In 2007, we dated pottery from these sites and found that the Neolithic happened during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, a period when the environment was very wet and warm (Janz 2012; Janz, Feathers, and Burr 2015).  This told us that the change in land-use and the introduction of new technologies were tightly connected with these environmental changes (Janz 2016).  The warmer, wetter environment created neat little pockets (oases) where there were lots of plants and animals, making it possible for people to hunt and gather in one place for longer. 

Why is this a new idea?  Well, there is large body of scientific research about birds and other animals showing that in nature when animals look for food, they try to eat things that are going to give them the most calories for the least amount of work – we call this “optimal foraging.”  Archaeologists have applied this to humans, suggesting that if humans are going to hunt something, they would rather hunt a big animal (with lots of meat and fat) than a small animal that is hard to catch.  We think this way because many early human and pre-human archaeological sites have lots of evidence of people hunting large animals like wild cows, horses, and deer, but rarely have bones from small animals like birds, fish, or rabbits.  The prevailing idea was that people only started hunting small animals because there were not enough big ones around – mostly because human population size increased over time and caused a strain on resources, but also because there were fewer large animals like mammoth and rhinoceros when they went extinct at the end of the Ice Age (Pleistocene). 

As we develop better methods for understanding the past, new ideas have emerged: 1) people often do not hunt really huge animals like elephants and camels because it is both a lot of work and produces way too much meat (so maybe there is something really interesting happening when we do hunt these animals); 2) since people usually live together in groups, one of the important things about humans is that they divide different tasks among group members – some people might hunt deer while other people gather plants, or make baskets; and 3) people in the very ancient past, including Neanderthals, did not only hunt big game – they also sometimes gathered plants, fished, and hunted rabbits.

The animal bones from Otson Tsokhio, several hundred meters away from Zaraa Uul, shows that about 35,000 to 25,000 years ago, during the “Upper Palaeolithic” period, local people lived on the edge of a saltwater lake and were hunting large wild animals such as horses (DE, Fig. 5 – Horse Bones), mountain sheep, giant elk, and possibly even woolly rhinoceros (Janz et al. 2021).  Some animals were probably very important to humans for reasons other than just food.  In 2018, while excavating at Otson Tsokhio, we found a place where these early people had carefully sandwiched a young hyena skull between a giant elk leg bone and a rhino scapula (DE, Fig. 6 – Sandwich).  Stone tools, animal bones, an ostrich eggshell bead, and red paintstone (ochre) were also found here.