Neandertal cooking - or thin gruel?
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| Seeds of the Indian Pea, Lathyrus sativa. Photo by Andrew Butko, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. |
There's a new report this week on Neandertal cooking. Now, we've known for a long time that Neandertals hunted and used fires, but this is the first that I know of that supports the idea that they selected, processed, and mixed vegetative ingredients to make maybe a bread or cake or something like that. I'm kind of disappointed it isn't more evidence, because I'm not really sure how excited we should be.
The report comes from a team of researchers based at English institutions, primarily the University of Liverpool. They were working with charred bits of stuff found at previous cave excavations. Their work was mostly electron microscopy to identify the components of the charred bits. There was only one bit from a Neandertal site, namely Shanidar in northern Iraq. This piece contained ground up remnants of pulses, legumes of the genera Lathyrus (Indian peas, shown above) and Pisum (the genus of our domesticated pea). The piece also contained bits of grass of unknown provenance.
How do we know this is a Neandertal artifact? This to me is pretty clear, maybe even clearer than a lot of putative Neandertal remains that depend on relative dating (like the Schoningen spears). Here in Shanidar, this charred lump was found along side actual physical remains of Neandertals. That's exactly what you'd like to see if you want to associate an artifact with a species: Find them in direct proximity in the same layer as bones. So that's done. Whatever this is, it's definitely Neandertal.
How do we know that this is food? In other words, could there be some other source of mixed plant material that could have been burned and left behind these residual bits? Burned bits of plant residue could have been fuel for a fire, or they could have been feces. The researchers argue that it's not feces because ancient feces have different contents and forms under the microscope. So they rule that out. There are also some implicit arguments at play here, namely that the plant material has been selected carefully and processed deliberately. It's been crushed and ground, not to a fine flour where the constituents are unidentifiable, but it's not just chestnuts roasting on an open fire. The authors note that the seed coverings contain bitter and toxic chemicals that the processing would reduce, so that's another observation in favor of this being the remnants of food. Finally, the charring from being near a fire also implicates this as some kind of food residue. The burning is probably the least compelling of all, but combined with the other evidence, you realize you have a single lump of vegetable material that contains specific edible plants that have been ground and mixed together and then heated. Well, that sure sounds like cooking to me.
Still, it's just one small piece. I wish there were more pieces. I wish there were grind stones with vegetable residue on them. I wish there was more unequivocal evidence. I can think of at least one possible (although not very convincing) explanation for this piece that doesn't involve cooking: bovid stomach contents. If Neandertals had hunted a bovid, maybe some of its cud fell near the fire and burned? Like I said, I'm not sure that explains it, but it's an interesting possibility. I wish there was more evidence.
Then again, put this together with all the other evidences of Neandertal sophistication, and it makes a compelling story of intelligent people working with their environment to provide their food needs. It will be interesting to see how this research is received by others.
Kabukcu et al. 2022. Cooking in caves: Palaeolithic carbonised plant food remains from Franchthi and Shanidar. Antiquity DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.143.
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