We’re starting to find features that distinguish one Neanderthal culture from another.
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Local cuisine was on the menu at Cafe Neanderthal
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Did the bones themselves at both sites cover those same 20,000 years? 20,000 years is a vast time, to my modern sensibilities, but I imagine change was at a vastly slower pace.
How much can the differences be attributed to time versus distance?
How much can the differences be attributed to time versus distance?
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CAFE NEANDERTAL
Specials Today:
Dry-Aged Amud Gazelle Stew: Mushrooms Og Swears Are Safe, Wild Greens
Roasted Kebara Boar Surf and Turf: Marrow, Great Auk Egg, Grilled Crab
Dessert
Sorry, sugar hasn't been invented yet
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Fascinating, no comments other than to thank Kiona Smith for another great article.
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When I butcher my sheep, I break the carcass down into manageable pieces that I can bag and put in my freezer. I end up with legs, saddle, pelvis, and neck, and bones from those cuts end up in my bone collection. The ribs and rack get deboned, and those bones do not end up in my bone collection. When I butcher geese, I take the legs and breast, and only end up with legs bones.
If I (a typical animal that wants to conserve energy and not carry heavy things unnecessarily) was at Amud, and food was plentiful, while field butchering I would take the legs, and cut out the backstrap from hip to skull. The end result would be a collection of leg bones.
The difference in the two locations could be based on the distance from the kill site, to the butchering site, to the cook site. If it is a short distance, take the whole animal. If it is a longer distance, take just the big meaty bits.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Interestingly, ancient humans may have been on to something (other that grossing out their distant relatives) when it comes to eating decayed animals.
"But studies conducted over the last few decades do indicate that putrefaction, the process of decay, offers many of cooking’s nutritional benefits with far less effort. Putrefaction predigests meat and fish, softening the flesh and chemically breaking down proteins and fats so they are more easily absorbed and converted to energy by the body."
I still don't understand Lutefisk. Cod and Chlorax really just don't go together.
"But studies conducted over the last few decades do indicate that putrefaction, the process of decay, offers many of cooking’s nutritional benefits with far less effort. Putrefaction predigests meat and fish, softening the flesh and chemically breaking down proteins and fats so they are more easily absorbed and converted to energy by the body."
I still don't understand Lutefisk. Cod and Chlorax really just don't go together.
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pthariensflame
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Both of these dishes sound like they’d be smash hits among the right crowd even today. Also, they absolutely had dessert—fresh fruit and berries!
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Made me come very close to spitting my coffee onto my laptop. My nose isn't happy with you. The rest of me thought that was hilarious.
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The question is how many animals species actually ate the Neanderthals for dinner ? You mess with a wild boar, you will end up getting the horns.
By the way this article is wrong the pizza in New England is the best!
By the way this article is wrong the pizza in New England is the best!
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If it is not made on the Naples/Amalfi coast and in compliance with the AVPN...its not really pizza.
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Og pretty sure this one is ok, but not sure if that’s technically a white spot or a white dot
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Og think that good point, but his species extinct so maybe better to ask a different hominid
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Silly Og. Points go on spears. How many times we have to talk about this?
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Like every tourist who goes to Iceland, I tried hakarl.
Icelanders are pleasant, educated, very normal people who look and talk like they’re from Minnesota. The fact that they are related to people tough enough to eat fermented solid cat piss makes them terrifying.
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Yeah. Some "delicacies" are definetly more palatable to a general audience than others. My mothers parents were second generation Scandinavian so lutefisk was served at family gatherings. I thought it was just awful. But when I was young I had a rather limited vocabulary of foods I really liked (aka "picky eater"). I mostly grew out of that and now will consume most foods. I still don't like liver, lima beans, cooked crucifers (cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts), though I will reluctantly eat them. Lutefisk though? I recently sampled it again after a many year hiatus and yeah...no...homey don't play that. Never had the opportunity to try hakarl. I would try it...as long as a puke bucket was handy and a mouth rinse of some type was readily available.
