Prehistoric Hunters Built Stone Traps to Corner Prey

Many thousands of years ago, ancient humans all over the world used vast animal traps to funnel stampeding herds into killing pits or over cliffs. It was once thought such traps were limited to the deserts of Arabia, where they are called "desert kites" because of their peculiar shapes. But similar traps have been found in Central Asia, Europe and South America. This suggests ancient communities in each region independently realized the effectiveness of this hunting strategy.

"We believe these were large-scale hunting structures designed to guide and capture herds of wild animals, most likely red deer," explains University of Ljubljana archaeologist Dimitrij Mlekuž, who found traces of ancient animal traps in Slovenia, just east of the top of the Adriatic Sea. Slovenia includes a vast area of eroded limestone known as the Karst Plateau, which has given its name to similar landscapes around the world, and it’s here that Mlekuž and his colleagues spotted the ancient stone walls used in these traps.

"Each system consists of two long, low stone walls that gradually converge to form a wide funnel narrowing toward a natural drop," he says. "At the end of this funnel, below a cliff or crag, lies the hidden part of the trap—a carefully concealed stone-built enclosure designed to contain the animals that fell or were driven over."

The largest of the Slovenian traps would have taken more than 5,000 hours to build, Mlekuž estimates, which suggests that a relatively large number of people built them in a short time and indicates that prehistoric communities in Europe were more complex than once assumed. The work, he says, would have amounted to 40 people working two hours a day for two months.

The structures are difficult to date, but the study authors think some parts may be more than 8,000 years old. This means they were built during the Mesolithic period. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal fragments in buried soil indicates they were abandoned before the Late Bronze Age, roughly 3,000 years ago. This may be when communities shifted to domesticating animals instead of hunting wild ones.

The catch from the stone funnels would have been too large for any single family to eat. "Such abundance almost certainly had a social dimension: collective consumption, feasts and gatherings that reinforced community ties and perhaps ritual or ceremonial life," Mlekuž says.

The ancient animal traps in Slovenia are about the same size as many of the desert kites found in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The idea of driving panicked wild animals into a pit or over a cliff has been used on a smaller scale in ancient North America, Africa and Australia.

Ancient fish traps share the same shape—a funnel leading into a trap. While the traps in Slovenia resemble those elsewhere, there are differences that appear to reflect the particular landscape.

"The Karst Plateau traps are generally larger, and while most desert kites end in a broad enclosure where animals were contained, our traps lead directly to a natural drop or pit, where the animals would fall and be captured below," Mlekuž says. Archaeological investigations suggest most desert kites in Arabia were abandoned thousands of years ago, but there are indications that similar animal traps in Central Asia were used until relatively recently. A study of similar traps in the Andes even suggests some may have been used for wild hunts in recent centuries.

University of Malta archaeologist Huw Groucutt has closely studied Arabia's desert kites, which were once confused with the ancient ceremonial structures called mustatils (Arabic for "rectangle") that were also built in the Arabian desert with long stone walls. In Arabia, which was relatively lush until about 6,000 years ago, the wild herds were probably gazelles, although sometimes they may have been ibex, oryx, wild donkeys or wild camels.

Groucutt also thinks the ancient animal traps are examples of cultural convergence. "One hundred years ago, everyone thought that everything had spread from Egypt or somewhere," he explains. "But now we keep seeing independent, local invention." He thinks evidence of such ancient animal traps will be found in many other regions, including southern Africa, the Nile Valley and what's now the Sahara.

"Anyone looking at wild animals moving around is going to have the same idea," he says. "It's a much more sensible strategy than trying to shoot at something with a bow and arrow."