Humans and wolves ate the same prey 1.5 million years ago in Grenada

The use of artificial intelligence techniques has allowed this discovery to be made at the Barranco León site in Orce.

The use of artificial intelligence techniques has allowed a multidisciplinary team of researchers to demonstrate that humans and wolves shared the meat of their prey and bit the same bones a million and a half years ago in Orce (Granada). The study, involving researchers from the University of Granada, the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Salamanca, has analysed how humans coexisted with other animal species, particularly carnivores, to find out whether they competed for prey or shared it. The study focused on the Barranco León site in Orce (Granada), where it was found that humans and canis mosbachensis, an ancestor of wolves, shared the meat of the same prey.

A combination of traditional taphonomy, three-dimensional geometric morphometry and artificial intelligence has been used to decipher the complex interactions between carnivores and humans at the dawn of European mankind. In Barranco León there are several species of carnivores, from a large hyena, sabre-toothed tigers, three species of canids, wolves and foxes, as well as some brown bears, although only the hyenas intentionally fracture the bones of their prey.

Bite marks are like the fingerprints of extinct carnivore species, but identifying them in fossil bones requires complex matching. The first step is to identify the bite marks, scan them at high resolution, analyse the morphological pattern of each bite mark with three-dimensional geometric morphometry, and use artificial intelligence to recognise the marks to determine the species that made them.

The results in Barranco León have shown that more than half of the marks are from the wolf ancestor, and not hyena, and that they also fed on animals of a size that they could not hunt, so they must have been scavengers. The research, led by Lloyd A. Courtenay, from the University of Salamanca, and José Yravedra, from the Complutense University, is part of the ProjectORCE led by the University of Granada researcher Juan Manuel Jiménez-Arenas, which has determined that humans and wolves shared food.

https://www.larazon.es/andalucia/20230201/eqgp6emk55g7rnznhmqpc6vgoy.html

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