Neanderthal groups had their own local food culture

Neanderthals may have had traditional means of preparing special foods for each group. The discoveries of two caves in what is now northern Israel suggest that residents there have massacred the same types of prey in their own way.

Modern humans, or Homo sapiensWere not the first hominines to prepare and cook food. It is proven that Neanderthals, for example, who lived in Europe and Asia up to around 40,000 years ago, used flint knives to massacre what they captured, cooked a wide range of animals and spicy their menu with wild herbs.

To find out more about Neanderthal food culture, Anaël Jallon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues examined evidence in the caves of Amud and Kebara in northern Israel.

These sites, which are only about 70 kilometers from each other, offer a unique opportunity to examine local cultural differences. The stone tools, the leftovers of food and the homes found on each site reveal that the Neanderthals occupied the two caves, probably during the winters, during the same period.

“You find the same species of animals to hunt and it is more or less the same landscape,” explains Jallon. “It will be the same kind of time, and the Neanderthals at the same time have mainly ate gazelles and fallow deer that they have completed with some larger animals like wild boar or the Aurochs.”

There are, however, some differences. For example, the bones reveal that a larger quantity of large prey has been hunted in Kebara, and other victims have been brought back to this cave to be massacred.

Jallon and her colleagues used microscopes to inspect the bones from sediment layers on the two sites between 50,000 and 60,000 years, examining the cuts cut with stone tools.

They found that even if the flint tools used were similar on the two sites, the cutting models were different. “The cuts tend to be more variable in their width and their depth in Kebara, and in Amud, they are more concentrated in large clusters and they overlap more often,” explains Jallon.

To assess whether the differences could be due to the butcher’s shop different prey, the researchers also specifically examined the long bones of the gazelles found on the two sites. They had the same differences.

“We are talking about two groups that live very closely and, say, both cutting beef – but on a site, they seem to get closer to the bone, removing all the meat,” said Ceren Kabukcu at the University of Liverpool, in the United Kingdom.

Previous research that has examined cutting marks on the bones of more recent societies suggest that the type of variation observed in the Neanderthal butcher’s shop is not due to a lack of expertise, but with a difference in technique.

Jallon thinks that the contrast is better explained by deliberate butcher’s choices. It may be that the Neanderthals of Amud made their meat more difficult to treat, for example, by drying it or letting it hang before cooking, she said, which would have mean that they needed more cuts to cross it or a larger team of people to massacre meat.

“In a behavior as opportunistic as the butcher’s shop, you expect to find the most effective way to massacre something to get the most out of it, but apparently, it was more determined by social or cultural factors,” explains Jallon. “This could be due to a group organization or to practices that are learned and transmitted from generation to generation.”

“The fact that there may be differences and nuances on how technology is used in daily life is not entirely shocking,” explains Kabukcu. “I think this question is studied, we could see more and more nuances on several sites in the Middle Paleolithic.”

It is not known if the caves were occupied at the same time or if disparate groups could have been in contact with each other. “It is a possibility that it is at the same time, but it is also possible that it is hundreds of years apart or more. We do not have the resolution of knowing it, ”explains Jallon.

But she also says that the model of cup brands very in cluster found in AMUD is similar in the oldest layer and in younger layers, so she says that the cave could have been used by return groups that have maintained the same butcher’s traditions for centuries.