A Study of Fractured Proboscidean Bones in Recent and Fossil Assemblages Gary Haynes 1 & Kathryn Krasinski 2 & Piotr Wojtal 3 Accepted: 23 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Reliable methods are needed to distinguish anthropogenic from non-anthropogenic causes of proboscidean limb bone breakage in fossil assemblages because of theoretical uncertainty about human-proboscidean relationships in the Pleistocene. This paper compares experimentally broken bones of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) and mammoths (Mammuthus spp.) after establishing that limb bone fracture dynamics are the same for those proboscidean taxa. We show that features thought exclusively diagnostic of percussive fracturing of green proboscidean long bones such as notched fracture edges, smooth fracture surfaces, and curvilinear fracture outlines also can be created on non-green bones and on bones affected by non-anthropogenic processes. The information reported here can be applied in analyses or re-analyses of fossil proboscidean bone assemblages and may either support or potentially alter current interpretations of hominin behavior. Keywords Proboscideans . Green-bone fracturing . Fracture dynamics . Experimental archeology . Neotaphonomy Introduction Archeological sites with proboscidean bones and lithic artifacts “occur regularly from the Plio/Pleistocene transition throughout the entire Pleistocene of Africa, Europe, and Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09486-3 * Gary Haynes gahaynes@unr.edu Kathryn Krasinski kkrasinski@adelphi.edu Piotr Wojtal wojtal@isez.pan.krakow.pl 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA 2 Department of Anthropology, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, USA 3 Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków, Poland