Humans
PUBLISHED
We’ll say it: prehistory has a Homo sapiens bias. Maybe it’s because of a botched initial reconstruction; maybe it’s just because we survived and they didn’t, but we have a tendency to imagine our Neanderthal ancestors – and they really were our ancestors, for the most part – as dumb, brutish, and short.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The truth is, they weren’t – and new research from an ancient site in Germany is the latest to demonstrate why.
“Our data provide the first evidence that Neanderthals […] hunted and processed turtles north of the Alps, beyond the Mediterranean region,” explained archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the MONREPOS archaeological research center, both in Germany, in a statement this month.
It's not news that Neanderthals hunted turtles – that’s been known for decades. But so far, the only evidence has come from a very small geographical area around the edges of the Mediterranean. It makes sense: it’s warmer there, and turtles need those higher temperatures to thrive.
The new paper, however, looks at an area almost 1,000 kilometers from that region, in the Middle Palaeolithic site of Neumark-Nord, central Germany. Areas that far north could occasionally get hot enough to support populations of turtles – but those times were fleeting, producing short but intense bursts of data for modern archaeologists.
Neumark-Nord is, then, nothing less than a geological “snapshot” of Neanderthal life during the Last Interglacial, a period around 125,000 years ago. And increasingly, that life has been found to have been turtle-heavy: excavations in the 2010s revealed a couple dozen sets of turtle remains from across maybe 900 years of Neanderthal occupation – and they carried the telltale scars of ancient human butchery.
But here’s the question: why?
It may sound obvious – like any animals, Neanderthals needed to eat, right? But remember what we said about underestimating our sister species: “We can virtually rule […] out” the idea that the turtles were being eaten, Gaudzinski-Windheuser said.
Frankly, the little turtles – European pond turtles (Emys orbicularis) – wouldn’t have been worth eating. They were smaller than their southern cousins, not nearly big enough to justify their use as a food source: “with a weight of around one kilogram, pond turtles have a comparatively low nutritional value,” Gaudzinski-Windheuser said. And the Neanderthals were hardly starving in any case: based on the sheer amount of large, high-yield animals found in and around Neumark-Nord, “there was in all likelihood a complete caloric surplus,” she added.
But what turtles do offer – even the small ones – is an easy hunt. They “may therefore have been hunted by children,” suggested Gaudzinski-Windheuser. “Their shells may then have been processed into tools” such as “scoops” for food.
Of course, that’s just one idea. There are other possibilities as to why the turts were hunted: perhaps they were used medicinally, for example – a very early manifestation of a tradition that lasted all the way up to the 19th century at least. Maybe they just plain tasted nice. As the paper points out, it’s hard to say anything about the motives of people who lived long before written language and left no local art that we’ve seen.
Nevertheless, the turtle shells are important, adding to our ever-evolving understanding of our long-extinct cousins. “[The] survival strategies of Neanderthals […] went far beyond simple caloric maximization,” said Gaudzinski-Windheuser.
They were “complex,” she said. “Our current results shed new light on [Neanderthals’] ecological flexibility.”
The paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
