In Gruta de Figueira Brava, a seaside cave just south of Lisbon along Portugal’s Atlantic coast, archaeological digs have produced ample remains that reveal the specifics of the ancient Neanderthal diet.

A study just published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reports that, in addition to the charcoal remains of past cooking fires, excavators unearthed deep and rich deposits of shells and bones that come from the animals the Neanderthals consumed.

"At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs," said study lead author Dr. Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, in a Frontiers press release.

“The marine crustacean assemblage recovered from Gruta da Figueira Brava is the first known from the Middle Paleolithic,” the study authors wrote in their Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology article, acknowledging both the uniqueness and importance of this find.

"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," Nabais declared.

"Together with the associated evidence for the large-scale consumption of limpets, mussels, clams, and a range of fish, our data falsify the notion that marine foods played a major role in the emergence of putatively superior cognitive abilities among early modern human populations of sub-Saharan Africa."