Despite this impressive size, 125,000 years ago, Neanderthals hunted these elephants, a study published on Wednesday showed for the first time, which sheds new light on our understanding of these prehistoric men.

"Neanderthals were able to manage enormous quantities of food", not only that resulting from the hunting of horses, bovids or deer, Wil Roebroeks, co-author of this study published in the journal Science Advances, told AFP.

"Either keeping it for a long time -- and that's already something we didn't know -- or simply because they lived in much larger groups than previously thought", with more mouths to feed, he explained.

Cutting up a prey of an average of ten tons before the meat rotted would require several days of work for about twenty men, the researchers estimated.

And provide enough to eat for three months for 25 people, or one month for 100 people.

To preserve it, perhaps they dried it under fires.

How did the Neanderthals go about killing these colossi?

Impossible to say with certainty, but one hypothesis is that they immobilized them by pushing them into muddy areas where they got stuck, or towards dug traps, before finishing them off with spears.

- Tool notches -

For a long time, researchers wondered about the presence, on several archaeological sites, of bones of elephants near stone tools.

Were Neanderthals really able to hunt them, or did they just feed on naturally dead animals?

Researcher Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser examines an adult elephant bone looking for marks left by Neanderthal tools © Lutz Kindler / MONREPOS/AFP

The ultimate evidence of hunting, a mark of impact or a spear stuck in a bone, has never been observed -- which is not surprising given the wingspan of these beasts (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), that studies genetics have been linked to present-day African elephants.

But on the site known as Neumark-Nord 1, near the present-day city of Halle in Germany, a clue alerted scientists: the remains of some 70 elephants, the largest known group, were in vast majority of adult males.

A lack of diversity that results from selection by hunters, according to the study.

Unlike the females living in herds, the solitary males must have been easier to kill.

They also represented more food, due to their larger size.

The researchers then analyzed the extremely well-preserved bones of nearly sixty of these elephants under a microscope: they bear the clear traces of flint tools used by the Neanderthals to cut them – notches of a few centimeters maximum.

"These are the classic cut marks generated by carving the meat and scraping it off the bones," explained Wil Roebroeks, professor of archeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The environment where these Neanderthals lived, and where the animals were found, near a lake, could be conducive to trapping them with loose soil, according to the researcher.

Once dead, the elephants were skinned on the spot.

About 40 of these specimens come from a period spanning just 300 years, leading researchers to estimate that an animal was killed approximately every five to six years.

- Generations -

According to the study, elephant hunting was practiced there by Neanderthals for a period of at least 2,000 years, or dozens of generations.

Undated image provided by the Monrepos research center in Germany of marks left by stone tools on an elephant bone dating from around 125,000 years ago © Handout / MONREPOS/AFP

But Neanderthals lived on Earth for a very long time (between about 400,000 and 40,000 years ago).

In Europe, "most of the time it was much colder than today", unlike the period analyzed on the Neumark site, explained Wil Roebroeks.

But "our image of Neanderthals is very oriented by colder periods".

Faced with more abundant food thanks to a favorable climate, they were then able to adopt a more sedentary way of life, in larger groups.

But the question of their number remains extremely difficult to determine with precision.

Anyway, the study demonstrates according to Wil Roebroeks that "the world of Neanderthals was very diverse".

And that they "weren't just nature's slaves, those kind of original hippies living off the land."

"They were able to shape their environment (...) by having a real impact on the largest animals in the world at that time", summed up the researcher.

© 2023 AFP