Ancient horse hunts challenge ideas of ‘modern’ human behavior

On a bright, late-summer day in north-central Europe around 300,000 years ago, a team of perhaps a couple dozen hunters got into their assigned positions for a big kill.

Little did they know that remnants of this lethal event would someday contribute to a scientific rethink about the social and intellectual complexity of Stone Age life.

Some of the hunters ascended a ridge where they gazed across a vast, marshy grassland below. Trees dotted the landscape and bordered a braided stream leading to a nearby lake.

From their elevated perch, these close evolutionary relatives of people today watched a herd of wild horses traipse across the grassy floodplain, heading for the lake. Descending slowly from the ridge, the hunters closed in from behind on their prey — a family consisting of a stallion, several mares and two of their young.

Sensing a distant threat, the mares picked up speed and continued straight ahead. The rest of the family followed behind in a single line, a behavior the hunters had observed many times before. Sentries positioned at key spots guided the queue of fleeing horses to a predetermined ambush spot.

As the animals neared the lakeshore, hunters armed with wooden spears leaped out from hiding places in clumps of tall reeds and sedges. Uneven, sloshy lakeshore soil slowed the four-legged targets and kept them off-balance. Other hunters blocked escape routes. A frenzy of wooden­-spear throwing and thrusting dispatched the entire horse family.

The hunting party then ate or carried away only what was needed. A few months later, hunters returned to ambush another horse family.

This unusually detailed reconstruction of an ancient communal hunt and its aftermath comes from a new analysis of an archaeological site in Germany called Schöningen. The latest findings at the site, which has been excavated over the last 30 years, fuel a growing conviction that a flair for planning and collaboration comparable to that of people today arose far earlier in our evolution than traditionally thought.

“We keep finding evidence of ‘modern human behavior’ in Homo species other than Homo sapiens, especially [Neandertals],” says Jarod Hutson, a zooarchaeologist at the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center and Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution in Neuwied, Germany.

Bucking orthodoxy about ‘modern’ human behavior

Archaeologists have traditionally held that an ability to plan and organize communal hunts, along with other aspects of so-called modern human behavior, emerged only about 50,000 years ago. Some researchers suspect still unspecified brain-related genetic changes at that time rapidly transformed thinking abilities in H. sapiens.

But that sudden mental and behavioral revolution relatively late in our species’s evolution may never have happened.

A growing number of reports have concluded that many hallmarks of modern behavior, including artwork and other symbolic acts, originated even earlier, during the Middle Paleolithic, a period that started at least 300,000 years ago and ran until at least 50,000 years ago. For instance, a South African cave has yielded a 73,000-year-old crosshatched line drawing etched on a rock, 75,600-year-old shell beads and 100,000-year-old remnants of pigment paint. Even earlier, Neandertals built ring-shaped structures out of stalagmites deep inside a French cave around 176,500 years ago. Neandertals may also have painted on cave walls at least 66,700 years ago.

Evidence of ancient communal hunting at Schöningen and elsewhere corrals further clues to the behavioral sophistication of ancient humans and our evolutionary relatives.

In their new study, published last year in the Journal of Human Evolution, Hutson and colleagues analyzed animal bones, ecological data, hunting weapons and butchery tools at Schöningen. Some parts of the hunt and the planning behind it undoubtedly eluded investigators. That’s understandable — the hunters lived 12,000 generations ago in a poorly understood culture.

No Homo fossils have turned up at the German site, leaving Hutson unsure about the hunters’ evolutionary identity. They might have been direct ancestors of Neandertals or common ancestors of Neandertals and H. sapiens. Some researchers assign European and African Homo fossils from about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago to a species called Homo heidelbergensis.

Whatever their species, Schöningen’s horse hunters undermine a popular view that Stone Age folks eked out a living gathering plant foods and scavenging animal carcasses abandoned by large predators. In that scenario, one or a few hunters from small, mobile groups occasionally secured a meaty bonus.

Not so at Schöningen. Communal hunts there included all able-bodied men, women and children, Hutson suspects. That’s what’s been documented among recent and historical hunter-gatherers. Everyone could play a role in tracking horses and driving them toward ambush sites, even if only the physically strongest individuals speared trapped animals to death.

