A million years ago the ecosystem of Israel and surrounding countries looked very different than it did today. Giant megafauna like elephants and aurochs, the wild ancestors of today’s domestic cows, roamed the land. But humans and our near ancestors began hunting these species to extinction. Straight-tusked elephants, the largest, were the first to disappear roughly 400,000 years ago, then the next largest animals followed like a line of toppling dominoes.
Researchers now believe that this trend reveals something about the very nature of our ancient ancestors in the Middle East, and why the ecosystem changed so drastically in many parts of the world due to hunting pressure, according to a study published in January in Quaternary Science Reviews. The progressive overexploitation of the largest prey animals may have led to large-scale cultural changes such as the adoption of agriculture when big prey resources became scarcer on the landscape, and even the evolution of humans.
“We believe that prey size decline during the Paleolithic was the organizing factor,” says Miki Ben-Dor, a prehistoric archaeologist at Tel Aviv University.
