Bone Modifications Resulting from Captive Chimpanzee Mastication: Implications for the Interpretation of Pliocene Archaeological Faunas

In order to obtain chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) mastication damage on bones, cleaned, disarticulated ribs and long bones of bovids and cervids were coated with food substances found palatable by captive chimpanzees. The bones were then presented to four groups of mixed sex and mixed age chimpanzees from the Tulsa Zoo (Oklahoma) and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (San Antonio, Texas). In the process of feeding on the coated bones, the chimpanzees inflicted discernible mastication damage on 73·61% of the total recovered bone specimens. Analysis of these chimpanzee-induced bone modifications reveals that non-technological hominoids of the same approximate size and with comparable dentition and bite force to the gracile australopithecines and earliestHomoare very capable of inflicting the same range and degree of damage to bones as are feeding carnivores. This finding implies that zooarchaeologists must take a contextual (configurational) approach when analysing mastication damage on arch-aeological bones, rather than automatically attributing all such damage to carnivores.