Flint marks on snake bones put a butchery signature on Natufian settling down

Researchers report flint knife cut marks at consistent locations on the bones of large snakes recovered from 15,000-year-old settlement layers on Mount Carmel, which they describe as the first evidence that people of the Natufian period hunted reptiles ^[6][7]. That matters because the shift it documents is usually argued from settlement plans and stone tools rather than from what was actually cut up and eaten.

The context, as summarised by phys.org, is that human communities in the southern Levant changed their way of life around 15,000 years ago: groups that had been nomadic reduced their mobility and established small permanent settlements for the first time ^[1]. The Natufian is treated as an important stage in the history of sedentism, preceding agriculture ^[2]. Reduced mobility carried a dietary cost, in that people could no longer be as selective about food resources as they had been ^[3].

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, draws on excavations at the el-Wad Terrace site in the Nahal Me'arot Nature Reserve on Mount Carmel in Israel ^[4][14]. It covers 20 archaeological layers of repeated settlement over roughly 3,000 years, radiocarbon dated to between about 15,000 and 12,000 years ago ^[5]. That works out to an average of about 150 years per layer ^[15], which is the kind of resolution that lets a team look at change over time rather than a single snapshot.

Lead author Maayan Lev, a postdoctoral researcher in the Kiel Training for Excellence programme at Kiel University, says lizards and snakes became an important part of the diet in this period ^[8]. Lev worked with Mina Weinstein-Evron and Reuven Yeshurun of the University of Haifa, and the team identified thousands of lizard and snake bones in the settlement layers ^[9][10]. The methodological work is the part to take seriously: Lev says microscopic examination allowed the team to separate reptile remains that died naturally at the site, or were preyed on by mammals and birds, from those that served as human food ^[11]. Without that filter, reptile bones in a cave terrace deposit prove nothing about human diet.

The cut marks were found on large-bodied snakes including the large whip snake (Dolichophis jugularis) and the eastern Montpellier snake (Malpolon insignitus) ^[6]. Evidence for consumption of the European glass lizard (Pseudopus apodus) is described as indirect, because its hard scales required a different butchering method than snakes ^[7]. The team's hypothesis is that the preferred prey was relatively large, relatively slow and not dangerous: the glass lizard was the ideal choice, harmless snakes were the fallback, and venomous snakes such as vipers were rarely caught ^[12]. The high frequency of bones from the more productive species, particularly the glass lizard, across all layers is read as evidence of a reliable and sustainable food source, holding up during periods of growth and population increase at the settlement ^[13].

What to watch: whether the microscopic criteria for distinguishing human butchery from predator damage travel to other Natufian assemblages, where reptile bones have presumably been recovered and set aside; and whether the indirect case for the glass lizard, currently the most abundant of the three taxa in this account, can be put on the same footing as the cut-marked snakes ^[7][13].