Anvil weight markings 39110/10/2023 Butchery traditions imply know-how (sequences of gestures), dedication (time involved in the activity) and skill (ability to reproduce gestures and to correct them). Hence, transmitted skills include habits enhanced by experience and/or group traditions. Thus, the development of specific butchery skills, which could be applied to Neandertals who regularly broke long bones to extract yellow marrow, is a valuable hypothesis. Some experiments focusing on the intuitive way to extract marrow highlighted intuitive patterns of percussion mark distribution. It could be influenced by anatomical constraints as the morphology, the thickness of cortical bone, the tissues compacta or spongiosa. Intuitiveness is the immediate intuition of a non-trained butcher to break a bone. These patterns are consistent with butchery traditions shared and transmitted within a same Neandertal group. In this paper, we describe standardized and counter-intuitive patterns of breaking bones. Regarding the analyses of faunal assemblages, the identification of traditions is mostly tested through studies of hunting strategies while butchery techniques are rarely considered. More and more, lithic analyses focus on the hypothesis that stone tool corpuses may indicate both activities and traditions. Stone tools are even used as markers of a specific group or regional traditions. įor decades, identification and analyses of Neandertal traditions through time, in specific site and comparing sites with others were based on studies of lithic assemblages, which were assumed to record the characteristics of a group with the inter-generational transmission of knowledge. Given the large accumulations of broken bones by Neandertal in archaeological sites, focusing on the modalities of bone fracturing seems to be an innovative way of tracking butchery traditions among Neandertal groups. For example, red and yellow bone marrow was an important food resource, especially in dry and cold environments. In addition to the consumption of meat from large and small game, bone assemblages in Neandertal sites indicate systematic fat consumption. Isotopic analyses show a dietary strategy based primarily on animal protein. The ability to use and to cook all the available resources in the environment suggests a combination of complex subsistence behaviours and opportunism. Over the last two decades, the diversity and flexibility of the Neandertal diet have been widely demonstrated. The diversity of Neandertal traditions should be considered by taking into account the butchery, in particular the practice of bone marrow extraction, and not only technological behaviours and types of tool kits. These standardized patterns, which are systematic and counter-intuitive, can be interpreted as culturally induced for the Abri du Maras and Saint Marcel Cave. Regarding the Abri du Maras and Saint Marcel Cave assemblages, our research demonstrates that Neandertal groups applied intense standardized bone breakage, far from the intuitive practice observed experimentally and related to bone density and/or skeletal morphology. On the contrary, in Riparo Tagliente, in Italy, several groups or individuals of a same group did not share the same butchery traditions over time. However, the traditions developed at each site were different. For femurs and humeri, our results demonstrate that Neandertal groups occupying the Abri du Maras (levels 4.1 and 4.2) and the Saint-Marcel Cave (levels g and h) sites in France applied butchery traditions to recover yellow marrow. Statistical analyses as the chi-square test of independence were employed to verify if percussion mark locations were randomly distributed, and if these distributions were different from the intuitive ones. To tackle this issue, we used a zooarchaeological approach focusing on the percussion marks produced during the bone breakage process. The detection of culturally-induced patterns of bone breakage involves differentiating them from intuitively generated patterns. These sites are located in southeastern France and northern Italy and are dated to the Late Middle Palaeolithic: Abri du Maras (Marine Isotopic Stages (MIS) 4–3, Ardèche), Saint-Marcel (MIS 3, Ardèche), and Riparo Tagliente (MIS 4–3, Verona). In this paper, we test the hypothesis of butchery traditions among Neandertal groupsusing the bone assemblages from three sites in southwestern Europe. While lithic technology is largely used to define cultural patterns in human groups, despite dedicating research by zooarchaeologists, for now butchering techniques rarely allowed the identification of clear traditions, notably for ancient Palaeolithic periods. Long bone breakage for bone marrow recovery is a commonly observed practice in Middle Palaeolithic contexts, regardless of the climatic conditions.
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