Two groups of Neanderthals who camped just 43 mi apart in northern Israel left behind piles of butchered bones that look nothing alike. Yet both groups hunted the same gazelles and fallow deer, shaped the same flint flakes, and cooked beside the same kinds of hearths.
“The subtle differences in cut mark patterns between Amud and Kebara may reflect local traditions of animal carcass processing,” said Anaëlle Jallon, a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead author of the new study.
Neanderthals’ butchery styles
Forty percent of the animal bones at Amud cave are scorched, while only 9 percent show burning at Kebara cave, a contrast the researchers recorded in more than 11,000 catalogued fragments.
Burned bone shatters easily, and at Amud most pieces were under one square inch, yet they bristle with dense, overlapping cut marks that sometimes crisscross like city streets.
The average piece spans several square inches, and its knife scars run long and straight, rarely intersecting. Kebara fragments tell a calmer story.
Both kitchens sat within the Middle Paleolithic Mediterranean woodlands, where gazelles roamed year round and larger aurochs grazed the valley floor.
Stable isotope work shows Neanderthals there pivoted diets as climate swung, a talent shared across Eurasia.
Yet the Amud team rarely hauled full grown aurochs back to camp, focusing on smaller game that could be carried whole. Kebara hunters, in contrast, often lugged large carcasses home before filleting them inside the cave.
Measuring Neanderthal butchery
Jallon’s team zoomed a 3D surface microscope over 936 Amud incisions and 736 Kebara grooves. Most shared the same V shaped profile, confirming that both groups wielded similar flint points.
Still, the metrics diverged. Amud marks averaged 1.9 mm long but crammed onto tiny chips, producing ten cuts per square centimeter. Kebara’s averaged 3.4 mm yet only 1.6 cuts per square centimeter.
Opening angles on Amud cuts ran wider, and their floors splayed into broader arcs. Those shapes usually form when a blade bites repeatedly at different angles rather than slicing clean in one stroke.
Fire may explain part of the difference. Repeated roasting can dry collagen, making bone more brittle and forcing butchers to hack rather than glide their tools.
Amud hearths cluster near the living surface and show layers of ash glued together by rainwash, hinting at frequent burning of refuse. Kebara’s hearths sit in discrete lenses, and many bone fragments lay untouched by flame, suggesting faster cleanup or cooler cooking.
Neanderthal butchery shaped by tradition
Experimental work finds novices leave shallow, chaotic cuts, but Amud grooves run deep and regular, ruling out clumsiness. Technique, not talent, separates the two butcheries.
“Even though Neanderthals at these two sites shared similar living conditions and faced comparable challenges, they seem to have developed distinct butchery strategies,” noted Jallon.
Instead, the team proposes social learning: each group copied elders, handing down rules about how long meat could hang, who wielded blades, and where to slice.
One idea is meat aging. If Amud hunters dried or left carcasses to ripen, the toughened tissue would need more short, forceful strokes, exactly what the bones record.
Groups stayed apart
Despite the short distance between Amud and Kebara, there’s no direct evidence the groups ever interacted. Researchers cannot confirm whether the caves were used simultaneously or separated by centuries.
Even so, the consistent cut mark style within each cave over multiple occupation layers hints that each group may have returned seasonally, preserving their own traditions across generations.
This long-term stability suggests that Neanderthal groups maintained cultural identities even without obvious borders or physical barriers.
Cultural differences in Neanderthal butchery
The findings join a growing list of cave to cave quirks that paint Neanderthals as flexible, creative foragers rather than a single gray mass.
Previous work shows Levantine clans favored gazelles over deer even when both stood in sight, a preference that likely mixed taste, risk, and tradition.
Other studies spot regional styles in stone tool trimming, birch tar glue, and pigment use. Cut mark signatures now add food prep to the cultural toolkit, filling a daily life gap between hunting and eating.
Was Amud’s smoky workspace a seasonal smokehouse run by a few specialists, or a crowded hearth where many hands joined in?
Did Kebara cooks trim meat fast to dodge cave dwelling hyenas outside, or to feed a larger band waiting inside?
Jallon hopes that chemical traces of drying or aging, microscopic wear on knife edges, and new isotopic snapshots of collagen breakdown can test these ideas.
Nearby sites such as Ein Qashish carry similar fauna and may reveal whether butcher signatures match either cave or map onto new patterns.
The study is published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
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