Zooarchaeological evidence for the use of animal resources by the Paleolithic inhabitants of Denisova Cave

This article discusses a collection of bone remains with traces of anthropogenic impact from the Paleolithic layers of Denisova cave, which covers a wide chronological range of the second half of the Middle and Upper Pleistocene. Over a thousand bone fragments with distinctive traces of human modification by cutting, scraping, splitting, and chopping, have been examined. Incisions associated with cutting soft tissues off bones were the most common and variable marks. Animal bites sometimes overlapped the traces of anthropogenic impact on the bones. Strategies of using animals among the inhabitants of the cave in the Initial Middle Paleolithic (MIS 9-7) have been established. The predominant operations in this period were removing meat and splitting the bones to extract bone marrow. Meat was mostly removed from the medial sections of diaphyses of tubular bones and ribs of large mammals using cutting tools. Traces of meat cutting and bone splitting continued to predominate in the Early, Middle, and Late Middle Paleolithic (MIS 6-4), although the role of more specialized operations, such as scraping and longitudinal cutting, increased. With the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic (MIS 3), traces of meat cutting remained the dominant types of traces on bones, while the share of dismembering traces increased, indicating increased activities of primary butchering of carcasses. Anatomically, traces of utilization are located mainly on long tubular bones, ribs, and lower parts of limbs. In the Middle Upper Paleolithic (MIS 2), general strategies of bone utilization did not change fundamentally.