Carnivore Taphonomy and the Early Human Occupations in the Andes

Sequential Incisions on a Cave Bear Bone from the Middle Paleolithic of Pešturina Cave, Serbia

“…Considering that the mean width of scoring produced by carnivores larger than wolf is always, irrespectively of the bone on which it occurs, higher than scoring produced by wolf (Campmas and Beauval 2008;Delaney-Rivera et al 2009: Table 3; Andrés et al 2012;Dominguez-Rodrigo and Piqueras 2003), it is unlikely that the Pešturina grooves were produced by adult hyenas or larger carnivores. Studies dealing with the taphonomic action of smaller carnivores are rare (Andrews and Evans 1983;Andrews and Jalvo 1997;Borrero 1990;Mondini 2002;Stallibrass 1984), and although metric data on the width of scoring produced by small carnivores, or juveniles of larger species on vertebrae are scarcely represented in the literature, it can be reasonably assumed that the width of the Pešturina grooves is compatible with the width of those produced by their smaller canines. One study (Elkin and Mondini 2001), for instance, reports that the scoring width produced by juvenileto-adult Pampa or Azara's foxes (Pseudalopex gymnocercus) ranges from 0.5-1 mm.…”

Skeletal element abundances in archaeofaunal assemblages: economic utility, sample size, and assessment of carcass transport strategies

“…Carnivore modification, however, has been well documented as a density-mediated process [19,40,56,57] and has been observed to impact modern faunal assemblages in a broad range of geographic and environmental contexts [2,4,9,14,16,25,26,29,36,37,56,57,73,80]. Numerous archaeofaunal assemblages also bear evidence of carnivore destruction (e.g., [1,17,34,52,55,[61][62][63]68]). Beyond carnivore destruction, we note that density-mediated attrition is widespread in published faunal assemblages (e.g., [27,43,46]) and that several assemblages show a clear separation between the frequencies of high-and low-survival elements with respect to economic utility [52e55].…”

South American camelid bone structural density: what are we measuring? Comments on data sets, values, their interpretation and application

“…Following Mondini's [35] criteria we observed that fewer than 1% of the specimens from all five assemblages exhibit carnivore marks (a maximum expectation is 25%, although comparative archaeological cases do not exceed 3%). All the assemblages conform to Mondini's [35] ''human pattern'' rather than to a ''carnivore pattern''. In addition, none of the remains showed corrosion by gastric acids, and only 0.79% of the total collection shows evidence of tool marks.…”