Ancient Spaniards Chowed on Snail 30,000 Years Ago

Researchers have stumbled upon a fossil site that revealed that a group of Homo sapiens in Spain were cooking themselves a nice meal of snail between 32,000 and 26,000 years ago. That's about 10,000 years before experts believe ancient Frenchmen took up the same dining habit.

These findings are detailed in a study that was recently published in the journal PLOS One.

According to the study, archaeologists recently unearthed a large trove of snail shells and other animal remains in Cova de la Barriada. But this isn't just some ancient mass grave for snails.

Lead investigator and study author Javier Fernández-López de Pablo, from the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Evolution, writes that this fossil cache has all the clear signs that it was a cooking pit used by paleolithic humans somewhere around 30,000 years ago. Within and around the pit, Pablo and his team also found tools, suggesting that the snails were a prepared dish.

Pablo told BBC News that this is "clearly the oldest record [of snail consumption] we have so far."

Previously discovered fossil sites indicate that 10,000 years after these ancient Spaniards ate their first juicy snail, other humans living along the Mediterranean coast of northern Africa, France, Italy, Greece and the Middle East also started consuming the tiny shell - the early beginnings of the famous French dish referred to as "escargot" today.

According to the study, the researchers had to be very careful when reaching their conclusions, as snail and mollusk remains are seen as "invasive remains" - meaning they were dropped into archaeological sites by various predators over the centuries.

However, "here we find huge amounts, very concentrated and very well selected, next to clear evidence of human activity," Pablo told BBC.

More than 110 samples of snail remains were excavated so far, and all were about the same large size. This indicates that the ancient humans only picked adult snails to consume, knowingly or unwittingly conserving local populations with their pickiness.

Even in modern times, it's not just the French who eat snails, Pablo is quick to add. The next time you visit Spain, he said, you can imagine sharing a meal with cavemen.