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I think lutefisk is one of those foods people eat to remind themselves of how bad things once were - when people had lutefisk as the only thing to eat - and of how good they've got things now that the don't have to eat lutefisk.
I think natto is similar. Some people gulp that shit down for breakfast. I assume that's on the premise that if that's how your day starts, it can't possibly get any worse.
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The shared tool technology implies broad social learning, the dissimilar food technologies implies local adaptations reminding of extant hominids.
The big question is what their respective Michelin ratings were. Did the teeth or bones suggest dissimilar growth conditions, any evidence of different parasite loads et cetera? This was a dedicated cut mark analysis, but there is cutting edge research to be done. https://www.frontiersin.org/journal...logy/articles/10.3389/fearc.2025.1575572/full
The big question is what their respective Michelin ratings were. Did the teeth or bones suggest dissimilar growth conditions, any evidence of different parasite loads et cetera? This was a dedicated cut mark analysis, but there is cutting edge research to be done. https://www.frontiersin.org/journal...logy/articles/10.3389/fearc.2025.1575572/full
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It was a successful trade industry, and it gave us moar cats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk
https://www.sciencealert.com/cats-sailed-with-vikings-to-conquer-world-genetic-study-reveals
But compared to today's standards, handling could be cumbersome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk
It is edible, especially with butter, but my mouth doesn't understand it either.
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Truth be told, natto is pretty divisive in Japan too. Half the country loves it, half hates it (especially the Osaka area). The size of the soybeans used also helps determine how intense the flavor is. Bigger beans typically means bolder flavor. Funnily enough, the most popular natto brands in Japan use smaller beans which has a much milder punch. Actually, a couple of states in the US specialize in growing soybeans for export specifically for the natto industry.
Anyways, natto, kimchi, yogurt etc… all good methods to extract more nutritional value from food! Gotta love fermentation!
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First, the link to the paper is broken, looks like a markdown collision or something. The article is available if you go to the site and then paste the id in from the broken link.
Good article, very interesting. However, the conclusions (from the paper) are not so good. In addition to the additional (and more reasonable sounding to me) explanation above about distance to the kill site, there's also the problem that the differences are pretty small, and the sample is very small. Only dozens of bones were intact enough to examine cut marks. And "1-3%" from Amud had cut marts, compared to 15% from Kebara. This could easily be coincidental differences in what was preserved.
The words carrying the most weight in the paper are the oft-repeated "could" and "might." It's certainly a good paper; they put caveats on every claim, so every claim is correct, even if all the speculation is also wrong. But it may not be a very useful or educational paper.
Amud had 11845 total bones examined. Of those 249 had cut marks. Kerbara had 1226 total, of which 95 had cut marks. Based on that, I think the most likely explanation for the difference is that bones processed in difference ways have a different likelihood of being preserved well enough to see the cut marks. (see @jezra's comment above)
Good article, very interesting. However, the conclusions (from the paper) are not so good. In addition to the additional (and more reasonable sounding to me) explanation above about distance to the kill site, there's also the problem that the differences are pretty small, and the sample is very small. Only dozens of bones were intact enough to examine cut marks. And "1-3%" from Amud had cut marts, compared to 15% from Kebara. This could easily be coincidental differences in what was preserved.
The words carrying the most weight in the paper are the oft-repeated "could" and "might." It's certainly a good paper; they put caveats on every claim, so every claim is correct, even if all the speculation is also wrong. But it may not be a very useful or educational paper.
Amud had 11845 total bones examined. Of those 249 had cut marks. Kerbara had 1226 total, of which 95 had cut marks. Based on that, I think the most likely explanation for the difference is that bones processed in difference ways have a different likelihood of being preserved well enough to see the cut marks. (see @jezra's comment above)
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Whaaaaaat. Fruits, berries, and honey! It's quite easy to render these into more sugary treats in various ways, and all the necessary stuff to do so would have been available to our ancestors, including Neanderthals (i.e. fire, pottery, and utensils).
