What did Neanderthals like to eat? It sounds like a good icebreaker at a business diner but archaeologists studying our extinct cousins ask this question quite a lot. Learning about Neanderthals’ diets is a lot like ransacking your neighbor’s trash bins. Maybe you find a lot of chicken wing bones and you quickly surmise Bob really likes his KFC without ever asking. Likewise, archaeologists study the diets of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens by carefully studying the bones and butchering tools across sites where these populations were known to live.
The Neanderthals split from the Homo sapiens lineage about 500,000 years ago and occupied the heartlands of the Eurasian steppe, a region modern humans would not visit until hundreds of thousands of years later. Surveys of their campsites suggest Neanderthals ate nuts, fruits, mushrooms, shellfish, and other food that was easy to gather. They butchered and ate horses, reindeer, bison, and mammoths. In fact, evidence suggests that Neanderthals hunted any animal they could find, even the most dangerous, like cave bears, wolves, and fearsome cave lions.
In all likelihood, Neanderthals also ate whatever birds they could lay their hands on. However, cooked bird remains and their fragile bones leave few traces. To learn more about how our extinct relatives prepared bird-based meals, researchers in Spain tried cooking like Neanderthals using only tools and methods that would have been available in prehistoric times.
Cooking Like Neanderthals
“Using a flint flake for butchering required significant precision and effort, which we had not fully valued before this experiment,” said Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the new study.
“The flakes were sharper than we initially thought, requiring careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring our own fingers. These hands-on experiments emphasized the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible connection to their daily life and survival strategies.”
While big game hunting by Neanderthals is well-documented, their hunting of birds remains less understood. Recent discoveries and new techniques have allowed scientists to investigate this aspect of their diet more deeply. By testing food preparation methods that Neanderthals might have used, researchers have created an experimental database to compare with real archaeological findings. This could help subsequent efforts by informing archaeologists whether ancient humans had cooked certain animal bones.
Putting Flesh on Prehistoric Bones
The team collected five wild birds that had died of natural causes from the Wildlife Ecology, Rehabilitation, and Surveillance Centre in Portugal. These included carrion crows, collared doves, and a wood pigeon—species similar to those Neanderthals might have consumed. The birds were defeathered by hand and then either immediately butchered or roasted over hot coals before butchering. It turned out that roasting the birds first made butchering much easier than in raw birds.
“Roasting the birds over the coals required maintaining a consistent temperature and carefully monitoring the cooking duration to avoid overcooking the meat,” said Nabais. “Maybe because we defeathered the birds before cooking, the roasting process was much quicker than we anticipated. In fact, we spent more time preparing the coals than on the actual cooking, which took less than 10 minutes.”
After cooking, the bones were cleaned, dried, and examined microscopically for cut marks, breaks, and burns. The flint flake used for butchery also showed wear and tear, including small half-moon scars on the edge. While butchering raw birds left few traces on the bones, cuts aimed at tendons left marks similar to those found on archaeological bird bones.
The roasted birds’ bones were more brittle, with many shattering and displaying brown or black burns. If Neanderthals roasted their birds — and in all likelihood, that’s what they did — the cooking process made the leftovers much more fragile, explaining why they’re so hard to find in the archaeological record.
Despite these findings, the researchers emphasized the need for further studies. Future research should include more species of small prey and explore other uses of birds, such as for their feathers or talons.
“The sample size is relatively small, consisting of only five bird specimens, which may not fully represent the diversity of bird species that Neanderthals might have used,” noted Nabais.
The findings appeared in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
