Neanderthals were eating brain-expanding shellfish 150,000 years ago
Shellfish has a surprisingly important place in our evolutionary story. One theory says shellfish fueled the expansion of our brains, while another gives it credit for saving our species. Turns out Neanderthals liked shellfish just as much as we did.
Shellfish has a surprisingly important place in our evolutionary story. One theory says shellfish fueled the expansion of our brains, while another gives it credit for saving our species. Turns out Neanderthals liked shellfish just as much as we did.Either way, shellfish have become intimately associated with what it means to be human, and it's even been argued that they became a species-saving food source about 160,000 years ago, when radical climate change reduced the entire human population to a few thousand people eking out an existence on the coast of South Africa. Shellfish is one of the few foodstuffs that actually thrive when temperatures go down.
Well, it now looks like we'll have to surrender "eating shellfish" as a uniquely human trait, along with pretty much everything we come up with as a supposedly uniquely human trait. Archaeologists have found clear evidence of Neanderthals eating shellfish in Spain's Bajondillo Cave, one of the preeminent sites for Neanderthal research. While study stone tool use, the archaeologists discovered the remains of lots of charred shellfish, primarily mussels. Whatever high level brainpower humans needed to find shellfish, Neanderthals must have had as well.
These ancient meals have been radiocarbon dated to 150,000 years ago, placing them right around the same time that the world's "last" humans were eating shellfish on the South African coast 164,000 years ago. Researcher Francisco Jimenez Espejo of the Spanish National Research Council observes:
"Many researchers argue that eating shellfish is one of the behaviours that define modern humans and to a certain extent an adaptive advantage that allowed homo sapiens to expand. But this investigation shows that at the same time as homo sapiens in southern Africa, homo neanderthalensis in the southern Iberian peninsula used the same resources."Shellfish might quite literally be brain food. They might very well have saved our species from total extinction. But it looks like this is one buffet we're going to have to share with our Neanderthal cousins. And just when it looked like we could have one behavior to ourselves - I better not hear about any ancient Neanderthal blogging, is all I'm saying.
Via PLoS ONE. Image by FotoosVanRobin on Flickr.
Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of io9
Eat your Omega 3 Fatty Acids or you could find yourself putting on a cape one day. If your brain shrank (a lot).
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