Resumen de Prey selection among Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the Northern Iberian Peninsula
Alba García-Álvarez, Gonzalo Linares-Matas, José Yravedra Sainz de los Terreros
During the last decades, archaeological research has demonstrated that hunting and primary access to animal resources have been a recurrent feature of early human behaviour. In addition to confirming this behavioural pattern, data from later Palaeolithic sites can be analysed to provide insights on the specific dynamics of human practices and how they inform subsistence strategies. Of particular interest are discussions on opportunistic versus selective hunting strategies, as well as the prey selection criteria that early human populations followed, if any, in the Palaeolithic period. We address these research questions throughout the paper, focusing on the second half of the Late Pleistocene in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. We consider a sample of twelve archaeological and palaeontological sites from a bibliographical perspective. The results analysed suggest that the prey selection strategies adopted by Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were influenced by a series of palaeoecological and sociocultural contexts, such as landscape, geomorphology and topography, seasonal prey mobility, and human mobility patterns. We suggest that the discussion is hindered by issues of data resolution, which can be improved through taphonomical analysis of the assemblages under consideration. Other limitations are derived from the incomplete nature of the available evidence, that are to be addressed through further future fieldwork.
