Proof That Neanderthals Ate Crabs is Another ‘Nail in the Coffin’ for Cave Dweller Stereotype
hubie writes:
In a cave just south of Lisbon, archeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there - especially about their meals. A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs.
[...] The evidence indicated to Nabais and her colleagues that Neanderthals weren't just harvesting the crabs, they were roasting them. The black burns on the shells, compared to studies of other mollusks heated at specific temperatures, showed that the crabs were heated at about 300-500 degrees Celsius, typical for cooking.
"Our results add an extra nail to the coffin of the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were primitive cave dwellers who could barely scrape a living off scavenged big-game carcasses," said Nabais. "Together with the associated evidence for the large-scale consumption of limpets, mussels, clams, and a range of fish, our data falsify the notion that marine foods played a major role in the emergence of putatively superior cognitive abilities among early modern human populations of sub-Saharan Africa."
[...] "The notion of the Neanderthals as top-level carnivores living off large herbivores of the steppe-tundra is extremely biased," said Nabais. "Such views may well apply to some extent to the Neanderthal populations of Ice Age Europe's periglacial belt, but not to those living in the southern peninsulas - and these southern peninsulas are where most of the continent's humans lived all through the Paleolithic, before, during and after the Neanderthals."
Journal Reference:
Mariana Nabais, Catherine Dupont, and Joao Zilhao, The exploitation of crabs by Last Interglacial Iberian Neanderthals: The evidence from Gruta da Figueira Brava (Portugal) [open], Front. Environ. Archaeol., 07 February 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2023.1097815
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