Didn't say whether they had mango salsa or not.......
Posted on 09/15/2011 7:42:53 AM PDT by Red Badger
Neanderthal cavemen supped on shellfish on the Costa del Sol 150,000 years ago, punching a hole in the theory that modern humans alone ate brain-boosting seafood so long ago, a new study shows.
The discovery in a cave near Torremolinos in southern Spain was about 100,000 years older than the previous earliest evidence of Neanderthals consuming seafood, scientists said.
Researchers unearthed the evidence when examining stone tools and the remains of shells in the Bajondillo Cave, they said in a study published online in the Public Library of Science.
There, they discovered many charred shellfish -- mostly mussel shells -- left by Neanderthals. They were able to date the shells by radiocarbon testing to about 150,000 years ago.
That is "almost contemporaneous" to the earliest evidence of modern humans eating shellfish at Pinnacle Point in South Africa 164,000 years ago, said the study led by the University of Seville's Miguel Cortes Sanchez.
"This discovery makes the Bajondillo Cave the oldest record of this activity among Neanderthals, as the earliest evidence until now did not go back further than 50,000 years," said Francisco Jimenez Espejo, researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which was part of the study.
"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," Espejo said.
"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."
The study was released Wednesday and is available online at: http://www.plosone … #authcontrib
Didn't say whether they had mango salsa or not.......
GGG Ping!...........
Duh.
Hunter gatherers would have eaten anything that didn’t eat them first. It don’t get much easier than shellfish.
And Neanderthals still do. I was there a number of years back and the Spaniards still ate them.
Consumer Advisory Warning: eating raw or undercooked beef, eggs, poultry, pork, or shellfish may increase your risk for foodbourne illness
Everybody SING now!
"Welllllll....
the fossils date the rocks
and the rocks date the fossils
and the fossils date the rocks, again!"
To tell the truth, most scientists working on this type of cra* are nothing but scam artists looking for grant money. They can take all their degrees and put it in a little “cave”.
So it was a red tide that contaminated the shell fish and wiped out the Neanderthals. The red tide was obviously from human pollution so there you go.
What is so surprising about this? Why would anyone suppose that Neanderthals would not eat shellfish? Hunting and gathering people will eat just about anything they can find, and mussels are very tasty, and full of good nutrients. They are also easy to prepare.
Directions for preparing mussels (from an old Neanderthal recipe):
1. Find mussels, Bring them back to cave or hut.
2. Have wife built fire.
3. Throw mussels around edges of fire.
4. When mussel shells open up, mussels are cooked — enough. Retrieve them, and when they are cool enough, eat them.
But they didn’t know about months with an ‘R’ in them because months hadn’t been invented yet!...............
Boy, those eyes are piercingly evil-looking.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0024026#authcontrib
They also used Uranium and Thorium dating.......
And Speleothem Dating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speleothem
What is ‘fire’?.................
I guess this part is wrong then.
clam bake!
clam bake!
They must have really like them to walk thousands of miles to get them.
Partially. Journalists don’t take science classes..........
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