Far from popular depictions, ancient humans did not just feast on simplistic meat roasted over open fires. Burnt food remnants from 70,000 years ago at the Shanidar Cave site, a famous Neanderthal dwelling in the Zagros mountains in northern Iraq, suggest otherwise — that Neanderthals had complex foods in their diets, that included legumes, lentils, wild mustard, nuts, peas and even pounded pulses.
The Shanidar Cave had been home to groups of Neanderthals, a species of humans that disappeared about 40,000 years ago. The cave also saw inhabitation by homo sapiens around 40,000 years ago. Food remnants from 70,000 years ago now suggest that Stone Age humans had complex cooking behaviour far earlier than many scientists had previously imagined.
“Our findings are the first real indication of complex cooking – and thus of food culture – among Neanderthals,” said Chris Hunt, a professor of cultural paleoecology at Liverpool John Moores University, and the leader of the excavation.
The researchers found that the Neanderthals were using ingredients like wild nuts, peas, vetch, which is a kind of legume, different grasses, pulses like beans or lentils, and wild mustard. They discovered that pounded pulses were the most common ingredients.
“Microscopic examination of the charred food remains reveals the use of pounded pulses as a common ingredient in cooked plant foods,” the researchers noted in the paper published in the journal Antiquity.
Scientists have previously found similar food remains from other sites but they were from only 12,000 years ago, a large gap from the Shanidar Cave find. This leads them to believe that there was some sort of shared culinary tradition.
Scientists had previously thought that complex cooking techniques had only emerged among humans after or during the Neolithic transition – when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer society to an agriculture-based one – around 6,000-10,000 years ago. Other findings from the Shanidar Cave have given more insight into the lives of humans during the Stone Age, which previously was thought to be a brutal time period with a constant struggle to survive.
