The Beef Over Beef: Prehistoric Meat Cuts Raise Questions About Course of Social Evolution

You’d be amazed how much scientists can learn from hundreds-of-millennia-old deer, horse, cattle, pig and tortoise bones. Scrutinized by anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists from Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona, faunal remains found in Qesem Cave in Israel dating from the late Lower Paleolithic period have thrown wide-open the question of how economic and social structures developed between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Presented in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Israeli and American researchers’ findings show that the cut marks on the animal carcasses of Qesem Cave are frantic and irregular compared to the neat, organized lines of later carvings. This suggests that late Lower Paleolithic people in this part of the world hunted and shared meat differently to those of later times.

“There are distinctive patterns of how people hunt, who owns the products of the hunt, how carcasses are butchered and shared,” says Tel Aviv University Professor Avi Gopher (as quoted by Science Daily) of hunters everywhere from southern Africa to upstate New York and sub-arctic Canada over the past 200,000 years. “The rules of sharing are one of the basic organising principles of hunter-gatherer cultures. From 200,000 years ago to the present day, the patterns of meat-sharing and butchering run in a long clear line.”

Most of these prehistoric social groups would effectively have one or two nominated members who would take skillful care of methodically preparing and carving the meat for distribution among the tribe. But not so the residents of Qesem Cave: it would appear that, after animal body-parts were carried in following a hunt, butchering was a much less-organised, delayed and possibly even communal affair, where everyone may have had to scramble for a scrap.

“The cut marks we are finding are both more abundant and more randomly oriented than those observed in later times, such as the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods,” explains Gopher. “What this could mean is that either one person from the clan butchered the group’s meat in a few episodes over time, or multiple persons hacked away at it in tandem.”

So Gordon Ramsay would probably have a few four letter words to say about their meat-cutting technique, but otherwise, what's the beef? The main point here would seem to be that the findings infer a lot about how the group functioned – clearly the late Lower Paleolithic people of modern-day Israel didn’t have such clearly defined social organisation as later societies. “More than one person was doing the job, and it fits our expectations of a less formal structure of cooperation,” says Professor Gopher.

It also raises the question of how, why and when one system developed into the other. “The major point here is that around 200,000 years ago or before, there was a change in behavior,” Gopher continues. “What does it mean? Time and further excavations may tell.”

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