Neanderthal groups had their own local food culture

Neanderthals may have had traditional ways of preparing food that were special for each group. Discoveries from two caves in what is now northern Israel suggest that the residents there but the same kind in their characteristic ways.

Modern people, gold Homo sapienswere not the first hominins to cook and cook food. There is evidence that, for example, Neanderthals, which inhabit Europe and Asia until approx. 40,000 years ago, used flint knives to slaughter what they caught, cooked a large number of animals and spiced their menu with wild herbs.

To learn more about Neanderthal -food culture, Anaëlle is investigating Jallon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues proving the caves of Amud and Kebara in northern Israel.

These places, which are only about 70 kilometers apart, provide a unique opportunity to explore local cultural differences. Stone tools, food residues and fireplaces found at each place reveal that Neanderthals occupied both caves, probably in the winter, during the same period.

“You find the same species of animals to hunt, and it’s less the same landscape,” says Jallon. “It will be the same kind of weather, and Neanderthal on both ate mostly gazelles and some brackish deer, which they complicated with a few larger animals such as wild boars or aurochs.

However, there is one if different. For example, Bones reveals that a larger prey of large prey at Kebara was hunted, and more killings were brought back to this cave to be slaughtered.

Jallon and her colleagues used microscopes to inspect bones from layers of sediment in the two places from between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, they examined the cuts that were cut into them with stone tools.

They found that although the flint tools used were the same in both places, the patterns of cuts, we are different. “The cuts tend to be more varied in their width and depth in Kebara, and in Amud they are more concentrated in large clusters and they overlap more often,” says Jallon.

To assess whether the differences could be down to slaughter different prey, the researchers also specifically on long bones from gazelles found in both places. These had the same difference.

“We are talking about two groups that live very close, and let’s say both cut some beef – but in one place they seem to cut closer to the bone and get all the meat off,” says Ceren Kabukcu at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Previous research that looked at cut brands on bones from recent communities suggests that the kind of variation seen in Neanderthal Butchechery is not down to a lack of expertise but to another in technically.

Jallon believes that the contrast is best explained by conscious butcher choices. It may be that the Neanderthals at Amud made their meat difficult to treat by, for example, drying it or letting it hang before cooking, she says, which welded has meant that they have made several cuts to get through it or a larger team of people to slaughter the meat.

“In behavior that is as opportunistic as a slaughterhouse, you would expect to find the most effective way to slaughter something to make the most of it, apparently it was more determined by social or cultural factors,” says Jallon. “It may be due to group organization or practice that is learned and transferred from generation to generation.”

“The fact that there may be different and some nuance about how technology is used in everyday life is not quite shocking,” says Kabukcu. “I think this question is being investigated, we may see more and more nuance in several places in the middle palaeolithic.”

It is not known where the caves we occupied at the same time, or whose vanishing groups may have been in contact with each other. “It is a possibility that it was at the same exact time, but it is also possible that it was hanged by years apart or more. We do not have the decision to know,” says Jallon.

But she also says that the pattern with very clumsy clip marks found in Ammud is similar to the oldest layer and in the younger layers, so she says that the cave may have been used by the Reversing Group that the same butcher traditions for centuries.