Subsistence pressure can be identified with a variety of archaeological tests, including a reduction in the size of animals, an increase in younger animals being hunted, an increase in the number of different species being hunted (especially smaller and faster ones), and an increase in the processing of animal bones, in order to extract more resources from them. If al-Khayran was experiencing a similar amount of subsistence stress as contemporary sites, then there might be evidence of some or all of these patterns. I specifically looked at whether or not the individuals at al-Khayran were breaking the bones in order to extract marrow or render bone-grease from them.
The bones excavated from the site were incredibly fractured from previous exposure and their recovery during excavations, but some of these fractures could have been due to intensive resource extraction practices. It is possible to tell if fractures are perimortem (created near the time of death of an animal, as would be expected if the inhabitants of al-Khayran were processing the bones) or postmortem (occurring well after death, as would be expected if they were not created to extract resources), based on their shape. I examined the shape of the bone breaks at al-Khayran and, ultimately, only two of the 188 examined fractures potentially exhibited marrow extraction or bone-grease rendering traits. Additionally, with refitting studies of these bones, both of these fractures were determined to be postmortem, based on their proximity to other postmortem fractures. These results could not disprove my hypothesis that the inhabitants of al-Khayran were not experiencing significant food stress. They leave open the possibility that there was greater variability in subsistence pressure during the PPNB than is typically discussed in the literature.