BIŚNIK CAVE, SOUTHERN POLAND. SINGS OF A DEPOT AND WORKSHOP OF NATURALLY SHED CERVID ANTLERS?

The use of shed antler bases as soft hammers and retouches first appeared in the archaeological record in the Early Palaeolithic, around 500 ka (e.g., Boxgrove, UK: Wenban-Smith, 1989; Pitts and Roberts, 1997; Roberts and Parfitt, 1999; Pettit and White, 2012; Smith, 2013; Stout et al., 2014). This practice remained rare until the Late Palaeolithic when it became more common. An exceptionally high proportion of shed antlers from layer 7-5 of Biśnik Cave, Częstochowa Upland, which is referred to the MIS 3-4 transition, could have been accumulated by hominins as raw material and then employed as tools for crafting other tools or for being shaped into tools themselves. That they enjoyed special attention by humans is reflected by the fact that the shed antlers are the only specimens from Biśnik Cave’s layer 7-5 to show human-derived damage; consistently, several flint tools display delicate striations on the working edges, suggestive of use for processing antler or wood (Cyrek et al. 2014). This, however, is not the only damage suffered by the antlers; most of them are also heavily gnawed and bit by carnivores, especially Crocuta crocuta spelaea, which evidently found them piled up in the cave and used them as nibbling bones. The spotted hyaenas cannot be held responsible for collecting the antlers; it is hardly credible that these opportunistic carnivores, at the top of the trophic pyramid, would spend time and efforts to collect large amounts of skeletal parts with so little nutritional value. We also exclude that spotted hyaenas needed to collect antlers to supplement their mineral intake: by being total consumers of vertebrate carcasses, their droppings consist almost entirely of mineral matter derived from bones (Matthews, 1939; Sutcliffe, 1970; Kruuk, 1972; Larkin et al., 2000). This reasoning inevitably leads to the conclusion that the blame for accumulating disproportionate numbers of shed antlers is to be placed on hominins. The alternating presence of hominins and hyaenas at Biśnik Cave is hinted at by taphonomic evidence. At the time when layer 7-5 was formed, the cave was used by many successive generations of animals. Taphonomic analysis indicates that the bone assemblage is the result of a time-averaged palimpsest of both biotic and episodic abiotic events, which include both animal and hominin frequentation, and eventual hydraulic winnowing, which purportedly removed a certain amount of the original specimens.