... the remains reveal that the early Sri Lankans were sustainable hunters, primarily targeting adult animals, the scientists report today in Nature Communications. “They hunted these animals for nearly 40,000 years, without driving any to extinction,” Roberts says. “So they must have had sophisticated knowledge of monkey life cycles and an understanding of how to use resources wisely.”
Many scientists believed such forests lacked the resources for early humans to successfully settle. Instead, our ancestors apparently quickly adapted to this and other challenging environments (such as high elevations and deserts), in part by figuring out how to reliably hunt difficult-to-catch prey.
To conduct the research, archaeologist Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (SHH) in Jena, Germany, and colleagues analyzed animal bones recovered from Sri Lanka’s Fa Hien Cave in Kalutara during excavations from 2009 and 2012. Materials and artifacts including charcoal, faunal remains, shell beads, and bone and stone tools indicate people occupied the site from about 45,000 to 4000 years ago.
The scientists analyzed almost 14,500 animal bones and teeth from four periods of occupation and found that gazelle-size mammals were the most common. Monkeys (primarily macaques and purple-faced langurs, the latter of which inhabit the tallest trees, reaching some 45 meters) and tree squirrels made up more than 70% of the identified remains, which also included otters, fish, reptiles, and birds. Fewer than 4% of the bones came from deer, pigs, and bovids, such as buffalo. Many bones bore cut marks from butchery and had been burned, signs that humans processed them for meat.
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