Humans Were Eating Snails 30,000 Years Ago
While the slimy critters may not be everyone’s cup of tea, snails took the fancy of humans living in Spain some 30,000 years ago, a new study has found.
Researchers have known for some time that humans have been munching on gastropods (snails and slugs) for thousands of years, but when we started indulging on these mollusks has been a mystery.
“Even though land snails are very present in paleolithic sites, the interpretation of snails as a food resource is very complicated,” lead author Javier Fernández-López de Pablo told Live Science .
That’s because snail shells around ancient human remains could be the result of hungry birds, rather than remnants of our diet.
The researchers aren’t sure why humans started eating snails at this time, but it appears to coincide with a period when populations in Iberia were undergoing various transformations and began experimenting with art .
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/humans-were-eating-snails-30000-years-ago
While the slimy critters may not be everyone’s cup of tea, snails took the fancy of humans living in Spain some 30,000 years ago, a new study has found.
Researchers have known for some time that humans have been munching on gastropods (snails and slugs) for thousands of years, but when we started indulging on these mollusks has been a mystery.
“Even though land snails are very present in paleolithic sites, the interpretation of snails as a food resource is very complicated,” lead author Javier Fernández-López de Pablo told Live Science .
That’s because snail shells around ancient human remains could be the result of hungry birds, rather than remnants of our diet.
The researchers aren’t sure why humans started eating snails at this time, but it appears to coincide with a period when populations in Iberia were undergoing various transformations and began experimenting with art .
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/humans-were-eating-snails-30000-years-ago
