Paleontology has been on a real Neanderthal tear lately, with all sorts of discoveries about how our ancient ancestors lived. Today, we learned a new factoid from a preprint study on ResearchSquare, published by researchers and found by IFLScience: Neanderthals loved eating beaver.
Okay, cool it, you pervs. I mean literal beaver, and marmots, too.
We’ve long known our extinct cousins were capable hunters. They could bring down towering woolly mammoths and small little rabbits. But new evidence suggests one of their favorite snacks was medium-sized rodents.
Neanderthals Apparently Loved Eating Beaver, According to New Research
At the Valdegoba Cave in northern Spain, researchers uncovered hundreds of 130,000-year-old Eurasian beaver and alpine marmot bones, along with stone tools and Neanderthal fossils. A lot of the bones had tooth marks likely made by opportunistic scavenger animals like foxes and wolves.
Some distinctly Neanderthal marks are mixed in as well, like cut marks on some bones that strongly suggest the work of a skilled butcher, or, to use the study’s more precise, fascinating word choice, “defleshing” and “disarticulation.” Never have I come across a more sociopathic word choice than “defleshing.”
The Neanderthals were munching on beaver, but it wasn’t a usual staple of their diet. Given how many of the bones they found showed signs of human processing, beaver meat was more of a quick fix, a snack they could go to in a pinch, when more substantial meals weren’t available. Beavers and marmots were to Neanderthals as the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is to modern humans.
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