littor...@gmail.com wrote:
The one time I was in the Netherlands it was mostly
just "Bier & Pommes." I was shocked -- *Shocked*, I
tell you -- to discover near everyone on the continent
charged extra for ketchup!
On the flip side, they always had a variety of sauces,
with mayonnaise uncomfortably popular...
Uncomfortably??
It's just egg and oil. Fries/Pommes are greasy enough. Besides,
if I'm not eating them naked with salt or ketchup, it's usually
something warm: Cheese. Chili. Gravy... the Canadian style
"Poutine," which is cheese curds and gravy...
And to answer your question: Salmon was exploited
but the dating is tricky. Were they technically
"Neanderthals" by then, or were they more or less
hybrids, thanks to interbreeding with so called "Moderns"
from elsewhere?
H.erectus pachyosteosclerosis (POS) leaves no doubt:
they were slow+shallow divers for shellfish, perhaps crabs... esp. in salt?water.
H.neand. had POS occipita, but big noses surrounded by large para-nasal air sinuses:
no doubt they frequently back-floated,
they're often found in riverdales, e.g. Neander, Rhine, Meuse:
this suggests seasonally following the river from the sea, but why?
Being "one from De Zalm" (as we were called), I could only think of salmon trek... :-)
We may be up against a preservation bias. Although, keep in
mind, they do find significantly older evidence for Salmon
fishing further south, in Europe, they also find...
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/culture/archaeologists-discover-rare-type-evidence-prehistoric-salmon-fishing-northern-finland
: In the whole of Finland, for example, out of thousands of Stone
: Age (dating10,500–3,500 years ago) settlements, many of
: which were established along rivers once rich in seasonally
: migrating salmon, only six bones were identified in over 100
: years of archaeological exploration.
One obvious problem is that if anyone was in Finland BEFORE
the Holocene then they were stamping around on a glacier...
Salmon bones aren't easily preserved but, given enough of the
buggers they should be. Which means we have some interesting
possibilities:
#1. They hated Salmon or 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. But "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.
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...
#2. 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.
#3. They ate them bones & all.
This should in theory be testable, examining coprolites. But
coprolites are even less likely to be preserved!
#4. They were too dumb.
Maybe they never "Figured it out." Maybe they never noticed the
patterns.
#5. They were out of sync.
Simply put: Yes they were in the same place but not at the same
time!
#6. They caught them, they ate them but not there.
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.
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