Neanderthal cooking skills put to the test with birds and stone tools

Archaeologists have cooked and prepared five wild birds using only fire, their hands and stone tools to learn more about the culinary abilities of Neanderthals. The experiment shows it took considerable manual skill for our ancient relatives to butcher animals using flint blades without injuring themselves.

Neanderthals inhabited Europe and Asia until around 40,000 years ago. Hearths have been found at many Neanderthal sites, and we also have evidence they hunted large animals like elephants and cave lions.

Mariana Nabais at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, says by replicating ancient activities such as cooking and butchering with the tools available at the time, scientists can gain insight into how prehistoric humans lived.

She and her colleagues wanted to better understand archaeological bird remains associated with Neanderthals that were recovered from deposits in Portugal, which date to approximately 90,000 years ago.

The team selected five birds that had died in a Portuguese wildlife rehabilitation centre and were of a similar size and species to those found in the archaeological deposits: two carrion crows (Corvus corone), a common wood pigeon (Columba palumbus) and two Eurasian collared doves (Streptopelia decaocto). The tools used in the experiment were flint flakes prepared by lithic technology students.

All five birds were plucked by hand. A crow and a dove were butchered uncooked and the remaining three birds were baked on a bed of coals. The cooked birds could be easily pulled apart without stone tools, but the raw birds required considerable effort using the flint blades.

“Palaeolithic knives were indeed very sharp, requiring careful handling,” says Nabais. “The precision and effort needed to use these tools without causing self-injury emphasised the practical challenges Neanderthals might have faced in their daily food-processing activities.”

Once the butchering was complete, the researchers prepared the bones and then analysed them for distinctive signs caused by the stone tools and the fire. They also identified wear marks on the flint tools.

The burn marks and tool scars were then compared with Neanderthal food remains from the Figuiera Brava and Oliveira archaeological sites, both in Portugal. Bird bones with burning stains and cut marks found at the sites align with those seen in the team’s replications, says Nabais.

“Our experimental study demonstrated that raw birds processed with flakes show distinctive cut marks, especially around tendons and joints, while roasted birds show burn marks and increased fragility, leading to bone breakage,” she says. “These finds help distinguish human-induced modifications from those caused by natural processes or other animals, such as trampling or the activity of rodents, raptors and carnivores.”

Neanderthals were skilled enough to catch and cook small, quick animals like birds, says Nabais. “This study highlights the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals, demonstrating their capacity to catch and process small, fast-moving prey like birds, thus challenging the traditional notion that Neanderthals were not capable of such complex tasks.”

Sam Lin at the University of Wollongong, Australia, says experimental archaeology is like reverse engineering where you compare what happens to a modern sample with archaeological material to try to interpret what may have happened in the past.

In this case, one of the main findings was that cooked birds don’t need tools to be prepared for eating, which could mean some bones won’t necessarily have tool scars. “They learned you can just rip a cooked wild bird apart the same way we eat a barbecue chicken,” says Lin.