This is a detective story, but a rather odd one. The clues are bones.
(C. K. Brain 1981:3)
Our selection of >9000 pieces of bone for this study, out of at least 1 000 000 pieces in
30 assemblages, was based on each having a 2.5 cm minimum diameter, and minimal
Plant root damage. Each selected piece was scored for 26 variables. This study is based
On >230 000 observations.
Question 1 What was the perimortem bone damage signature of late Pleistocene Siberian carnivores?
Conclusion 1 The diagnostic damage done by big carnivores, especially hyenas, includes tooth dints, tooth scratches, end - and mid-shaft polishing, end-hollowing, notching, and stomach bones. While we think of hyenas as being bone-breakers, so also were late Pleistocene humans. Statistically speaking, bone breakage is not a reliable feature for identifying the breaker. Tooth dints, tooth scratches, and stomach bones are, in combination, the best indicators of hyena and other large carnivore presence.
Question 2 What was the perimortem bone damage signature of late Pleistocene Siberian humans?
Conclusion 2 Human causation of bone damage is best recognized by the occurrence of cut marks, chop marks, and burning. However, burning is very rare in our assemblages. But if archaeological context can rule out natural burning, such as lightning-ignited steppe or forest fires, burning is a prime indicator of human presence.
Question 3 How was meat prepared for eating?
Conclusion 3 It follows fTom conclusion 2 that roasting was almost never involved in the perimortem damage of our assemblages, at least on-site. Thus, we must rule out roasting as a regular means of cooking meat. We feel that if meat had been cooked at all, it must have been done with stone-boiling in perishable containers. But given the absence of fire-altered stew-soup heating stones, bowl-shaped stone pots, earth ovens, or in-skin roasting of small animals, meat was generally not cooked by late Pleistocene Siberians. Pollen analyses of our sites do not suggest that flowering plant materials contributed much to the average diet.
Question 4 What happened to the remains of >1000 generations of Siberians (at least 1 000 000 individuals)?
Conclusion 4 Given the excellent preservation of non-human faunal remains in our assemblages, a mystery quickly arose. Why are there almost no human remains in our assemblages? Possibilities include: off-site burial locations, cannibalism, no burial, on-site burials followed by hyena scavenging. Because we have one human tooth fTom Denisova Cave that had been swallowed and acid-eroded like our hyena stomach bones, we favor the latter inference. In a shallow animal cave ca. 100 m from Okladnikov Cave, Ovodov found some human bone that probably came from Okladnikov Cave. The bone must have been carried to the animal cave by some carnivore, presumably a hyena, who dug it up fTom its burial site.
Question 5 Who were the late Pleistocene inhabitants of Siberia?
Conclusion 5 The human remains in our Middle Paleolithic assemblages include a very small number of fragmentary bones and teeth, mainly from Okladnikov Cave. The bone has almost no morphological information for affinity assessment, but a few of the teeth can be identified as Neanderthal or Neanderthal-like. These teeth came from Denisova and Okladnikov caves. An Upper Paleolithic child’s dentition from the more recent Mal’ta site looks decidedly like those of Cro-Magnons and modern Europeans. The molar teeth from the Listvenka site look like those of anatomically modern and living Northeast Asians and Native Americans. We suggest that the population history of Siberia appears to be like that of late Pleistocene Europe - namely, replacement, not local evolution. We expect skeptics will say this inference is based on much too small a sample. Our response is that, statistically speaking, these teeth make up the known universe of late Pleistocene Siberian human teeth. They are not a sample. DNA analysis from a single Denisova finger bone proved to be Neanderthal.
Question 6 Did hyenas by their burrowing activity blur the stratigraphy of cave and open sites, hence misleading researchers into believing in cultural continuity and local evolution?
Conclusion 6 The competition between humans and hyenas in Africa is today quite intense, which must have been the case also in the Siberian Paleolithic. Cave and open archaeological sites show considerable use and disturbance by hyenas. We propose that what may look like local cultural evolution based on gradual changed ways of manufacturing stone artifacts from Middle to Upper Paleolithic times was caused by hyena activity mixing sharp, distinct strata into a blur where non-evolutionary stratigraphic borders have been erased. The few Pleistocene human teeth suggest there had been population replacement, not local evolution. Do a few teeth trump thousands of stone artifacts? Yes, if the archaeology does not take into account the possibility of bioturbation.
Question 7 Was there a hyena barrier to Beringia?
Conclusion 7 While controversy swirls about the date when Paleo-Siberians first crossed Beringia and entered the New World, the most convincing evidence is that their arrival into Alaska began about 13 500 years ago. This is the time that the Pleistocene was ending, and northern environmental conditions were shifting from Arctic (mammoth) steppe to tundra and taiga. The Bering Sea was on the rise, flooding coastlines in Siberia and Alaska. This is about the same time that hyenas are believed to have gone extinct. The northern limit where hyena remains have been found in Siberia is ca. 55-56° N. With a few inconclusive exceptions this is also the northern limit where late Pleistocene Siberian archaeological sites have been discovered. This concordance leads us to believe that a sort of hyena barrier to Beringia existed. We envision the barrier to have been more like hit-and-run guerilla warfare than like the sharply drawn borders of trench warfare during World War I in Europe. As Paleo-Siberians and hyenas competed at 55-56° N latitude for the same limited resources, their mutual struggle for survival must have intensified. Food scarcity perhaps drove hyenas to kill and eat more often unprotected children and weak elderly individuals, thus slowing down northern expansion by humans because of insufficient population growth. The rate of northward human population expansion was without question also influenced by Arctic cold and patchy resources, but importantly, by the heightened competition with carnivores, especially pack-hunting hyenas. Reaching western Beringia had to wait until the hyena population thinned and they eventually went extinct along with mammoths and other large animals that hyenas opportunistically preyed upon.
So, this is the account of our Siberian odyssey that subconsciously began on the Amur River in 1979, and certainly began gestating by 1984 when the senior author first met Ovodov and Pavlova. By 1987 our odyssey led along a muddy mountain road into the Altai. In 1998 we were formally collecting perimortem damage information. Data collection ceased in 2006 because of the senior author’s deteriorating vision. We hope the reader will find our account interesting, useful, and sufficiently inspiring to venture forth in a similar way elsewhere in the world.
World History
