Given the nutritional value of large land snails, an earlier argument that it was eating fish and shellfish that energized human brain evolution may have been overstated, says Jerardino, who did not participate in the new study. Previous excavations at a cave on South Africa’s southern tip found evidence of humans eating mussels, limpets and other marine mollusks as early as around 164,000 years ago ( SN: 7/29/11). “Food sharing shows that cooperative social behavior was in place from the dawn of our species.”īorder Cave’s ancient snail scarfers also push back the human consumption of mollusks by several thousand years, says archaeologist Antonieta Jerardino of the University of South Africa in Pretoria. “The easy-to-eat, fatty protein of snails would have been an important food for the elderly and small children, who are less able to chew hard foods,” Wojcieszak says. Some of the group members who stayed behind on snail-gathering forays may have had limited mobility due to age or injury, the researchers suspect. Long before that, hunter-gatherer groups in southern Africa roamed the countryside collecting large land snails to bring back to Border Cave for themselves and to share with others, the team contends. New discoveries at Border Cave challenge an influential idea that human groups did not make land snails and other small game a big part of their diet until the last Ice Age waned around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, Wojcieszak says. ![]() ![]() Numbers of unearthed snail shell pieces were substantially larger in sediment layers dating to that time period. The supersized delicacy became especially popular between about 160,000 and 70,000 years ago, the researchers say. ![]() Wojcieszak, of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, studies chemical properties of archaeological sites and artifacts. Analyses of shell fragments excavated at South Africa’s Border Cave indicate that hunter-gatherers who periodically occupied the site heated large African land snails on embers and then presumably ate them, say chemist Marine Wojcieszak and colleagues.
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