At Hora 1, a granite peak that rises like a tooth from the woodlands of northern Malawi, archaeologists identified almost 13,000 fragments from meals eaten over 21,000 years. The tiny remains offer a rare way to ask how people lived together when there were no roads and communities travelled on foot: did they defend food-rich places, or share space with other groups?
Ancient people left few direct records of their social lives. But the food they gathered can offer clues. If useful resources are packed into predictable places, a group may be able to guard them. If food is scattered and hard to predict, defending a territory may cost more than it is worth. Present-day foraging communities show that people can make different choices depending on the risks and resources around them.
To investigate those choices in the past, researchers studied animal bones from Hora 1, a large rock shelter in northern Malawi. The site preserves traces of human activity including hearths, stone tools, burials and red paintings on its walls. In layers of earth dug during several visits, the team found hundreds of thousands of bones. They were broken, cooked, cut, chewed and discarded. Almost 13,000 fragments could be identified, spanning the last 21,000 years of human occupation.
Most of the identified bones came from small animals, including tiny antelopes, hares and monkeys. Large animals such as zebras, wildebeest and rhinoceroses seem to have been uncommon in the valley. The fragments included bones from limbs, torsos and heads. That spread suggests hunters brought whole animals back to the shelter, rather than carrying home only the choicest parts of large prey. The researchers also compared the chemistry of local rocks with traces in animal teeth. The match supports the idea that the animals came from nearby.
Together, these clues point to people hunting close to home over the thousands of years recorded at Hora 1. The bones were heavily broken, averaging about the size of a little finger. Researchers then turned to some of the smallest, least nutritious bones, but the available report does not give the results of that analysis.
The study, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology in 2025, uses food remains to explore ancient cultural boundaries. Its authors say the findings challenge the idea that coastal environments were mainly responsible for boundary formation. Hora 1 is far inland, showing why researchers need to look beyond coasts when asking how food and social relationships shaped one another.
The bones cannot tell us exactly what happened when strangers met, or whether any particular encounter ended in sharing or conflict. But they preserve evidence of everyday choices: what people hunted, how far they carried it and what they brought back. As archaeologists study more sites and compare their food remains, they can build a fuller picture of how communities adapted to changing resources—and how those changes shaped the lines between groups.