Neanderthals may very well have been foodies, reveals the findings of an excavation in Northern Iraq

The results of an excavation in Northern Iraq suggest that Neanderthals, the closest genetic ancestors of us, who existed up until 40,000 years ago, may have been food enthusiasts.

The discovery of pieces of ‘very tasty’ pancake-cum-flatbread among the remains of what may be the oldest cooked meal ever discovered, has led to convincing claims that Neanderthals had a vibrant culinary culture and did not rely on uncooked animal flesh or plant berries.

One of the four food remnant pieces ‘particularly resembled experimental preparations and archaeobotanical examples of burnt bread-like foods or finely ground cereal meals,’ according to study published in Cambridge University’s ‘Antiquity’ magazine.

The burned food remnants were recovered from the Shanidar Cave site, an ancient Neanderthal dwelling 500 miles north of Baghdad in the Zagros Mountains.

‘Our findings are the first real indication of complex cooking – and thus of food culture – among Neanderthals,’ Chris Hunt, a professor of cultural paleoecology at Liverpool John Moores University, who coordinated the excavation, said in a statement.

The researchers concluded that the findings from Shanidar Cave site demonstrate that food choices and preparation practices traditionally associated with the intensification of plant resource use and the origin of farming clearly have a deep history that predates the earliest evidence of crop farming by several tens of thousands of years.