Sun, Oct-30-11, 03:42
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Fish and birds gave Neanderthals fine dining
Quote:
From The New Scientist
29 October, 2011
Fish and birds gave Neanderthals fine dining
THEY may have been partial to a chunky slab of meat, but very early on Neanderthals also had a taste for fine dining treats like fish and small birds. The findings show that our long-lost cousins were cognitively advanced from the get-go, long before modern humans appeared in Europe.
Discoveries of jewellery and make-up at 50,000-year-old sites show that around the time they went extinct Neanderthals had a taste for the finer things in life. Now that evidence has been pushed back to their first appearance in Europe.
Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Marie-Hélène Moncel of France's Natural History Museum in Paris analysed residues on stone tools found at Payre in southern France, which was occupied by Neanderthals between 125,000 and 250,000 years ago. They found traces of fish scales, feathers, wood, hide and starch, indicating that their owners were fishing, hunting small birds, processing wood and hides, and eating vegetables (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023768). That goes against the view, still held by some, that Neanderthals hunted large game but were not capable of subtler tasks like spearing fish and catching birds.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article...ine-dining.html
Quote:
Neanderthal Use of Fish, Mammals, Birds, Starchy Plants and Wood 125-250,000 Years Ago
Abstract
Neanderthals are most often portrayed as big game hunters who derived the vast majority of their diet from large terrestrial herbivores while birds, fish and plants are seen as relatively unimportant or beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals. Although evidence for exploitation of other resources (small mammals, birds, fish, shellfish, and plants) has been found at certain Neanderthal sites, these are typically dismissed as unusual exceptions. The general view suggests that Neanderthal diet may broaden with time, but that this only occurs sometime after 50,000 years ago. We present evidence, in the form of lithic residue and use-wear analyses, for an example of a broad-based subsistence for Neanderthals at the site of Payre, Ardèche, France (beginning of MIS 5/end of MIS 6 to beginning of MIS 7/end of MIS 8; approximately 125–250,000 years ago). In addition to large terrestrial herbivores, Neanderthals at Payre also exploited starchy plants, birds, and fish. These results demonstrate a varied subsistence already in place with early Neanderthals and suggest that our ideas of Neanderthal subsistence are biased by our dependence on the zooarchaeological record and a deep-seated intellectual emphasis on big game hunting.
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http://www.plosone.org/article/info...al.pone.0023768 |
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