A long tunnel cave, about 1.5 miles long, full of hundreds of thousands of animal bones. No, it’s not the opening scene of an Indiana Jones movie. The Umm Jirsan lava tube located in Saudi Arabia has a collection of bones from wolves, camels, foxes, horses, hyenas, bats, cattle, and even three human cranial or cranial remains. A new study published last month notes that these bones were collected by scratched hyenas over a period of about 7,000 years.
The site was first investigated in 2007 and extensive studies of 1,917 bones and teeth showed that there were about 40 individuals representing 14 taxa. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the animals lived about 439 to 6,839 years ago.
But how do we know that the hyenas brought her to stripes?
Wolves, striped hyenas and foxes have similar dietary preferences, but their eating behavior is different. Wolves usually eat their prey in places of slaughter and feed their young by regurgitating previously ingested meat. But striped hyenas and red foxes are avid bone hoarders. Striped hyenas are also known to plunder human graves and several human cranial remains have been found near their dens. They keep these bones to eat in times of lack of food or even to feed their young.
The set includes a variety of animals, including cattle, kids, horses, camels, rodents, and even humans. (3 / n) pic.twitter.com/S7LF434psF
– Stewie Stewart (@ StewieStewart13) July 21, 2021
“There are other similar sites reported from the Middle East and Africa. However, there have been very few detailed studies on these sets,” explains first author Mathew Stewart of the Max Planck Institute for Science of human history in germany in an email at indianexpress.com. The findings were published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.
Striped hyenas also have a powerful neck and jaw muscle that helps them carry large carcasses over long distances. The presence of skeletal remains of hyena and coprolites, or fossilized feces, suggested that these bones accumulated mainly from scratched hyena (Hyaena hyaena).
The Umm Jirsan lava tube system is currently the longest lava tube reported in Arabia with a horizontal passage length of 1481 m and a typical height of 8-12 m (PALAEODESERTS PROJECT)
The study team has planned to conduct a study and investigate other similar sites in the region. “Surprisingly, the thousands of bones reported in the paper represent only a small fraction of the material preserved in the Umm Jirsan lava tube,” adds Dr. Stewart.