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HAYNES—RECONSTRUCTING HUMAN PREDATIONDelpech, 1994). Archeological evidence suggeststhat the active hunting often targeted large gamespecies; for example, several sharply pointedwooden spears were found in Schöningen, Germany,along with numerous bones of Pleistocene horsesdated around 400,000 years old (Thieme, 1997). Thespears are interpreted as killing tools, and the horsesare thought to be the prey of Homo heidelbergensisor archaic H. sapiens.By the Middle Paleolithic, beginning around250,000 years ago, archeological sites containpossible evidence of even larger and moredangerous prey being hunted as well as scavenged(Patou-Mathis, 2000). The site of La Cotte de St.Brelade in the Channel Islands between France andEngland contained very incomplete skeletons ofseveral woolly mammoths and woolly rhinocerosesalong with stone artifacts, although no hearths orburnt bones were discovered. The assemblage hasbeen interpreted as what was left in a processingsite where certain meat-bearing body parts weretransported for butchering after mass kills (Scott,1980, 1986).DISTINGUISHING HUNTINGFROM SCAVENGINGEven fully modern foragers can be satisfied withpassive scavenging of already dead animals when itis less costly than the active pursuit and killing oflive prey. But humans are never more than part-timeor opportunistic scavengers and no specializedscavenging human groups are known from theethnographic record. The opportunistic scavengingof animals involves cultural practices that seemalmost identical to those used in active hunting.Modern small-scale foraging groups such as theHadza in Tanzania (O’Connell et al., 1988a, 1988b;Woodburn, 1968) make and use the same tools tokill animals—spears, clubs, or bows-and-arrows—as they do to scare away lions and hyenas fromanimal carcasses. The Hadza (and any other humanforagers) also use the same kinds of butchering toolsto extract food from scavenged carcasses as fromkills they make themselves (Bunn et al., 1988). Thismeans that the artifacts and technology found inprehistoric archeological sites do not by theirpresence distinguish between scavenging andkilling. Other kinds of evidence must be used tomake the distinction. The methods available to makethe distinction between hunting and scavenging mustbe applicable in all contexts, from the very earliestsites to the most recent ones. The immediate costsand benefits of hunting versus scavenging must beunderstandable in order to reconstruct situationallyspecific choices made in the past.One possible if indirect measure of how muchpredation rather than scavenging was done byhumans in prehistory may come frommusculoskeletal analysis of prehistoric humanbones (Peterson, 1998). In cases where there areno animal bones associated with implements madeby humans, the human skeleton itself might be ableto provide indicators (specifically stress markers)that predation-related activities were frequent, suchas habitual overhand throwing, thus supporting thehypothesis that spears were delivered by armmotion or through the use of atlatls, specializedthrowing boards or sticks. Frequent spear-throwinglogically implies frequent predation.Unfortunately, extremely few prehistoricarcheological sites contain human skeletal material,and thus other methods are needed to find theevidence for predation in the fossil record.FINE-SCALE METHODSFOR ANALYZING PREDATIONThe goal of a step-by-step predation analysis isto identify the costs and benefits of humaninvolvement in the killing or utilization of an animalcarcass. Before any economic interpretations can bemade, a first step is to establish the contemporaneityand behavioral association between humans and theanimal remains in question. Bone decomposition,also known as weathering, by itself is an impreciseindicator of the contemporaneity of different skeletalelements (Behrensmeyer, 1978; Lyman and Fox,1989). Weathering varies within similarenvironments due to element differences (thickcompact bone weathers differently than thinnerwalledcancellous bone) or microhabitat differences53