 fossils have been reviewed in this study.

Finally, 368 marks appeared on 167 bones, as explained by the researchers in the article published in the journal

.

Of them, Jiménez-Arenas clarifies, only 10% are fractured, which calls into question, although it is not the subject of this study, a fairly widespread previous idea: there was not such a strong competition between humans and hyenas as previously thought, least in this area of ​​southern Europe.

Although it may go without saying, it is helpful to remember an idea.

There are no traces of vegetable consumption in humans at the time.

"Vegetables hardly leave evidence in the archaeological record, if anything, some pollen that guides us in what they could eat, but not in what they really ate," adds Jiménez-Arenas.

Yes, there is evidence of meat consumption in humans through the marks of its tools on the bones.

The results of the comparison between the fossils and the bite database indicate that the most frequent bite is that of these

or wolves: “Some super opportunistic animals that, because they are small, cannot kill large animals.

They probably resembled the current jackals”, explains the researcher from Granada.

“If they have to wait for everyone to finish eating, they do it.”

Perhaps for this reason, because when they arrived, they had to tear to find something to eat, which is why their bite is the most common.

A million and a half years ago, man was more a scavenger than a hunter, according to Professor Jiménez-Arenas: “It was a primary scavenger.

They arrived first at the corpses”.

And it is known, he says, because “the entrails are the first thing that is eaten.

It is the softest, the most nutritious and the first to spoil.

And we have bones with evidence of instrumental evisceration."

The evisceration was followed by the fleshing and cutting, says the researcher, of the pelvis, ribs and other parts.

The remains abandoned by humans were then used to feed the rest of the animals until, finally, the wolves arrived.

"That they wouldn't need much either because they were small," he concludes.

magnifying glass vs.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence has developed in the 21st century.

The magnifying glass was invented by Roger Bacon, an English monk, in the 13th century.

Almost eight centuries old that he does not make these instruments incompatible.

On the contrary, "artificial intelligence by itself does not solve any problem," explains Jiménez-Arenas.

Everything starts with the magnifying glass because the first decision in these investigations is human.

“All the bones first pass through the geologist's magnifying glass and are scrutinized down to the last square millimeter of their surface.

Then he already goes to the scanner and begins the automated process that we consider good if the correspondence between the mark of the fossil and the database exceeds 90%, ”the researcher ends.

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