“Schöningen shows our Middle Paleolithic ancestors already had great knowledge of their environments, used the immediate topography to their advantage and had a sophisticated understanding of animal behavior, making them successful communal hunters over and over again,” says Ashley Lemke, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She studies structures that ancient human groups built to assist in driving and trapping prey at other sites.

Ambushing horse families

Preserved wooden spears found at Schöningen, which now number 10, have attracted worldwide attention. Coal mining operations led to the initial discovery of three spears, as well as stone tools and animal bones, in the 1990s.

Spears at the German site are among the oldest known such weapons. A long piece of wood with one end shaped into a point, discovered in England in 1911 and known as the Clacton spear, dates to roughly 400,000 years ago, about 100,000 years earlier than the Schöningen finds.

In addition to wooden spears, excavations at Schöningen have uncovered six double-pointed sticks, which hunters may have used as spears or daggers. Partially preserved wooden implements displaying intentional splits near pointed or rounded ends have polished edges and other wear consistent with hide preparation.

Around 1,500 stone artifacts unearthed at Schöningen include sharp-edged flakes suitable for cutting apart carcasses. Hutson’s group suspects hunters employed a variety of bone tools to sharpen stone flakes and break bones for marrow.

Researchers have found no remnants of fireplaces or burned bones at the site. Hunters might have eaten what they could without cooking it on the lakeshore before carrying equine edibles back to a camp. But it remains unknown whether these ancient folks could light controlled fires.

Hutson’s team delved into what happened before, during and after Schöningen’s ancient horse hunts. The investigators focused on about 9,000 excavated bones, including lower jaws retaining teeth, that belonged to wild horses. Butchery marks on smaller numbers of bones from red deer, bison and wild cattle indicated that hunting of those creatures, either individually or in herds, occasionally occurred.

Among the horse specimens, which represented at least 54 individual animals, the researchers found several families. Tooth size and the extent of tooth wear pegged 22 horses as juveniles up to 2 years old, 29 as adults mostly between 5 and 6 years old, and three as seniors older than 15.

Tellingly, few signs of 3- to 5-year-old adolescent horses appear at Schöningen. Adolescent male horses leave their families to form bachelor groups or travel solo until they reach full maturity. Rather than queuing up family-style in response to threats, bachelor groups tend to disperse haphazardly. Communal hunting of horse families would leave behind limited evidence of slaughtered adolescents, as Hutson and colleagues found.

Given a family-friendly age profile for the Schöningen horses, it’s reasonable to conclude that hunting teams exploited the animals’ predictable behavior in family groups to drive them into lakeshore ambushes, the investigators say.

Clusters of butchery and scraping marks, as well as intentional bone breaks to remove marrow, appear mainly on remains of prime-age adults. Hunters limited the amount of protein-rich lean meat consumed at kill sites, the researchers suspect. Eating too much protein can cause weight loss, ill health and death.

Tool marks on horse ribs indicate that hunters cut through the chest to remove and eat internal organs, such as the vitamin C–containing liver. Fat crucial to a balanced diet may have been removed from parts of horses that do not preserve butchery marks, such as the neck and abdomen.

Despite attracting little interest from hungry hunters at kill sites, young horses at Schöningen provided crucial clues to how often hunts occurred. Based on the timing of modern horse births in late spring, juvenile horse deaths in the ancient sample occurred in every season but peaked in late summer and early autumn.

“This evidence implies that the Schöningen [hominids] were present at the lakeshore year-round, or nearly year-round,” Hutson says. Hunting parties probably ensnared horse families over several consecutive generations, he adds.

Teamwork among early hunters

Other ancient Eurasian sites contain signs of communal hunting that align with a picture of intricately planned and executed horse ambushes at Schöningen.

Numerous bones of butchered fallow deer and other relatively large prey that accumulated along an ancient lakeshore in Israel raise the possibility of communal hunts even before the Middle Paleolithic. Around 780,000 years ago, hominids at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov regularly hunted herd-forming animals and mainly butchered adults in their prime.

In northern Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains, Neandertal ancestors conducted communal bison hunts around 400,000 years ago, researchers reported in 2017 in the Journal of Human Evolution. In several organized events, hunting groups drove bison herds to the edge of an underground cave called Gran Dolina where the animals plunged to their deaths or were finished off on the cave floor by individuals wielding weapons, according to archaeologist Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, and colleagues.

