Video from 2012. I think it shows the cave in Portugal where this latest discovery was made.
"Over 80,000 years ago, Neanderthals fed themselves on mussels, fish and other marine life. The first evidence has been found by an international team in the cave of Figueira Brava in Portugal. The excavated layers date from 86,000 to 106,000 years ago, the period when Neanderthals settled in Europe. Sourcing food from the sea at that time had only been attributed to anatomically modern humans in Africa." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "Figueira Brava provides the first record of significant marine resource consumption among Europe’s Neandertals," according to Science. "... Consistent with rapidly accumulating evidence that Neandertals possessed a fully symbolic material culture, the subsistence evidence reported here further questions the behavioral gap once thought to separate them from modern humans."
Comment: I'm not sure why the Science Daily article calls this "the first evidence" that Neanderthals ate mussels, fish, etc. Maybe it's the first evidence found in Portugal. According to the Natural Museum History video below, paleontologists working in Gibraltar had already found evidence back in 2009 that the Neanderthal diet included various kinds of marine life.
Note: "During the Stone Age, access to flint was so important for survival that people would travel or trade to obtain flint. Flint Ridge in Ohio [next video] was an important source of flint and Native Americans extracted the flint from hundreds of quarries along the ridge. This 'Ohio Flint' was traded across the eastern United States and has been found as far west as the Rocky Mountains and south around the Gulf of Mexico." (Wikipedia)
Flint blades are razor sharp, making them ideal for hunting and dressing animals. The stone can also be used to strike sparks, but it tends to shatter:
"Flint's utility as a fire starter is hampered by its property of uneven expansion under heating, causing it to fracture, sometimes violently, during heating. This tendency is enhanced by the impurities found in most samples of flint that may expand to a greater or lesser degree than the surrounding stone, and is similar to the tendency of glass to shatter when exposed to heat, and can become a drawback when flint is used as a building material." (Wikipedia)
"Two thousand years ago the Mediterranean Sea was a haven for two species of whale which have since virtually disappeared from the North Atlantic, a new study analyzing ancient bones suggests. The discovery of the whale bones in the ruins of a Roman fish processing factory located at the strait of Gibraltar also hints at the possibility that the Romans may have hunted the whales. " Source: Science Daily (2018).
Note: "The Gibraltar region was at the centre of a massive fish-processing industry during Roman times, with products exported across the entire Roman Empire. The ruins of hundreds of factories with large salting tanks can still be seen today in the region."
The species of whale involved here are the North Atlantic right whale and the Atlantic gray whale. The right whale is huge. According to Wikipedia, it can "grow up to more than 18 m (59 ft) long with a highest-recorded length of 19.8 m (65 ft)" and weigh something like 100 tons. And the gray whale can grow up to 50 feet long and reach weights of around 40 tons. If the Romans were hunting these monsters in wooden fishing boats, they were definitely braver than I am.
Update: This discovery seems to confirm something the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote in his monumental Natural History:
"Scientists have questioned the credibility of Pliny the Elder's now 2,000-year-old account of orcas hunting whale calves near the Strait of Gibraltar, since those marine mammals aren't known to visit that area. Now, archaeological evidence suggests Pliny knew exactly what he was talking about." Source: Live Science (2018)
"...In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder famously wrote about orcas (also called killer whales, though they are in the dolphin family) attacking whales and their calves in the Bay of Cádiz, near the Strait of Gibraltar— the entry point from the Atlantic Ocean into the Mediterranean that lies between Africa and Europe. According to Callum Roberts in "The Unnatural History of the Sea" (Island Press, 2008), Pliny described how whales 'during the summer periods hide in a certain calm and spacious inlet, and take marvelous delight in breeding there.' Pliny continued with a description of the brutal battles he witnessed as killer whales preyed on the mother whales and their calves."
People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."
"Skeps, baskets placed open-end-down, have been used to house bees for some 2000 years." (Wikipedia)
Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."
Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.
Bees, along with other insects, were also used for divination, a form of augury known as entomomancy. Pliny the Elder describes the practice in a section on bees and beekeeping in Book XI of his monumental Natural History:
"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.
Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)
Report from 2012.
Related:How to Construct a Claypot Hive. "Clay tiles were the customary homes of kept bees in the eastern end of the Mediterranean," according to Wikipedia. "Long cylinders of baked clay were used in ancient Egypt, the Middle East and to some extent in Greece, Italy and Malta. They sometimes were used singly, but more often stacked in rows to provide some shade, at least for those not on top. Keepers would smoke one end to drive the bees to the other end while they harvested honey.
