Neanderthals feasted on seafood and nuts according to fossil remains

By Alison George

Sarah09/Stockimo /Alamy

Neanderthals dined on a menu of surf and turf with a sprinkling of pine nuts, an excavation of a coastal position in Portugal unearths.

Right here’s the first firm evidence that our extinct cousins relied on meals from the ocean, and their versatile weight loss map is but extra proof that they behaved in remarkably identical systems to in style humans.

The fresh dietary diagnosis comes from a position occupied by Neanderthals between 106,000 and 86,000 years ago in Figueira Brava, south of Lisbon. A painstaking excavation of fossil meals remains, led by João Zilhão at the College of Barcelona, Spain, confirmed that the Neanderthals that lived there consumed a gigantic range of foods, dominated by seafood. “It’s a blended weight loss map,” says Zilhão.

They were fisher-hunter-gatherers, collecting big amounts limpets, mussels and clams, as well to brown and spider crabs in particular, he says. “Crabs were the finest marine handy resource they exploited.”

Fossil remains from the cave confirmed that fish, seal, dolphin, seabirds and land animals equivalent to deer, horse, and wild goat were moreover on the menu. By distinction, Neanderthals dwelling inland mainly hunted land animals equivalent to mountainous, bison and woolly rhino.

The crew moreover found evidence of a thriving economic system per pine bushes. “They outmoded the wood for fuel and picked up the pine cones, stored them, then consumed them as wanted by roasting the cones and cracking the nuts to relish the kernel,” says Zilhão.

Standard human weight loss map

Finding out extra about marine-basically based meals of the Iberian Neanderthals is overturning our idea of how the fresh human species, Homo sapiens, developed.

A weight loss map correctly off in seafood is believed to had been well-known for the come of fresh human cognition. Proof for this idea comes from the caves at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, which reveals that early fresh humans ate marine foods as a long way support as 160,000 years ago.

The brain-boosting fatty acids contained in seafoods were conception to have led to a flourishing of cultural and technological improvements, such because the creation of shell bead embellishes and graphic drawings. Within the waste, these skills enabled the growth of in style humans out of Africa, and the demise of the Neanderthal and Denisovan populations dwelling in Eurasia – or so the hypothesis goes.

The seafood-eating habits of Neanderthals hadn’t been noticed till now, on legend of many of the coastal areas that existed at that time have disappeared. The Figueira Brava inform of Portugal is one in every of the few locations in Europe where such sites would possibly possibly per chance also be found, on legend of referring to all are now underwater due to sea stage upward push, or were destroyed by glaciation. “There is not very any likelihood of discovering them,” says Zilhão.

Journal reference: science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz7943

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