The last of the Neanderthals feasted on warmed mussels, baby seals and washed-up dolphins, according to fossil hunters working in ancient seaside caves in Gibraltar.
Excavations in the giant Gorham's and Vanguard caves on the Rock's eastern flank unearthed flint stone tools and remnants of seafood meals alongside the long-dead embers of hearths, which have been carbon-dated to around 28,000 years ago.
The findings suggest that Neanderthals who lived in the caves exploited the plentiful resources that the Mediterranean shoreline provided, and may help explain why groups living in Gibraltar clung on to life while those elsewhere became extinct around 7,000 years earlier.
An international team led by Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London and Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar Museum uncovered bones and shells that had clearly been butchered with primitive cutting and stripping tools.
Among the remains of wild boar, red deer, ibex and bears, they found bones and shells from monk seals, dolphins and mussels. Many of the bones had sustained damage from cutting and peeling, while the mussels had apparently been warmed on a fire to open them up.
Today the caves are just 10 metres from the water's edge, but 30,000 years ago, when ice was still locked up in vast sheets to the north, the sea would have been 1-2 kilometres away, across sand dunes and woodland.
Gorham's cave, the larger of the two, is 35m high at the entrance and goes back more than 100m into the rock. Several smaller caverns that lead off the main cave have yet to be excavated.
"They would have had bone or wooden clubs to kill young seals and may have had skin bags to collect mussels in, which they brought back to the cave and put on the embers of a fire to open them," said Prof Stringer.
"The dolphins would have been delivered to them dead on a plate, after they beached either because they were ill, injured or had died at sea. From the cave they had a great vantage point, and if they couldn't see the dolphins wash ashore, they would see the birds gathering and would be able to go down and claim the carcass for themselves," he added.
As a test, the scientists gathered fresh mussels and put them on the warm ashes of a fire to confirm that the shells opened up to expose their soft flesh.
The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It's evocative being in these caves. You can expose a stone tool and know you're the first person to hold it since a Neanderthal tens of thousands of years ago," said Stringer.
The plentiful food supply and stabilising influence of the Atlantic on the local climate is thought to have protected the Neanderthals in Gibraltar from the effects of glaciation further north, which played havoc with vegetation and the animals that grazed on it, almost certainly hastening the demise of our closest hominid cousins.
Modern humans and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, around half a million years ago. While the Mediterranean H. heidelbergensis evolved into the Neanderthals, in Africa the same species evolved along a different path that ultimately gave rise to modern-day H. sapiens.
Remains of Neanderthals dating back 400,000 years suggest they were reasonably sophisticated, crafting hand tools and weapons, harnessing fire and burying their dead.
For more on the discovery, watch an interview with Chris Stringer recorded by the Natural History Museum in London.