Home sweet home: Two of the caves in Gibraltar where Neanderthals lived 30,000 years ago.
Credit: Clive Finlayson, Gibraltar Museum.
SYDNEY: Animal remains from caves in Gibraltar show for the first time that Neanderthals regularly hunted and fished seafood from mussels and fish to seals and dolphins.
"Up to now we have only had clear evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, exploited marine resources," said Chris Stringer a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, England. "Now we know that Neanderthals did the same, which provides further evidence of organised foraging and complex behaviour in these close relatives of ours."
Stringer led an international team of researchers who report their research today in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Butchered bones
The researchers made the discovery by excavating 30,000-year-old fossil material from two coastal caves in Gibraltar, on the southern tip of Span.
Though the caves have not yet yielded actual hominid bones, they have plenty of other evidence that Neanderthals lived there, including the remains of fires for cooking, and numerous stone tools crafted in a style typical of Neanderthals from across Europe.
Alongside the butchered bones of land mammals including wild boar, bear, ibex, red deer and rabbit in the caves the experts also found the bones of young monk seals and bottlenose dolphins.
"The seal bones we found have clear cut marks and peeling, from Neanderthals bending and ripping them from the body to remove meat and marrow," said Stringer, while "the mussel shells had been warmed on a fire to open them."
A recent study of the isotope signatures of Neanderthal bones suggested that these people were much more heavily dependent on red meat than our own ancestors, he said.
Since there is recurrent evidence from several excavated levels over time in both the Gibraltar caves, the researchers believe that eating seafood was not a rare behaviour for Neanderthals at this time. "We have found evidence that they knew the geographic distribution and behaviour of their prey, suggesting they were hunting on a seasonal basis," said Stringer.
Not too surprising
Peter Brown, a palaeoanthropologist of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, said it's great to have more evidence of the diversity of behaviours in human relatives, but that he was "not all that surprised that Neanderthals were smart enough to use adjacent marine resources at Gibraltar."
Brown argued that for both of the marine mammals found in the caves, the numbers are very small, "suggesting a rare opportunity, perhaps scavenging, rather than the regular targeting of species." Young monk seals would have been easy to surprise on the beach, he said, while the dolphins eaten may have been stranded.
Brown noted that Australian Aborigines used to hunt elephant seal on the west coast of Tasmania, which he said is "an order of magnitude more difficult than monk seal." Though these people were our own species, the technology they used was not too different to that used by Neanderthals, he added.
