TARRAGONA, SPAIN—According to a statement released by Frontiers, evidence that Neanderthals cooked and ate brown crabs some 90,000 years ago has been uncovered in Portugal’s Gruta de Figueira Brava by a team of researchers led by Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA). No signs of consumption of the crabs by rodents or birds were found, and about eight percent of the shells have burn marks, Nabais explained. Neanderthals are thought to have caught the crabs in low-tide pools on the nearby rocky coastline, and then carried them back to the cave, where they roasted them on coals. The remains of other shellfish were unearthed in the cave, Nabais added, but most of the debris came from brown crabs measuring about six inches across. A crab of this size would have yielded about seven ounces of meat, she concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. To read about recent DNA sequencing of the first known family of Neanderthals, go to "Around the World: Russia."
