Stone Age people still preferred hunting wild deer to make tools, even when they had plenty of farm animals sitting right at home.
April 3, 2026
Original Paper
ZooMS reveals preference for wild taxa in Chalcolithic bone tool manufacture at Vila Nova de São Pedro, Portugal
SSRN · 6507771
The Takeaway
Ancient communities in Portugal ignored an easy supply of domestic animal bones to seek out wild deer for their tool-making. This suggests that prehistoric people chose their materials based on symbolic or spiritual reasons rather than what was most convenient.
From the abstract
The Chalcolithic period in Iberia is marked by an expansive craft production industry that utilized both novel and traditional production techniques and raw materials, a key component of which was animal bone. Faunal assemblages from Chalcolithic Iberian sites contain both domesticated species (sheep, goat, pig, cattle) and a wide range of wild species (e.g., deer, horse, aurochs, boar, lynx), but a high proportion of worked bone artifacts in these assemblages cannot using standard zooarchaeolog