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It's already been shown that hyenas ate humans, but did early humans likewise dine on hyenas? They might have, say Spanish researchers who found evidence of human "processing" of hyena bones in an ancient hyena den.
"Although the interaction between hyenas and hominids is a constant throughout human evolution, consumption of these animals by our ancestors has never before been documented," said researcher Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. His paper announcing the discovery appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Taphonomy.
The suspect hyena bones come from Maltravieso cave in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, which is on the southwestern tip of Europe. The cave has rooms with archaeological sites ranging from the Middle Pleistocene to the Bronze Age. The Hyena bones come from what's called the Sala de Huesos (Hall of Bones), which is filled with debris dated to between 117,000 and 183,000 ago.
"In this chronology, in Europe, there was only one hominid species," Rodríguez-Hidalgo told Discovery News. "We assume that Neanderthals were responsible for this...activity."
The Sala de Huesos appears to have been primarily a hyena den, but also might have been used by humans, although there are no human bones found there, he said.
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