- An international study has just shown that Neanderthals were not only hunters and gatherers, they were also fishermen.
- During excavations in a Portuguese cave that served as shelter for Neanderthals, scientists found traces of molluscs, crustaceans but also marine mammals.
- This discovery suggests that the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals were more important than previously believed.
For the majority of people, the Neanderthal is that distant cousin who, thousands of years ago, spent his time hunting mammoths in the cold northern steppes, dressed in a simple animal skin. It is in any case like that that for decades we represented in the History books this extinct species which lived in Europe, in the Middle East and in Central Asia, until approximately 30,000 years before our era.
You can hardly imagine the Neanderthals feet in the clear Mediterranean water, collecting crustaceans and fishing. However, it is a reality. An international research team involving CNRS laboratories has just published a study in the journal Science that sheds new light on the lifestyle of Neanderthals.
# Press release 🗞️ | An international research team has just shown that the # Neanderthals hunted, fished and collected food resources of marine origin in large quantities.
➡️ https://t.co/5XVjvhy0Rx
📙 https://t.co/rAIhGPWtUJ pic.twitter.com/pxyY9s3vGl
These discoveries come from excavations carried out between 2010 and 2013 in the Figueira Brava cave, in Portugal. This shelter is known to have housed Neanderthals between 106,000 and 86,000 years BC. As with their fellow humans who lived in the land, those who lived there consumed land animals.
Seal and clams on the menu
But, while digging, the researchers discovered dozens of traces of molluscs, crustaceans and even fish. This revealed that, like the Homo Sapiens, the Neanderthals reveled in eating limpets, clams, but also crabs, blue shark, eels, cormorants and even dolphins and gray seals.
To cook all this, they used local wood species, be it olive, vine, fig or even umbrella pine whose charred traces were found. What give a light smokiness to these dishes. The researchers even assume that in a good Mediterranean, these Neanderthals consumed the pine nuts.
Until now, we knew that they were already using shellfish at the same time in the Mediterranean on several sites in Italy. “Recent work has notably proposed that Neanderthals collect these shells in order to use them as tools. However, the consumption of aquatic foodstuffs has not been highlighted on these Italian sites ", indicates Marianne Deschamps, researcher of the laboratory Works of archaeological research on cultures, spaces and societies (Traces, CNRS / University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès / Ministry of Culture) who participated in this discovery.
For her, the results of these excavations completely change the image we can have of this people "adapted to the cold and specialized in hunting large herbivores, still widely used". "During the Neanderthal era, the Earth's climate was almost always colder than today and the north of France or Germany were steppe or tundra regions which corresponded to the extreme north of the zones populated. The absence of human occupation in some of these regions is also documented there during the coldest phases. The vast majority of European populations therefore actually lived in southern Europe, especially in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. The lifestyles of the vast majority of Neanderthal populations therefore had to be closer to that of Figueira Brava, ”she explains.
Their meals were therefore not made entirely of mammoth, rhino, bison and reindeer meat. At the time, they were already followers of a form of Mediterranean diet. A diet rich in Omega 3 and other fatty acids which would promote the development of brain tissue, like human populations called "anatomically modern".
“A very influential model concerning the origins of humanity suggests that the habitual consumption of aquatic resources would have enabled an increase in the cognitive capacities of the African populations of the last interglacial. This increase would explain the early appearance among them of a symbolic material culture. These behaviors reflect a capacity identical to ours for abstract thinking, communication through symbols and, ultimately, language, ”says Marianne Deschamps.
Not so primary beings?
These capacities have enabled them to develop more organized and complex societies, unlike Neanderthals, Denisovians and other non-modern groups. Except that over the past decade, "evidence has accumulated that the Neanderthals also had a symbolic material culture," continues the researcher.
“The results of the Figueira Brava excavation add to this panorama that, if it is true that the daily consumption of marine resources played an important role in the development of the cognitive capacities of our ancestors, then it happened at the scale of humanity as a whole, not just the scale of a small African population which then developed. Consequently, these discoveries make us wonder if the anatomical differences observed between Neanderthals and so-called "anatomically modern" men necessarily correspond to different levels of cognition and intelligence, "she concludes.
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