Recently, archaeologists went where no modern cooks have ventured before: They tried to recreate Neanderthal cooking. In a recent paper in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, Mariana Nabais et al. note that Neanderthals in the Eurasian steppe enjoyed a varied diet:

Surveys of their campsites suggest Neanderthals ate nuts, fruits, mushrooms, shellfish, and other food that was easy to gather. They butchered and ate horses, reindeer, bison, and mammoths. In fact, evidence suggests that Neanderthals hunted any animal they could find, even the most dangerous, like cave bears, wolves, and fearsome cave lions.

Tibi Puiu, “Scientists Recreate Neanderthal Cooking Methods, and the Results Are Eye-Opening,” ZME Science, July 24, 2024 The paper is open access.

Nabais’s team decided to focus its cuisine efforts on preparing birds, even though we don’t have direct evidence that Neanderthals ate them. But, as Puiu explains at ZME Science,

In all likelihood, Neanderthals also ate whatever birds they could lay their hands on. However, cooked bird remains and their fragile bones leave few traces. To learn more about how our extinct relatives prepared bird-based meals, researchers in Spain tried cooking like Neanderthals using only tools and methods that would have been available in prehistoric times.

Puiu, “Neanderthal Cooking Methods

Considerable skill was required

The team got five wild birds that had died of natural causes from a conservation area in Portugal and prepared them, using methods that were available to Neanderthals. That is, they defeathered all the birds by hand, then butchered two of them — a carrion crow and a collared dove, while they were raw, using a flint flake. But they roasted the other three birds before cutting them up with the flake, to see if that worked better.

They discovered some things. First, it takes a lot of skill to prepare dead birds for dinner when you don’t have metal utensils:

“Using a flint flake for butchering required significant precision and effort, which we had not fully valued before this experiment,” said Dr. Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

“The flakes were sharper than we initially thought, requiring careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring our own fingers. These hands-on experiments emphasized the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible connection to their daily life and survival strategies.” “

Phys.org” July 24, 2024

Second, they found that roasting the birds over hot coals made them much easier to butcher, using available methods and that it took only about ten minutes to completely roast them — a comparatively quick meal. But direct archaeological evidence of Neanderthal bird consumption might be harder to demonstrate if the Neanderthals used the easier, roast-first method:

The bones from the roasted birds were more brittle: some had shattered and couldn’t be recovered. Nearly all of them had brown or black burns consistent with controlled exposure to heat. Black stains inside some bones suggested that the contents of the inner cavity had also burned. This evidence sheds light not just on how Neanderthal food preparation could have worked, but also how visible that preparation might be in the archaeological record. Although roasting makes it easier to access meat, the increased fragility of the bones means the leftovers might not be found by archaeologists.

Eurekalert, July 24, 2024

We don’t know what Neanderthals did for sure but they probably didn’t needlessly make extra work for themselves.

Should Neanderthals sue for defamation?

A decade ago, I wrote an article about Neanderthal man called “The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents.” My basic contention, there and elsewhere, is that the separateness and intellectual inferiority of Neanderthal man was a constant drumbeat in older literature on the topic, probably due to a felt need to underline the fabled Darwinian Descent of Man.

That Darwinian account of the human race — which has done so much harm — would be much easier to believe in good faith if scientists could point to a clearly inferior and clearly human being.

And there he was, Neanderthal man! — just human enough for the purpose but no longer present as a distinct group — and thus conveniently not able to speak for himself.

That version of the story would appear to be collapsing now. See, for example, Günter Bechly’s Fossil Friday notes on the new evidence for the human nature of Neanderthals: “In my humble opinion, the evidence for symbolic thinking, language, and genetic admixture clearly suggests that Neanderthals belong to our very own species … The latest technical literature shows that such a view is well rooted in up-to-date mainstream science.”

Also, Casey Luskin observed recently that Neanderthals were a lot more human than we realize. It’s not clear why they are even regarded as a “separate human species” — except for the problem that, if we just take them out of the supposed lineup, we have less evidence for the fabled Descent of Man.

And tellingly, it becomes even more obvious that the human mind has no history. Combing the past, we see the human mind where we see it. Whether it’s the 2012 bombshell of Neanderthal art or the vigorous pursuit two million years ago by some group or other of the fabled perfect sphere, we just do not see a Descent of Mind. What we see is an accelerating improvement in technology. Let’s see if that fact becomes more evident with more research.

You may also wish to read: The human mind has no history. There is no good reason to assume that human intelligence evolved from mud to mind via a long slow history. When we look at the human past, we see lights flashing on suddenly. Technology evolves but not the mind as such.