This is why Neanderthals are considered the world’s first ‘fine diners’

By Mark Waghorn via SWNS

Neanderthals were the world's first "fine diners" - harvesting and roasting crabs, according to new research.

It is another "nail in the coffin" for their stereotypical image as knuckle-dragging cavemen, say scientists.

Today, seafood is served as a delicacy at the world's top restaurants.

But our primitive cousins were cooking and eating white and brown meat - some 90,000 years ago.

The prehistoric dinner menu was unearthed in a cave just south of Lisbon.

A treasure trove of evidence included stone tools, charcoal - and abundant shells and bones.

The site named Gruta de Figueira Brava sheds fresh light on the community that lived there - especially what they ate.

Lead author Dr. Mariana Nabais, of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, said: "At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs.

"They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm (six and a quarter inches).

"The animals were brought whole to the cave where they were roasted on coals and then eaten."

A wide variety of shellfish was found in the archaeological remains the Spanish team analyzed.

But they were overwhelmingly represented by brown crabs - prized by people around the world for their soft, delicate and sweet taste.

The meat has a distinctive, rich flavor - suggesting Neanderthals appreciated good food.

Size was estimated by calculating the carapace relative to the pincers - which preserve better than other parts.

The researchers assessed breakage on the shells and claws, looked for butchery or percussion marks and determined whether the crabs had been exposed to high heat.

Most were large adults which would yield about 7oz (200g) of meat. Patterns of damage ruled out the involvement of other predators.

There were no carnivore or rodent bites - or pecks from attacks by birds.

Crabs are evasive. The Neanderthals would have caught them from low tide pools in the summer.

Stone tools, hominin-made features like hearths, burns found on some of the crab shells and fractures that looked like they'd been made intentionally suggest they'd been broken open for access to the meat.

Larger individuals were picked in the main because they'd have fed more mouths.

The black burns on the shells, compared to studies of other molluscs heated at specific temperatures, showed the crabs were heated at about 300-500 degrees Celsius - typical for roasting.

Dr. Nabais said: "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.

"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."

It is impossible to know why Neanderthals chose to harvest crabs or whether they attached any significance to consuming them.

But they would have offered meaningful nutritional benefits.

Dr. Nabais said: "The notion of the Neanderthals as top-level carnivores living off large herbivores of the steppe-tundra is extremely biased.

"Such views may well apply to some extent to the Neanderthal populations of Ice Age Europe's peri-glacial belt, but not to those living in the southern peninsulas - and these southern peninsulas are where most of the continent's humans lived all through the Palaeolithic, before, during and after the Neanderthals."

Neanderthals are now known to have been complex and empathetic individuals - a far cry from their original depiction as brutes.

They created symbolic art, produced geometric structures and controlled fire to use on tools and food.

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.