Actually, Neanderthals Were Quite Bougie

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Actually, Neanderthals Were Quite Bougie

It’s not just insulting to get compared to a Neanderthal, it’s also likely based on an inaccurate stereotype. As it turns out, Neanderthals weren’t primitive slobs at all — they were dragging their knuckles to much more sophisticated seafood feasts than we ever realized. In fact, archeologists have recently discovered that Neanderthals were downright bougie, regularly harvesting large brown crabs as opposed to dining on the equivalent of prehistoric roadkill, per Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain.

Nabais and her team found that Neanderthals ate a wide variety of shellfish, but particularly liked brown crab. They suspect that Neanderthals caught the crabs using low tide pools and cooked them at 300 to 500 degrees Celsius. “The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and then eaten,” Nabais explained. This makes them not only early man, but the original foodies/hipsters (take that Brooklyn!). 

“Our results add an extra nail to the coffin of the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were primitive cave dwellers who could barely scrape a living off scavenged big-game carcasses,” Nabais continued. “Together with the associated evidence for the large-scale consumption of limpets, mussels, clams and a range of fish, our data falsify the notion that marine foods played a major role in the emergence of putatively superior cognitive abilities among early modern human populations of sub-Saharan Africa.”

And so, the next time you’re called a Neanderthal for crushing a T-bone in record time, tell them there’s no way that can be true — after all, it wasn’t topped with crab.

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