Abstract
Despite the ubiquity of terrestrial gastropods in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological record, it is still unknown when and how this type of invertebrate resource was incorporated into human diets. In this paper, we report the oldest evidence of land snail exploitation as a food resource in Europe dated to 31.3-26.9 ka yr cal BP from the recently discovered site of Cova de la Barriada (eastern Iberian Peninsula). Mono-specific accumulations of large Iberus alonensis land snails (Ferussac 1821) were found in three different archaeological levels in association with combustion structures, along with lithic and faunal assemblages. Using a new analytical protocol based on taphonomic, microX-Ray Diffractometer (DXR) and biometric analyses, we investigated the patterns of selection, consumption and accumulation of land snails at the site. The results display a strong mono-specific gathering of adult individuals, most of them older than 55 weeks, which were roasted in ambers of pine and juniper under 375°C. This case study uncovers new patterns of invertebrate exploitation during the Gravettian in southwestern Europe without known precedents in the Middle Palaeolithic nor the Aurignacian. In the Mediterranean context, such an early occurrence contrasts with the neighbouring areas of Morocco, France, Italy and the Balkans, where the systematic nutritional use of land snails appears approximately 10,000 years later during the Iberomaurisian and the Late Epigravettian. The appearance of this new subsistence activity in the eastern and southern regions of Spain was coeval to other demographically driven transformations in the archaeological record, suggesting different chronological patterns of resource intensification and diet broadening along the Upper Palaeolithic in the Mediterranean basin.
Highlights
Diet change is a widely debated research topic of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition
Land snails found in the Gravettian levels of Cova de la Barriada reveal the existence of mono-specific gathering strategies focused on large pulmonate gastropods during the Early Upper Palaeolithic
Taphonomic analyses indicate significant differences between the breakage patterns documented for the Gravettian levels of Cova de la Barriada and those produced by other land snail accumulators such as birds, hedgehogs, badgers, mices and rats
Summary
Diet change is a widely debated research topic of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. Studies on vertebrate prey mobility, size and body biomass suggest that, in many areas of Europe, the first anatomically modern humans (AMH) had a broader diet than Neanderthals, who mainly focused on large- and medium-size herbivores [1,2,3] This view has been called into a question by the increasing body of archaeological evidence indicating that Neanderthals’ subsistence relied on a varied range of resources including plants, fish, birds, shellfish, tortoises, marine mammals and rabbits [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. As posed by Lubell [17,18], the environmental interest of Late Pleistocene land snails and the paucity of specific studies focused on taxonomic, taphonomic, quantitative and biometric studies have prevented an understanding of the beginning, context and specific modalities of this type of subsistence activity
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