ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Zooarchaeology
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fearc.2025.1545249
This article is part of the Research TopicNeanderthal Complex Behaviour Through the Lens of Faunal ResourcesView all 9 articles
Late Neanderthal subsistence and foraging mobility in Portuguese Estremadura: a zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of Level JJ of Lapa do Picareiro
Provisionally accepted
- 1Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behaviour, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal
- 2University of Louisville, Louisville, Colorado, United States
- 3University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Recent revisions of Neanderthal behavioral models call into question the notion of inflexible subsistence strategies. Here, we present new zooarchaeological and taphonomic data from Level JJ at Lapa do Picareiro (Portuguese Estremadura), dating to approximately 51.5-42.5 ka cal BP, to evaluate Neanderthal prey selection, mobility, and adaptive responses to climatic fluctuations during MIS 3. Our analysis of macro-mammalian faunal assemblagesdivided into three stratigraphic subunits-reveals a consistent emphasis on red deer exploitation, supplemented by occasional hunting of ibex, chamois, aurochs, and horse. Despite paleoenvironmental disturbances associated with Heinrich Stadial (HS) 5, the stable abundance and processing of red deer indicate that these key resources remained reliable, supporting a localized foraging territory estimated at 225-400 km². In contrast, the lithic record shows a shift in raw material procurement before and after the climatic event, suggesting adaptive technological responses. Overall, our findings imply that Neanderthals at Picareiro employed brief, intermittent site occupations while maintaining resilient, regionally adapted subsistence and mobility strategies in the face of environmental variability.
Keywords: Neanderthal, Subsistence, Paleolithic archaeozoology, Iberia, Paleolithic
Received: 14 Dec 2024; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Carvalho, Haws and Jones. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Milena Carvalho, Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behaviour, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.