Neanderthal Crab Roast Leftovers Are Found in a Portuguese Cave

[milestogo]

A number of cities vie for the unofficial title of “seafood capital of the world,” and Lisbon has a good claim. The city, Portugal’s coastal capital, is famous for its salted cod, sardines and stuffed brown crab. A study published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reveals that these brown crabs have been on the menu for a long time. In a cave less than 20 miles from Lisbon, researchers discovered charred remnants of shells and claws: evidence that Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab 90,000 years ago.

The cave site, Gruta da Figueira Brava, was about a mile from the coast when Neanderthals lived there. It contained multiple chambers, including an open “porch” living area, probably large enough to accommodate at least an extended family. Rising sea levels slowly brought the Atlantic to the cave door.

Reaching Gruta da Figueira Brava today involves a climb down a craggy cliff face overlooking the sea. “It was a bit adventurous,” said Mariana Nabais, a postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and an author of the study. “In a way, it’s good that it’s hard to get there, because that’s what allowed it to preserve such incredible, incredible finds.”

During excavations, she and her team brought sediments from the cave back to their field lab on the hilltop so they could be studied, but Dr. Nabais and her colleagues recognized some bits of debris right away. “You can immediately identify them on site as being crab claws, especially in Portugal, because we have a tradition of eating crabs a lot,” she said. “It was a big surprise, especially because when we were digging there, we still didn’t have that idea of Neanderthals actively eating shellfish.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/science/neanderthals-crab-portugal.html


Pieces of crustaceans from Gruta da Figueira Brava including from a barnacle, Perforatus perforatus (A); brown crab (B) with black burns; brown crab showing impact flakes (C); and pincers with longitudinal breaks (D).
Credit...Mariana Nabais/Catherine Dupont/João Zilhão, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 2023

I love it when leftovers make headlines.

[WarGamer]

1. Neanderthals were magnificent.

Today scientists have completely reversed their view of Neanderthals.

It's likely they were highly intelligent and superior in many aspects to H. sapiens.

I frequently wonder what would have happened if Neanderthals had won the evolutionary "war"...

Would they be as violent and destructive as H. sapiens?

https://www.fortinberrymurray.com/todays-research/were-the-neanderthals-smarter-than-we-are

[milestogo]

2. I wonder what side dishes they ate.

[WarGamer]

4. From what I've read...

Meat was the appetizer, main dish, dessert and snack.

Another biological disadvantage compared to the more dietary flexible H. sapiens.

[WarGamer]

3. To continue with my ramblings...

Neanderthals were superior to H. sapiens in several aspects.

They were physically larger, very powerful...they had larger brains. They formed tools, made art and had funeral rituals. Scientists have estimated by the size of the bones and skeletal analysis that they had great strength, we're talking like NFL player strength as average.

They were also more "high maintenance" meaning their bodies developed more slowly and they had higher caloric needs and their needs were a disadvantage compared to H. sapiens. Their bodies may have been more susceptible to disease...

Neanderthals have been described as gentle... quite the opposite of H. sapiens which have proven to be quite violent.

Combine gentleness, intelligence and physicality... what could have been?

[JudyM]

5. Really interesting!

Of course, some Homo sapiens ‘tribes’ are generally gentle, so while aversion to outgroups may be a universal human trait, from everything I’ve read, violence isn’t.

[WarGamer]

6. I don't know...

As long as history has been recorded, it features man clubbing fellow man to death... over food, slaves, land...

Humans started by killing those from "the adjacent valley" and that for many centuries and even today, humans are killing "the other"

I'm a bit of a misanthrope but when you've studied history your whole life, you understand that human history IS the history of barbarity and destruction.

[frogmarch]

7. Some researchers say Neanderthals had high-pitched voices.

Give a listen.

[Lucinda]

8. "I love it when leftovers make headlines."

❤️ ✿❧🌿❧✿ ❤️

[msfiddlestix]

9. omg, I thought for a second this was a metaphor for the Republican party and their cave antics

I'm planning on reading the post it looks quite interesting. I just couldn't help laughing while thinking this was about something else entirely.