Neanderthals are often portrayed chowing down on mammoth meals and woolly rhino ribs. But an analysis of their leftovers from a coastal cave in Portugal suggests fish and mollusks claimed a special place on their Paleolithic palates.
We all have that image of the primitive Neanderthal that eats lots of meat, said Filipa Rodrigues, an archaeologist at the University of Lisbon and author of a paper published Thursday in Science. Now, we have this new perspective that they explored the marine resources like Homo sapiens did.
Archaeologists have previously found evidence that Neanderthals ate, collected and wore jewelry fashioned from shellfish. But evidence they consumed large amounts of fish has been lacking. Some scientists have argued Neanderthals did not have the skill or wit to catch fish as their Homo sapiens contemporaries did in Africa, and may have lost out on consuming aquatic animals rich in fatty acids that could have aided with brain development.
But deep in Cueva de Figueira Brava, which housed Neanderthals about 100,000 years ago, Dr. Rodrigues and her colleagues have uncovered more than 560 fish bones, as well as remains from clams, mussels, crabs, waterfowl, seabirds, seals and dolphins. The findings suggest Neanderthals cast a wide net to add sea creatures to their dinner menus, and the researchers say it shows the behavior of the archaic species was comparable to modern humans that lived at the time.
In this one tiny window of visibility, they demonstrate that Neanderthals ate quantities of seafood, said Peter Rowley-Conwy, an archaeologist from Durham University, who was not involved in the study.
The find from the Portuguese cave taps into ongoing scientific debates about the cognitive sophistication of Neanderthals, and how different the extinct species really was from our earliest modern human ancestors.
João Zilhão, an archaeologist from the University of Barcelona and lead author of the study, said he hoped his finding would help reshape the popular image of Neanderthals as cold-adapted, mammoth hunting brutes.
The real Neanderthals are like what we’ve been able to show at Figueira, he said. They are no different from people living in the same setting and the same environment 100,000 years ago in South Africa or 7,000 years ago across the river in Portugal.
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