Life Around the Elephant in Space and Time: an Integrated Approach to Study the Human-Elephant Interactions at the Late Lower Paleolithic Site of La Polledrara di Cecanibbio (Rome, Italy)

Abstract

During the Lower Paleolithic, the interaction between hominins and elephants through the medium of lithic tools is testified by numerous sites in Africa, Europe, and Asia. This interaction ensured hominins a large source of food and of knappable raw material, bone. The availability of the huge package of resources represented by these animals had a deep impact on hominins behavior and their strategies of exploitation of the landscape. This article, for the first time, documents this behavior with a spatial and chronological viewpoint. At the Late Lower Paleolithic site of La Polledrara di Cecanibbio (Rome), the outstanding in situ find of a quite entire carcass of Palaeoloxodon antiquus surrounded by lithic tools of small dimensions allowed us to explore the relation between the elephant, fatally entrapped in muddy sediments, and the hominins that exploited its carcass with their lithic toolkit. The application of an integrated approach including technology, refitting, use-wear, residues, and spatial analyses to the study of the small tools allowed us to unveil the activities carried out around the elephant in a timeline. As a result, hominins exploited the carcass for meat and fat possibly in more than one time and selected the area of the carcass as an atelier to knap and possibly cache their lithic products for future use. These data introduce the intriguing suggestion that the carcass was, besides a source of food and raw material, also a landmark for humans in the landscape.