While once thought to be lumbering, slow-witted brutes, evidence has mounted over the past decade or so that Neanderthals had a rich, sophisticated culture – they were capable hunters and toolmakers, created art and ate a varied diet consisting of cooked food.
Now, researchers from Spain’s Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) have found further evidence of our closest relatives’ cooking skills and discerning palates – they have unearthed evidence in a cave south of Lisbon that Neanderthals were capturing, cooking and eating brown crabs.
Named Gruta de Figueira Brava, the cave contains the charred shells of brown crabs that date back 90,000 years.
“At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs,” said lead researcher Dr Mariana Nabais of IPHES-CERCA.
“They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm. The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and then eaten.”
Upon examining the leftover shells and claws, the researchers estimated that the crabs were mostly large adults that contained around 200g of meat. The lack of tell-tale scratches or marks on the shells rules out the possibility that they were eaten by rodents or birds and so were likely harvested by the Neanderthals from low tide pools in the summer, they say.
Also, black burns on the shells indicate that they were heated up to somewhere between 300 and 500°C, a common, if slightly high, temperature for cooking.
The finding also casts doubt on the theory that the consumption of seafood helped early humans' brains to develop more quickly than Neanderthals'.
“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.”
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