With present-day elephants,

 With present-day elephants,

 older males usually keep to themselves. “If we assume similar behavior at Neumark-Nord, the solitary bull males would have ranged over the lake shores without the cover of a herd, and therefore would have been easier to move in on than females protecting their young,” said Lutz Kindler, a researcher at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum who also collaborated on the study. He acknowledged that scavenging on elephants that died naturally might have left the same marks as butchering those that had been hunted. But, he added, “the concentration of so many bones in a single location makes that unlikely.”

Hunting the “biggest calorie bombs,” as Dr. Roebroeks calls them, may have required little technological sophistication. “Of course, a Neanderthal hunter would have to know the behavior of these creatures very well, and would have to be able to predict their behavior,” he said. “But as long as the hunter could immobilize the elephant by, for example, digging pits or driving them into mud traps, the animal could be theoretically finished off with wooden thrusting spears.” Indirect evidence for use of such weapons exists in hunting lesions on the bones of fallow deer exhumed at the site.

Dr. Roebroeks and his colleagues concluded that at least some Neanderthals lived in substantially larger groups than is often hypothesized. The researchers estimated that a group of 25 foragers working in tandem would have required three to five days to skin and carve up a single 11-ton elephant, and an equal amount of time to process it. The yield: more than 2,500 daily portions of 4,000 calories per portion.