Hello Elizabeth; Here is a little experiment to try. Try to twist a humerus or femur along its long axis between your hands. Rabbit bones break readily without the marrow being squashed. I've never tried the others.

Experimentally yours, Jim Des Lauriers

As you know, most of the taphonomic experimental work on marrow extraction addresses larger mammals. I remember Lew Binford mentioning that many hunter-gatherer groups process smaller fauna essentially by crushing the whole animal. He discussed Nunmuit Eskimo throwing small fauna into caribou paunches following a bit of quick crushing and leaving them to ferment in buried caches, returning if needed during the lean spring period to harvest the "pickle meat", which also would liberate whatever marrow and tissue fat these animals had. I know some NW coastal literature identified flattening squirrels with a blow from a large rock on an anvil and just tossing them in the soup pot. I think one problem with getting systematic ethnoarchaeological data on this question is that most populations do have an important large fauna component of their diets. Only a few researchers have been interested in small fauna, and sometimes groups don't pursue small game with the frequency that can be encountered during enthographic or ethnoarchaeological field research. Kim Hill has always emphasized that the Ache of Paraguay ignore most small fauna as too much of an opportunity cost compared to the potential for encountering larger game. However, as a caveat, the Ache he worked with lived at an agriculturally dependent mission, and while he has always said the foraging he and colleagues witnessed was "just-like" it was n pre-reduction times, these essentially were special-purpose foraging trips, not identical to fully mobile Ache foraging. They were funded by agricultural foods from the missions they set out (just like treks identified of red Yanomami of Venezuela & Brazil), weaned dependents and older people stayed back at the missions (Hill always said that "mirrored" pre-reduction higher mortality among children & older folks), and it was a sex fest in the forest and chance to enjoy bush foods. The 75% reliance eon hunted food he reports is anomalous compared with all other hunter-gatherer groups outside of the high latitudes. There are other word behaviors about the Ache even in pre-1960s ethnographic info as well. Brian Wood working with the Hadza has emphasized the importance of small game in Hadza hunting returns (in contrast with the O'Connell & Hawkes, et al. focus on large game hunting), and Brian has an archaeology background, he may have some good insight into processing of those animals in camp. I have worked with Savanna Pumé of the Venezuelan llanos who rely almost entirely on small game. 87% of their hunting returns come from armadillos (adults =~900g), tegu lizards (~500-900g), and 100g tepid lizards (mean hunting returns are ~2 kg per hunter/trip of undressed weight. This savanna of poor soils & low underbrush cover has a very depurated faun in terms of density and diversity. Within one 24-month period when I tallied all the large game inputs brought back to a camp of 80 folks, all of the game 6 kg or larger consisted of 2 deer (one a juvenile), 1 capybara, 2 river turtles, 6 tamandua anteaters, and 7 caimans. Modern Pumé butchering involves cutting all game (including large game) into small ~50-100g pieces with steel knives to throw into the soup pot and boiling them in water. This opens up all marrow cavities without any directed effort to retrieve the marrow. Given their reliance on small game, boiling conserves the fat in broth, and while a hunter may only get 200g of meat from his efforts, he can get 2 bowls full of broth. The Pumé don't worry about bits of bone splintered from the chopping of animals into pot-sized & share-out sized pieces, they just spit them out while eating.

Thank you for this very detailed response. The problem I often run into is that many (if not all) of the modern hunter gatherer communities today use fire or some sort of "stew" that helps relieve the nutrients from the marrow cavity of small mammal bones. It's more efficient and less time consuming while it also increases the net return rate (as you describe above in the modern Pume example). The problem that I'm interested in addressing is when you have an archaeological context with no fire (and certainly no pots for cooking or boiling water for adding vegetables for a meat stew), how do hominins access the marrow of smaller game? There is always more than one way to do something and not every way is going to be the most optimal. In the Levant, the Late Pleistocene hare assemblages typically show a abundance of cylinders with green fractures due to twisting the long bones - it's time and energy efficient. However, has this always been the way that hominins access marrow from small game? Or is this more of a modern human way of getting at small game marrow? I'm still searching for an experimental study that attempts to try different ways of accessing marrow from small animals to see what their derivatives would look like - although I may just try this myself since there seems to be a void in the literature about this topic.

Elizabeth; Look back at my first comment. I agree with you that a little experiment is in order. The context of my having done it was from the Boy Scouts 70 years ago. That was part of the stew-making pot. Cheers, Jim Des Lauriers

Hi James. Thank you for your input. I have tried twisting rabbit bones to access marrow and while I agree it is very effective, I am more interested in other methods of accessing marrow that may have been used in the past. It looks like no one has done this so I'm looking into conducting one. Thanks again.