Based on sedimentation rates and the number of individual elephants,

 Based on sedimentation rates and the number of individual elephants,

 the team estimated that an elephant was killed roughly every five to six years at the site. “A fully grown male straight-tusk elephant would have provided quite a big pile of meat, about four tons, and it seems likely that the hunters would not have gone to all that trouble just to let most of it rot,” Dr. Roebroeks

 said. He and the team contend that the Neanderthals of Neumark-Nord either stayed put for months, as opposed to days, or that groups gathered at intervals to dig traps and feast together, which raises the possibility of a broad social, cultural and genetic exchange.

Straight-tusked elephants went extinct at least 30,000 years ago; many factors were probably to blame, Dr. Roebroeks said, including predation, climate change, reduction in food availability and competition from woolly mammoths moving into their territory. Neanderthals had already disappeared by then, pushed aside as Homo sapiens inherited Earth. As Mr. Cuppy observed, “That kind of progress is called evolution.”