Granada, (EFE).- 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 work, in which researchers from the University of Granada, the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Salamanca participate, has analyzed how the human being coexisted with other animal species, particularly carnivores, to find out if they competed for the prey or shared.
The study has been focused on the Barranco León de Orce site (Granada), where it has been verified that humans and canis mosbachensis, an ancestor of wolves, shared the meat of the same prey.
Thanks to the combination of traditional taphonomy, three-dimensional geometric morphometry and artificial intelligence, it has been possible to decipher the complex interactions between carnivores and humans at the dawn of European humanity.
Bites, like fingerprints
In Barranco León there are various species of carnivores, from a large hyena, saber-toothed tigers, three species of canids, wolves and foxes, as well as some brown bears, although only hyenas intentionally fracture the bones of their prey.
Bite marks are like the fingerprints of extinct carnivore species, although identifying them on fossil bones requires complex comparison work.
The first step is to identify the bite marks, scan them with a high degree of resolution, analyze the morphological pattern of each one with three-dimensional geometric morphometry, and use artificial intelligence to recognize the marks determined by the species that made them.
The results in Barranco León have indicated that more than half of the tags are from the wolf’s ancestor, and not from the 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, is part of the ORCE Project led by the researcher from the University of Granada Juan Manuel Jiménez-Arenas, and who has determined that humans and wolves shared food. EFE