Several cities vie for the unofficial title of “seafood capital of the world” and Lisbon has a good claim. The city, Portugal’s coastal capital, is famous for its salted cod, sardines and stuffed brown crab. A study published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archeology revealed that these brown crabs have been on the menu for a long time. In a cave less than 20 miles from Lisbon, researchers have discovered charred shells and claws: evidence that Neanderthals cooked and ate crabs 90,000 years ago.
The cave site, Gruta da Figueira Brava, was about a mile from the coast when Neanderthals lived there. It contains many rooms, including an open “patio” living area, perhaps large enough to accommodate at least one extended family. Rising sea levels slowly bring the Atlantic Ocean to the mouth of the cave.
To get to today’s Gruta da Figueira Brava, you have to climb down a craggy cliff overlooking the sea. “It was a bit of a risk,” said Mariana Nabais, a postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution and an author of the study. “In a way, it’s good that it’s so hard to get there, because that’s what allows it to preserve such amazing, amazing finds.”
During the excavation, she and her team brought sediment from the cave back to their field lab at the top of the hill so it could be studied, but Dr. Nabais and her colleagues noticed a instant debris count.
“You can immediately identify them as crab claws, especially in Portugal, because we have a tradition of eating crabs a lot,” she says. “It was a big surprise, especially when we dig there, we still didn’t know that Neanderthals actively ate shellfish.”
In the end, the researchers found 635 pieces of crab shells, representing at least 33 individuals, along with remains of oysters and sea urchins. Much of the crab was the same species of brown crab served with eggs and mustard in present-day Lisbon. Based on the size of the claws, most specimens were larger than average, each capable of about 7 ounces of meat.
The shells show no signs of being eaten by other animals, such as tooth marks or broken patterns caused by birds falling on rocks. Instead, some of the pods were charred and blackened: a sign that they were roasted.
Dr. Nabais said that this discovery, following a 2020 study in Science detailing a variety of animal remains found in the cave, including birds and turtles, further rejects the traditional view of Neanderthals, humanity’s closest relatives, as dummies compared to modern people.
“We always considered Neanderthals like these brute cousins,” she said. One argument against Neanderthal intelligence is the idea that they were only capable of scavenging or hunting large prey. like an elephantwhile smarter people adopted a richer diet that included fish rich in fatty acids that promote brain development.
“What we’re seeing today, more and more, especially in the Mediterranean region, is that the Neanderthals that lived here were actually eating small prey,” said Dr Nabais. “Now, we know that they’re also eating shellfish, which is something people think they won’t be able to do because they’re a bit stupid.”
Fred H. Smith, professor emeritus of anthropology and biological sciences at Illinois State University who was not involved in the study, praised the researchers’ thoroughness and agreed with their conclusions. about the flexibility and intelligence of the Neanderthals.
“Twenty, thirty years ago, it was essentially assumed that the Neanderthals were not able, or at least not able to make use of, these resources,” he said. “So we’ve come a long way.”
