Three millennia of lizard and snake consumption by Natufian foragers

Squamate (lizard and snake) exploitation provides a rarely documented window into human dietary flexibility at the end of the Pleistocene. This study analyzes over three millennia of squamate remains from el-Wad Terrace (Israel), revealing that large-bodied snakes and lizards formed a substantial and consistent part of Natufian subsistence. Repeated evidence of butchery on snake vertebrae indicates regular consumption across all occupation phases. Shifts in squamate abundance and bone modification patterns correspond to shifts in site-use intensity and the relative contribution of human and animal predators to archaeofaunal deposition. Species-based habitat weighting indicates a broadly stable Mediterranean maquis environment, where detected environmental shifts would not substantially alter local squamate abundance, demonstrating that variation in squamate use is unlikely to have resulted from environmental forcing. In the regional record, Natufian herpetofaunal assemblages cluster together, demonstrating human foraging choices and contrasting with those of older Paleolithic sites. In the latter, herpetofauna is far less abundant, taxonomically structured by geography, and includes more diverse and smaller-bodied taxa. Striving to understand the socioeconomic circumstances that contributed to relying on squamates for food, we assess their prey ranking by accounting for body size, agility, and the risks associated with handling different taxa. We found that high- and medium-ranked species were consistently targeted despite fluctuations in habitation intensity, suggesting squamate resilience. These results uncover the long-term role of reptiles in emerging sedentary lifeways and possibly early human impact on local reptile communities.