Natural background bone assemblages and their ravaging stages in Olduvai Bed I

One pillar of Potts’ (1988) argument that several Olduvai Bed I sites were hominid-made was that the dense concentrations of bones seemed to have no equivalent in natural processes of bone dispersal and concentration in modern savannas (see Chapter 1). The ongoing landscape archaeology project at Olduvai has obtained a wealth of information about bone scatters on the landscape during that time. Cushing’s (2002) study of these scatters reveals that bone density on the landscape during the formation of Lowermost Bed II varied according to geological facet (including habitat type), and that natural bone clusters on the landscape were sometimes fairly dense. Of all the trenches analyzed by Cushing, those belonging to Olduvai Bed I Middle Bed – the same stratigraphic interval in which archaeological sites such as FLK Zinj are situated – show the highest densities of bone scatters. This suggests that there were loci on the landscape in which natural bone accumulations were substantially high and in which no hominid participation was required (see Chapter 7 for an extensive explanation of the FLK North 6 case).