Thursday, September 15, 2011

Neanderthals shellfishing 150,000 years ago

The news is out: the site of Bajondillo, in southern Spain, has yielded clear evidence of Neanderthals collecting and eating shellfish as far back as 150,000 years BP, and pretty much continuously, though at different intensities, after that. One obvious thing to point out: this is almost as old as the earliest evidence of modern humans collecting shellfish (Marean et al. 2007), and the way Neanderthals did it seems to have been constrained by very similar considerations, namely how far the beach was from a given site in the past. The paper itself (Cortés-Sánchez et al. 2011) is published in PLoS ONE, which means that it's freely accessible.

Today's kind of a hectic day (giving a free, non-technical talk at the Colorado Scientific Society tonight, levaing for a trip tomorrow), but this paper is a real game changer on several levels, so check back soon, cause I'll have much, much more to say about this. Exciting times for Neanderthal Studies, I'll tell you that much!

References


Cortés-Sánchez M, Morales-Muñiz A, Simón-Vallejo MD, Lozano-Francisco MC, Vera-Peláez JL, et al. 2011 Earliest Known Use of Marine Resources by Neanderthals. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24026. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024026

Marean CW, Bar-Matthews M, Bernatchez J, Fisher E, Golberg P, et al. (2007) Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Nature 409: 905–908.

3 comments:

terryt said...

"One obvious thing to point out: this is almost as old as the earliest evidence of modern humans collecting shellfish (Marean et al. 2007), and the way Neanderthals did it seems to have been constrained by very similar considerations, namely how far the beach was from a given site in the past".

Do you mean to say they didn't need boats? Maju will be surprised.

CamArchGrad said...

Hawks has a very sardonic comment on this.

http://www.johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/diet/cortes-sanchez-2011-bajondillo.html

Apparently every generation has to rediscover shellfish exploitation outside the Upper Paleolithic.

Millán Mozota said...

[shrug] i'll say this tima Hawks should read the paper more carefully.
Besides the (may be too journalistic) tittle, along the text the authors specifically say: "those data reinforce our suspicion that the coastal adaptation, however important might have been at the local level of specific populations , maybe yet another overrated phenomenon in the list of behaviors long considered to represent modernity".
And, while i dont like either those "chases for the oldest fetish", it is strictly true that the shellfish from Bajondillo makes the older neandertal iteration of that phenomena (at least, from places excavated with scientific & modern techniques, and in a properly dated context)