Discussion

Considering all the forms of perimortem damage that help distinguish that done by humans and non-human animals, we wholly agree with the excavators that there is very little evidence of carnivore and/or human scavenging of the animal remains at the Volchiya Griva beast solonetz. But why is this so? In the taphonomic and forensic literature, and in our personal experience with various-sized animals, large and small, which we found dead upon the ground, all were, within months, even days, markedly scavenged and scattered. Some animal examples that the senior author and his oldest daughter have made records and time-sequential photographs of, commencing from the known day the animals died, all but completely disappeared within a week (a small beef calf) to a year (a fully grown beef bull, and an old horse named Lucky). The scavengers in these cases were dogs, coyotes, buzzards, ravens, rodents, and first-on-the-scene scavengers, namely flies and other zoophagous insects. But we personally have experience with one significant exception - a non-scavenged adult steer that died on its ranch. The ever-present carrion birds were never seen circling over its carcass. This carcass was never scavenged, although it eventually decayed after a few years, whereas all other dead animals found on the ranch over a ten-year period had been scavenged and scattered almost entirely. Is it possible that the salt-tolerant bacterial and chemical concentrations at Volchiya Griva caused some deaths that scavengers naturally avoided?