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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The discovery shows that large-scale, planned hunting architecture, previously known only from the deserts of the Near East and Africa, also existed in Europe. It challenges long-held assumptions about the social and technological capacities of Europe’s prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The Karst traps link the Adriatic region to global traditions of large hunting megastructures (like desert kites), suggesting that complex hunting strategies were a shared human innovation, not isolated to any single region.
Perspectives
These massive stone traps are more than ancient hunting devices, they are the early infrastructure of social life in Europe. Building and using them required coordinated labor and collective effort, while the resulting hunts likely fed feasts and festivals that brought communities together. They show that prehistoric Europeans created large-scale social gatherings around cooperation and shared abundance. As Graeber and Wengrow have argued (in "The Dawn of Everything"), early humans were not simply bound by survival; they were experimenting with ways of living together, organizing work and celebration on their own terms. These vast hunting structures embody that creativity. They embody collective labor, shared abundance, and moments of intense social presence, where hunting merged with gathering, exchange, and celebration.
Dimitrij Mlekuz Vrhovnik
University of Ljubljana
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Prehistoric hunting megastructures in the Adriatic hinterland, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2511908122.
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