Big eats from a 12,000-year-old burial
Communal feasting may have existed prior to farming’s invention
By Bruce Bower
Nacho-fueled Super Bowl bashes and multi-course wedding banquets may hark back to a time when preagricultural people devoured wild animal meat at their comrades’ gravesides.
That’s what happened 12,000 years ago at Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel, say zooarchaeologist Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and archaeologist Leore Grosman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At least 35 members of the Natufian culture gathered there to chow down on wild tortoise meat at the burial pit of an elderly woman who probably had been a shaman, the researchers report in a paper scheduled to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wild cattle meat was also served either at that feast or at a separate gathering for another person interred in the cave, they propose.