Discussion

The Mal’ta perimortemtaphonomy picture is straightforward. The assemblage represents the accumulated bone refuse of meals left scattered by humans in the site, and bone collected elsewhere for dwelling construction and fabricational purposes. The large amount of mammoth bone is biased by the great size of these huge animals. We could identify no perimortem processing that would help decide if the mammoths had all been victims of hunting, or if their bones were of previously dead animals simply dragged back to the Mal’ta camp for construction rather than nutritional purposes. In the whole assemblage we failed to identify any signs of roasting. We favor the collecting scenario because of weathering. At some time of the year, medium-sized carnivores were in the Mal’ta camp. We presume these carnivores were wolves and that they were scavenging the site in the absence of its human occupants. This absence may have been seasonal over any number of years, and repeated carnivore visitations are a reasonable hypothesis. Given that cave lion has been identified in the Mal’ta faunal remains, there is a possibility that cave hyenas might also have been present, although our perimortem taphonomy is unsupportive of the possibility. Lastly, given that dog remains have been reportedly found at Afontova Gora at about the same time period, and a dog skull of much greater age has been found at a hyena cave in the Altai Mountains (Razboiich’ya Cave), some of the Mal’ta carnivore damage might have been done by dogs.