It’s sometimes difficult to imagine what childhood was like for someone in another country who lived within a completely different cultural context from your own. It can be even more difficult to, say, imagine what Neanderthal children did with their spare time. Luckily, according to research recently published in Scientific Reports, we now know that little Neanderthal kids liked hunting turtles.
The discovery comes from Neumark-Nord, an archaeological site in Germany that’s giving researchers a glimpse into what day-to-day Neanderthal life was like around 125,000 years ago. The researchers found dozens of remains of European pond turtles, a lot of them clearly showing signs that they had been butchered.
That alone isn’t too surprising. Neanderthals hunted Turtles, but mostly in warmer regions like the Mediterranean, where turtles were bigger and more abundant. This site is much further north than we’re used to finding evidence of turtle butchery, and it’s happening in environments where turtles only showed up in the very brief windows that the area experienced warmth.
How Do We Know the Kids Weren’t Eating the Turtles?
The turtles were small, only about a kilogram each. There wasn’t a lot of good eats in those shells, especially when you consider the effort to hunt them for their meat is time that was probably better spent hunting larger game animals, which were bountiful in the area. This led researchers to theorize that Neanderthals were hunting these little turtles for sustenance, but as some kind of cultural behavior.
The turtles may have been easy targets because, after all, they were turtles – notoriously slow, ponderous creatures that are easy for, say, a child to start developing their hunting skills early. Or maybe it provided a division of labor that gave the youngins something to do.
Some other possibilities include the turtles being used as tools, with their shells being repurposed into scoops. There are also some medicinal or cultural reasons that the physical archaeological evidence doesn’t support just yet. But the simplest explanation here that the evidence does suggest is maybe the most telling: none of this was necessary for survival, so they must’ve had some larger cultural reason to do it.
Bicycles and video games hadn’t been invented yet, so let the kids preoccupy themselves and learn a thing or two about Neanderthal adulthood by letting them run off and engage in a little low-stakes hunting.
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