Moreover, fermentation usually increases sugar content, and while we don't know whether that existed as far back as the time period Neanderthals lived in, we do know that people fermenting beverages and animal products predates organized agricultural cultivation—so it's certainly possible that Homo species of that time might have as well.
So I'd really be more shocked if they HADN'T discovered various ways to make sugary desserts of some kind or other—perhaps especially honeyed hard candies or the like...assuming that their food prep skills had extended to making food more novel or tasty, which I suppose is arguable, but they would have to be very behaviorally different from modern humans to make this likely.
Of course, they probably didn't have these all the time, or else we'd expect more dental caries than we do actually see—that or Neanderthals and prehistoric homo sapiens had structural biological (or potentially commensal fauna) differences that would made their teeth more resistant to decay, which isn't impossible, but afaik there is no evidence for it.
So, I judge it not inconsistent with the canon of human "lore" for you to assert that dessert is on the menu!
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Or more likely in this case, eat some of it there, and carry the more transportable bits back.
Not sure whose guess it was on the broken and charred bone versus whole bone (uncharred) reasoning, but charred and broken indicates that the bones were cooked with the meat off, to crack and eat the marrow out of them. You can achieve the same thing by cooking the bones a long time, but you'd also ruin the meat on the bones if you did that, unless you were stewing them in a vessel. Simply cooking a bone in meat over a fire is going to ruin the meat before you've softened the bone much to crack it (you can still cook the marrow and crack the bone). If they preferred to eat the meat uncooked, which seems likely.
I can't speak to STONE tool butchery, but butchery in general.
Uncooked meat is easier to remove from the bone than cooked meat. Stewed meat is easier to remove from the bone than cooked meat or uncooked meat, but you have to stew it for a few hours (slow roasting it doesn't achieve the same thing, unless you are roasting it covered to trap the moisture and allow the muscle fibers to break down and soften).
When meat is cooked, the muscle fibers contract and bind more to the bone. It takes a few hours of heat and moisture for the protein fibers to break down, softening the meat again. That is why meat cooked medium rare and less tends to be "softer" than meat that is cooked more fully. And also why stewed meat is much softer, because the muscle fibers have broken down. You get chewy meat if you cook it fully, but not long enough for it to relax again. So, either cook the meat only some, or cook it a long time.
You can break the marrow out of a bone from uncooked meat, but the bone tends to splinter, which is unpleasant getting a shard of bone stuck in your gums/tongue/roof of your mouth/throat (I have not tried eating marrow from uncooked bones, but I can imagine). Stewed bone break more regularly and don't leave sharp hard pieces of bone, and the marrow is still edible. This takes several hours of stewing (meat on or off the bone). OR You can toss a bone into the fire, sans meat for a few minutes and the bones will tend to snap/cracl, without having destroyed the marrow inside, also not producing shards of bone and sharp edges.
So I would guess the one group cooked the meat, bone on. Butchered the meat off the bones, and then tossed the bones into a fire for a few minutes to sear the bones and then broke them open to get the marrow out.
The other group either stewed their meat before butchering it (unlikely) or tended to butcher the meat prior to cooking the meat, and had sufficient food access that getting at the marrow wasn't considered worthwhile effort, so they mostly chucked the bones. Hence less cut marks and straighter cuts on the bone, and little in the way of broken bones and bones that were not charred.
But I am probably just as wrong as the researchers on what this all likely meant.
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I really enjoyed reading about Cafe Neanderthal and their focus on local cuisine. Places like this are always exciting because they let you experience authentic flavors that are hard to find elsewhere. It actually reminded me of how I sometimes check out the chipotle menu when I’m looking for something flavorful and unique. Both options show how food can be both traditional and modern at the same time
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