Fallow deer abundances and age profiles indicate opportunistic hunting in the Middle Paleolithic Levant

Advanced Paleolithic hunting skills have been suggested to include the targeting of specific prey species or prime-age individuals. The Mesopotamian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) was the second most abundant prey species in Levantine Middle Paleolithic anthropogenic sites, and it has been argued that humans deliberately hunted prime-aged individuals. We present a regional analysis of the fallow deer abundance and age structure at Middle Paleolithic cave sites in the Mediterranean zone of the Levant. We also refine and standardize fallow deer dental aging, responding to critical discrepancies between existing methods regarding the prime-old age boundary that change significantly the interpretation of mortality curves. Our study demonstrates that using wear diagrams, supplemented by crown height measurements for specific wear stages, enables coherent separation of age cohorts. Following that, our results show that fallow deer are more abundant in natural traps than human sites and hyena dens and that all sites, regardless of the agent of accumulation, possess an unselective age structure, disproving the claim for intentional selection of prime-aged fallow deer. At the same time, species associated with open environments, the smaller-bodied gazelle and much larger aurochs, seem to have been preferentially targeted. These lines of evidence suggest that Paleolithic hunters preferred open biomes and captured fallow deer opportunistically as they traveled to their designated hunting grounds. We suggest that this patch-choice pattern may be attributed to the reduced search costs in non-wooded environments and gregarious, anti-predatory behaviors of prey species. Ultimately, we demonstrate that animal size was not a primary determinant of human prey choice in the Middle Paleolithic southern Levant.