Paleolithic Escargot - Prehistoric Spaniards Cooked Snails 30,000 Years Ago
The Paleolithic inhabitants of modern-day Spain may have eaten snails 30,000 years ago - 10,000 years earlier than their Mediterranean neighbors, according to a recent paper. Snails were widespread in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, but it is still unknown when and how they were incorporated into human diets. The authors of this study found land snail shell remains from ~30,000 years ago at a recently discovered site in Cova de la Barriada, Spain. To better understand if the inhabitants may have eaten snails, the researchers investigated patterns of land snail selection, consumption, and accumulation at the site, and then analyzed the shells' decay, fossilization process, composition, and age at death by measuring the shell size. read more