Neanderthals harvested shellfish to eat at Gruta da Figueira Brava (Portugal)

A new study led by Dr Mariana Nabais, current MSCA COFUND fellow at IPHES-CERCA, proofs that Neanderthals ate shellfish at Gruta da Figueira Brava (Portugal).

“At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs,” said Dr Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), lead author of the study, published in?Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. “They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm. The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and then eaten.”

Large brown crab adults

A wide variety of shellfish remains were found in the archeological remains Nabais and her colleagues studied, but the shellfish in the undisturbed Paleolithic deposits are overwhelmingly represented by brown crabs. Their size was estimated by calculating the size of the carapace relative to the crabs’ pincers, which preserve better than other parts of the crab, so are more likely to survive to be found by scientists. Nabais and her colleagues found that the crabs were mostly large adults which would yield about 200g of meat.

Cooked

The archeologists also assessed the breakage on the shells, looked for butchery or percussion marks, and determined whether the crabs had been exposed to high heat. By studying the patterns of damage on the shells and claws, they ruled out the involvement of other predators: there were no carnivore or rodent marks, and the patterns of breakage didn’t reflect predation by birds.

Instead, they found surface modifications which could be consistent with stone tools and hominin-made features for accessing the meat. Similarly, burns on approximately 8% of the crab shells, suggested these hominins were not just harvesting the crabs, but also roasting them. The black burns on the shells, compared to studies of other mollusks heated at specific temperatures, showed that the crabs were heated at about 300-500 degrees Celsius, typical for cooking.

On Neanderthals

“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,” said Nabais. “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.”

Link to the scientific paper: Nabais, M, Dupont, C., Jo?o Zilh?o. 2023. The exploitation of crabs by Last Interglacial Iberian Neanderthals: the evidence from Gruta da Figueira Brava (Portugal).?Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. doi: 10.3389/fearc.2023.1097815