Notched gazelle bones may be the signature of a Paleolithic culture

Enlarge (credit: Tejero et al. 2018)

In caves and rock shelters around the Levant, archaeologists keep finding gazelle scapulae (shoulder blades) marked with a series of regular notches. Scientists still aren’t sure what kind of information the enigmatic marks once conveyed or how the bones themselves might have been used or displayed, but they may be able to tell us something about how early human cultures spread through Eurasia.

Put another notch in your… gazelle scapula?

Hayonim Cave in Western Galilee, Israel, overlooks the right bank of a large wadi a few miles from the Mediterranean shore. There, archaeologists found eight gazelle scapulae, mostly broken, along with hearths, tooth pendants, stone chips, and signs of ochre use within layers of sediment dating to the Upper Paleolithic. The bones are marked with rows of 0.5-2.5mm wide, 4-5mm long notches regularly spaced 0.5 to 7mm apart. They were put there by a stone blade; on the only unbroken scapula in the set, there are 32 notches, but some have as few as three.

The notches aren’t on the same parts of the bone where you’d expect to find cut marks from butchering an animal. Butchering cuts also tend to be shallower and shorter, and the surface of a hacking or cutting mark looks very different under a microscope than a notch made by sawing into a pre-scraped surface.