So there's precious little evidence for the exploitation
of salmon by Neanderthals, at least before Cro
Magnon were already on the scene and Neanderthals
were likely influenced both genetically and culturally.

...the "Culturally" would be what's important here. They
didn't even have to breed with new arrivals in order to be
exposed to new ideas, new perceptions, but they did
breed anyway...

Salmon bones are delicate, we're certainly up against a
preservation bias here, but given even just a few
thousand years of exploitation, there should be
mountains of salmon remains.

I think. I'll get to that later.

So, why didn't Neanderthals seem to eat salmon very
often? Here's some ideas:


#1. They hated Salmon. They thought it was yucky.

Does anyone remember the old Japanese version of
the TV show, "Iron Chef?" I recall one episode where
one of the competing chefs was chopping up a live
squid, or a squid that had been alive until moments
before, and some of the judges were like, "Mmmm...
I could eat that right now!"

Yes. One look at a man dismembering a slimy squid
and their mouths were drooling. But on an different
episode the special ingredient was bell peppers, and
it was the exact opposite response!

Apparently bell peppers used to be considered pretty
awful. Especially amongst Japanese children! There
was an anime -- "Chin Chan" -- where one of the jokes
was the kid eating bell pepper chips as a snack...

Culturally, the Japanese like slimy foods. They don't
like "Bitter" foods, with bell peppers considered bitter.

It's a CULTURAL difference. It's not their DNA. They
simply may have hated the taste of salmon. It may
have been too different in flavor or texture than the
greater part of their diet.

#2. They had some sort of cultural prohibition
against it.

I don't like the "They hated it" idea because, let's face
it, as much as they could have hated it they would
have hated going hungry even more. And you really
only need a couple of seasons of scarcity (of other
foods) to accumulate a huge mass of salmon bones.
And we don't find any such huge mass. So maybe there
was a cultural prohibition.

"Homo" is a peculiar lot, with many ideas, and dietary
restrictions are known from cultures across the globe.

India and beef, anyone?

Kosher? Halal?

I definitely think this is a possibility.

I'm not saying that I believe it is the answer but it is without
a question possible.

They could have thought the fish from a river is sacred, or at
least the salmon. Maybe some past group couldn't deal with
the bones and decided that the Devil made them...

All you really need is for one person to eat salmon and then
fall sick, to convince a group of primitive people that the
salmon was at fault.

ALSO: Salmon are food for other animals. They could have
thought that by avoiding salmon they were ensuring more
bear skins or meat...

#3. They exploited them but not the way we think.

What if they just wanted the roe? They might have even
figured out a way to get it without killing the salmon.

Used it for bait? So if you want to find the bones you've got to
stop looking at Neanderthal sites and start looking at game
trails?

#4. They ate them bones & all.

This should in theory be testable, examining coprolites. But
coprolites are even less likely to be preserved! We'd be going
from one potential preservation bias to a definite preservation
bias...

#5. They were too dumb.

Maybe they never "Figured it out." Maybe they never noticed the
patterns.

#6. They were out of sync.

Simply put: Yes they were in the same place but not at the same
time!

#7. They caught them, they ate them but not there.

There is evidence for Neanderthals hunting & processing
animals away from where ever their dwelling site was
located. This could be because they had to go somewhere
else to bag migrating caribou or maybe they did it to avoid
attracting predators, vermin and disease. Or just the smell.

Fish stink. At least the uneaten remains. They could have
eaten or processed them a comfortable distance from
where they lived.

YES they had to reek themselves. They were probably living
right on top of garbage, bodily waste and their own odor
But fish is different. So maybe it was all a matter of what
they were used to.

#8. Salmon bones don't preserve.

I mean, have you ever seen any scientific test of the idea
that Salmon bones should be preserved?

It's utterly gross, disgusting and I shouldn't bring it up but,
there's at least one law enforcement forensics school
(lab? facility?) that leaves dead bodies lying around. This
is so students can examine that in nature at various lengths
of time (of exposure) and of course various states of
preservation. In theory at least, after studying such things
an investigator might judge how long it's been since the
remains of a murder victim had been deposited at a mere
glance.

Yeah, totally gross. But does anyone do this kind of thing
with salmon remains?

Maybe the remains we do find are the rare exception. Maybe
their presence is linked to the climate, directly or indirectly.

i dunno. The point is, has this sort of thing been studied?
Can anyone state WITH SCIENTIFIC CERTAINTY how long
salmon remains should last in a given location, a given
climate, soil time (etc)?

Maybe they're just not supposed to last.

#9. The ate salmon, they deposited plenty of bones in
areas and these bones were preserved. Only human
settlement over the next few tens of thousands of years
displaced/destroyed with with our building and farming.

Undoubtedly, countless archaeological sites have been
destroyed by later building and farming.

Rivers are NOT stagnant. i recall the excavation of a
riverboat here in the United States, a 19th century
steamer, and were it sank was at that time a full mile
distant from the river's present course. What people
don't "Get" is that all the archaeology that lay
between it's former course and it's present course
was effectively destroyed by the river's movement.

The river carved itself a channel, carving OUT what
used to exist where that new channel lay, and it
kept on carving away that soil for 100 years or more,
until everything along a mile-wide track had been
dug up & washed away.

Nature does that. But humans do it too.

Remember the old "Time Team" British show on
vandalism oops, no, I meant what passes for
archaeology in the U.K.? Which is vandalism, btw.

Quite a few ancient Roman sites where known
from the remains of Roman construction plowed
up in farm fields. Well, who were the Romans
plowing up? Or the people who lived their
thousands of years earlier; who were they plowing
up?




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