Their analysis of at least 60 bison identified from over 22,500 Gran Dolina fossils detected young, prime-age and old individuals consistent with predation on entire herds. Tooth wear placed the deaths of young bison mostly in the late spring and early summer and again in early fall, suggesting at least two communal hunts.

Rodríguez-Hidalgo suspects that 50 to 100 individuals participated in some aspect of Gran Dolina mass hunts, whether driving bison herds to their fatal nosedives, butchering carcasses or carrying the considerable yield to nearby camps.

Communal hunting requires larger groups and far more planning, anticipation and teamwork by individuals with different roles than the cooperative hunts of animals such as wolves, orcas and chimpanzees, Rodríguez-Hidalgo says.

The ability to speak a language and understand that words symbolize objects and actions made communal hunts possible, he contends. When language originated has long inspired heated debates, but scholars have often assumed that spoken tongues developed only in H. sapiens.

An ability to think symbolically lies at the root of supernatural and religious beliefs as well, Rodríguez-Hidalgo says. “Does this mean the [hominids] of Gran Dolina or Schöningen believed in God or the Great Spirit?” he asks. “No, in my opinion, but they were no longer wolf packs hunting by instinct.”

Increasing evidence, including those ring-shaped structures and wall art inside European caves, suggests that Neandertals held symbolic beliefs of some kind. In line with those clues, excavations at Middle Paleolithic sites dating to between about 130,000 and 50,000 years ago indicate that Neandertals formed teams that effectively hunted a range of herd animals.

At five European sites, our close evolutionary relatives ambushed groups of bison, wild cattle, rhinos, horses and reindeer, according to work by archaeologist Mark White of Durham University in England and colleagues. Much like the Schöningen horse hunters, Neandertals slaughtered prey indiscriminately but preferred to eat prime-age adults. White’s group dubbed Neandertals “excellent tacticians, casual executioners and discerning diners.”

Tactical advantages of communal hunting

Even presented with Schöningen’s butchered bones, cutting tools and reconstructed marshy lake, archaeologists can only partially untangle how communal hunts played out hundreds of thousands of years ago. Although far from being Stone Age relics, modern hunter-gatherers and Indigenous groups can help fill in some blanks.

Throughout the world, nonindustrial societies have frequently used communal hunting tactics with great success, archaeologist Eugène Morin of Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, and colleagues reported last year in Current Anthropology.

Communal hunts in recent centuries included anywhere from two to several hundred people. In many recorded instances, some hunters drove prey to locations bounded by lakes or cliffs where others ambushed them, much like Neandertals and the ancient Schöningen horse hunters.

Hunters could conduct drives on foot, on horseback, in motor vehicles or by setting fires that forced prey toward ambush spots.

Some communal hunts trapped small prey such as rabbits in nets. In other cases, hunting communities built stone walls or fences that formed paths through which larger animals were driven into corrals. Human-made structures designed to trap animals may date to 10,000 years ago or earlier.

Morin’s group analyzed 139 extensive written descriptions by explorers and ethnographers of communal and solo hunts dating from the 1600s to the 2000s. Most accounts concerned hunter-gatherers in North America, Africa, South America, Australia and Pacific Ocean islands.

Communal hunts were common until being largely replaced by hunters who relied on repeating rifles and dogs in the late 1800s, the researchers say. Compared with solo hunting, communal tactics produced much larger and more predictable yields of animal foods, they estimate. In open settings, horseback riding increased communal hunting ranges and the ability to divert herds.

Men, women, children and the elderly from different local communities joined forces in communal hunts studied by Morin’s group. These gatherings also served social purposes, helping adults to find mates and make trade contacts.

Researchers currently cannot specify the size and makeup of ancient communal hunting groups or untangle how hunters socialized with one another, says archaeologist Lutz Kindler of the MONREPOS research facility. Kindler, who was not part of the new Schöningen study, coauthored a 2023 report describing evidence of straight-tusked elephant hunting and butchery by large groups of Neandertals at a site in Germany called Neumark-Nord.

“After a horse hunt, did the Schöningen people just sit down, slice meat, break bones and recharge their energy, or did they pat each other on the back, laugh and celebrate?” Kindler asks.

Ancient communal hunters certainly worked hard. Perhaps they played hard, too.