Neanderthals living 90,000 years ago in a seafront cave, in what’s now Portugal, regularly caught crabs, roasted them on coals and ate the cooked flesh, according to a new study.

“Our results add an extra nail to the coffin of the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were primitive cave dwellers who could barely scrape a living off scavenged big-game carcasses,” said study author Dr. Mariana Nabais, a postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, in a news release.

Archaeologists excavating the site at Gruta daFigueira Brava, roughly 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Lisbon, had also found the remains of shellfish.

This latest study found the Neanderthals hunted mostly larger adult crabs, suggesting they had been selected for the size, with a shell or carapace about 16 centimeters (6.3 inches) wide.

“Whether such foods were perceived as tasteful, reflected some sort of festivity, added social value to whoever harvested them, or had other consumption-associated meanings is beyond our grasp,” the study that published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology said.

While crabs aren’t easy to catch by hand, the study said it was likely they were caught in shallow low-tide rock pools near the cave, perhaps aided by spears to stun them.