The unsustainable harvesting of wild animals has an ancient history.

About 5,000 years ago in the Middle East, hunters drove a species of gazelle to the edge of extinction by funneling entire herds into carefully constructed stone corrals, where the animals were easy prey.

That’s the theory of Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Melinda Zeder and two of her colleagues, who report stunning evidence of such a mass kill in modern-day Syria.

“It must have been one heck of a barbecue,” Zeder said. “The scale of it is really quite staggering.”

The people living in the Middle East 5,000 years ago subsisted on goats and sheep while developing early agriculture.

But every spring, herds of Persian gazelle thundered from breeding grounds in the south, near the Arabian peninsula, to the lush green steppe in the north, where the animals gave birth. In August, the herds roared back south.

The migrations presented two annual opportunities for the crafty ancients. So they augmented their spears, bows and arrows with new hunting technology: stone corrals that flared out into two long, low walls, which acted as funnels.

Hundreds of these structures — called kites, for their shape as seen from the air — dot the entire Levant, from Arabia up through northern Syria.

Zeder said the kites invariably appear in low spots or other areas ideal for channeling herds of animals.

For decades, archaeologists debated the kites’ function. The discovery of ancient rock art near some of the kites provided a firm clue. The paintings show what look like human figures driving horned animals into circular pens.

But until now, no hard evidence of a mass kill of the gazelles had surfaced.

Zeder said she and her colleagues have found “the smoking arrowhead” — a pile of 3,000 gazelle toe bones found in a thin layer just a few miles from still-standing kites.

Carbon dating pegged the bone pile at 5,100 to 5,500 years old. “It was a whole herd,” said Zeder, whose findings were published Monday in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academies.