What we know about Neanderthal diet and cooking, we've learned from the trash they left behind, but there are some gaps in rubbish that has been sitting around for hundreds of thousands of years. We know that they hunted and ate any animal they could get hold of, from wolves to mammoths, plus fruit, nuts, shellfish, and mushrooms. We've found little evidence that they ate birds, but that's only because birds have lightweight bones that don't last long, esecially when they've been cooked.
How would a Neanderthal eat a bird? A team from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain decided to recreate a Neanderthal meal, using only the tools they would have available to them. They procured five wild birds that had died of natural causes and set about preparing them.They compared the methods of skinning the birds before cooking and roasting them first, and found that the most likely method also explained why so few relics survived to be studied. They also found out how dangerously sharp flint cutting tools are. Read about the experiment and what it tells us about studying Neanderthal culture at ZME Science. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Mariana Nabais)