From “Fish and birds gave Neanderthals fine dining” (New Scientist October 29, 2011), we learn:
THEY may have been partial to a chunky slab of meat, but very early on Neanderthals also had a taste for fine dining treats like fish and small birds. The findings show that our long-lost cousins were cognitively advanced from the get-go, long before modern humans appeared in Europe.
Discoveries of jewellery and make-up at 50,000-year-old sites show that around the time they went extinct Neanderthals had a taste for the finer things in life. Now that evidence has been pushed back to their first appearance in Europe.
Look, we KNEW this. You think those Neanderthal baggages were relying on their native charms when they went after our men? Look at them. It is to laugh. They probably stole all that stuff. Like they stole the men. Men are just so 😆 dumb.
No, but seriously, of course Neanderthals would mainly eat fish and small birds for protein. Large game are difficult and dangerous to bring down, and require many days of work afterward preserving the meat – assuming one even knows how to do it – and tanning the hides. It’s worthwhile, in the long run, but probably was not the main day-to-day source of food.
Teaching a boy to use a slingshot would be wiser and safer for daily life. Any Aboriginal Canadian who hunted buffalo now and then could have told us that.