The menu didn’t just feature large game. But also ‘poultry’, or rather small wild birds, slaughtered and then roasted over hot coals. At the stove: Neanderthal chefs. A team of scientists has tried to steal their secrets in the kitchen, replicating ancient methods of slaughtering and cooking. The goal: to learn more about the diets of our hominid ancestors. It’s difficult to know what they ate. Food preparation, especially when it comes to smaller foods, can leave few archaeological traces. But understanding Neanderthal meals is considered by experts to be essential for understanding an incredibly adaptable population that thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in extremely varied environments. To find out what food preparation might have looked like in the archaeological record, scientists put on aprons and tried to cook like Neanderthals.
“Using a flint flake for butchering required considerable precision and effort, which we had not fully appreciated before this experiment,” explains Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the paper published in ‘Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology’. The paper illustrates the results of a pilot study conducted on prehistoric tables. What ended up on the plate at home in Neanderthals? How did they prepare the food to serve it? To find out, the scientists actually carried out field experiments. “The flakes were sharper than we initially thought and required careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring the fingers,” notes Nabais. These tests “highlighted the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible link to their daily lives and survival strategies.”
You are what you eat, goes a maxim that was also true for humans in the distant past. What items on their menu? Although Neanderthals practiced big game hunting, less is known about the birds that some of them hunted. Recent discoveries and new techniques allow us to delve deeper. By testing food preparation methods that Neanderthals might have used, to see what traces they might have left on bird bones, and how those traces compare to damage caused by natural processes or the actions of other animals, scientists have created an experimental database that can be compared to real archaeological sites. They collected five wild birds that died of natural causes at the Wildlife Ecology, Rehabilitation and Surveillance Centre (Cervas) in Gouveia, Portugal: two carrion crows, two collared doves, and a wood pigeon, similar to the species Neanderthals ate, and selected cooking methods using archaeological evidence and ethnographic data.
All the birds were plucked by hand. A carrion crow and a collared dove were then butchered raw, using a flint chip. The remaining three were roasted over hot coals until cooked, then butchered, which the scientists found much easier than butchering the birds raw. “Roasting the birds over coals required maintaining a constant temperature and carefully monitoring the cooking time to avoid overcooking the meat,” Nabais says. “Perhaps because we plucked the birds before cooking them, the roasting process was much quicker than we had anticipated. We spent more time preparing the coals than actually cooking them, which took less than 10 minutes.” A ‘fast’ cuisine, in short, for active people who are always on the move.
The scientists cleaned and dried the bones, then examined them under a microscope for cuts, breaks, and burns. They also examined the flint flake they had used for signs of wear. Although they had used their hands to do most of the butchering, the raw birds required considerable use of the flint flake, which now had small crescent-shaped scars on its edge. While cuts used to remove flesh from the raw birds left no marks on the bones, cuts aimed at tendons left marks similar to those on birds found at archaeological sites. The bones of the roasted birds were more fragile: some had shattered and could not be recovered. Nearly all had brown or black burn marks consistent with controlled exposure to heat. Black spots on the inside of some bones suggested that the contents of the internal cavity had also been burned.
This evidence, experts explain, sheds light not only on how Neanderthal food preparation might have worked, but also on how visible such preparation might be in the archaeological record. Although roasting makes meat easier to access, the increased fragility of bones means that ‘meal leftovers’ might not be found by archaeologists. Scientists say the research should be expanded to gain a more complete understanding of Neanderthal diets. Future studies should include more small prey species, as well as processing for non-food products (claws, feathers). “The sample size is relatively small, consisting of only 5 bird specimens, which may not fully represent the diversity of bird species that Neanderthals may have used,” Nabais points out. “Secondly, the experimental conditions, although carefully controlled, cannot fully replicate the exact environmental and cultural contexts of Neanderthal life.” There is still work to be done, in conclusion, to decipher the recipe book of prehistory.
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