"Most people are familiar with the historical Silk Road, but fewer people realize that the exchange of items, ideas, technology, and human genes through the mountain valleys of Central Asia started almost three millennia before organized trade networks formed. These pre-Silk Road exchange routes played an important role in shaping human cultural developments across Europe and Asia, and facilitated the dispersal of technologies such as horse breeding and metal smelting into East Asia." Source: Science Daily.
Note: The Silk Road network linking east and west dates back to the 2nd century BC, but this latest discovery shows that trade was taking place in Asia for thousands of years before that:
"This new study, led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, provides details of recently recovered ancient grains from the far northern regions of Inner Asia. Radiocarbon dating shows that the grains include the oldest examples of wheat and barley ever recovered this far north in Asia, pushing back the dates for early farming in the region by at least a millennium."
Note: "There are essentially two types of [fish] trap, a permanent or semi-permanent structure placed in a river or tidal area and bottle or pot trap that are usually, but not always baited to attract prey, and are periodically lifted out of the water." Source: Wikipedia.
The trap in this video appears to be of the bottle-trap variety. According to Wikipedia, a trap of this kind is "lowered into the water on a line, where it is left either at the bottom, or suspended at some depth beneath the surface. Bait is usually, but not always used to lure the prey inside. Variants of this basic trap have been used from early times in countries around the world."
"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."
"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.
[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis. Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.' The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses. The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army. What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route. The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses. Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move. The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Quoted in Roman Times)
Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."
"The burger may be America’s favorite food, but the popular dish was gifted to us by the Romans." Source: Daily Mail.
"In an ancient Roman cookbook a meal called ‘Isicia Omentata’ uses minced meat, juniper berries, wine, pine nuts and a salty fish-based sauce – all of which are formed into a patty.
"The book, called Apicius [next video], was composed in the late fourth or fifth centuries with recipes created as early as the first century and provides recipes that the ancient empire dined on."
The recipe book, Apicius. This is apparently an 8th century copy of an earlier (4th century?) version.
Comment: Garum, the fermented fish sauce used in this Roman burger, was hugely popular back then, but I've always thought it sounds disgusting. I could be wrong, though; after all, I like soy sauce which is made from a fermented paste of soybeans, grain and various molds. The Isicia Omentata might have been pretty good after all, but even so there's no denying that the best hamburger in history is the Heart Attack Grill's Octuple Bypass Burger.
"Why do some animals eat or abandon their offspring? According to researchers, these might actually be forms of parental care. Their mathematical model shows that when overcrowding threatens offspring survival -- which often occurs due to spread of infection or competition for resources -- sacrificing a few so the most can live becomes the ultimate form of tough love." Source: Science Daily.
Tough love. That's hilarious. Only a sociobiologist could argue with a straight face that eating your own children is a form of "parental care." Don't get me wrong, though. I can think of lots of good reasons for eating your own babies. Maybe you can't afford the quarter-of-a-million dollars it will cost to raise that cute little rug rat to the age of eighteen, or maybe you just want to stop their incessant babbling and howling.
This baby looks particularly tasty.
Another good reason to eat babies is to save the planet from the global warming crisis. As we all know, the world will end in a few months if we don't immediately dismantle our advanced industrial societies and drastically reduce the population.
The best reason to eat babies, though, is hunger. Jonathan Swift, the famous Anglo-Irish gourmet, pointed out that plump human babies around a year old are particularly succulent and nutritious:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it would equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust." -- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
Swift didn't mention it specifically, but babies are also very tasty when they're barbecued.
Examples of how food has changed over the centuries.
"Hard plant foods may have made up a larger part of early human ancestors' diet than currently presumed, according to a new experimental study of modern tooth enamel. The results have implications for reconstructing diet, and for our interpretation of the fossil record of human evolution, researchers said." Source: Science Daily.
According to this study, the australopiths could eat things like nut shells and seeds without damaging their teeth, and I'm guessing that early humans could probably do the same thing. The wild plants available back then were a lot tougher than the genetically modified, domesticated plant foods we eat today.
The Paleo Diet recommends eating the same foods our prehistoric ancestors ate, but this is basically impossible for a number of different reasons [next video]. For example, even if the wild plants common to the Stone Age were still around we probably couldn't eat them without screwing up our teeth.