Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For decades, many paleoarchaeologists believed Neanderthals went extinct largely because they just weren’t intelligent enough to compete with their Homo sapien relatives. However, mounting historical evidence suggests this was far from the case. The latest discovery to help the Neanderthal’s reputation ion? The ancient hominins knew when and how to safely snack on shellfish potentially thousands of years before their human descendants. The findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focus on Neanderthals who lived at Los Aviones Cave in present-day Cartagena, Spain. Researchers discovered the remains of 115,000-year-old mollusks including gastropods and limpets that were clearly harvested as food. This contradicts past theories about Neanderthals, which suggested they had difficulty adapting to coastal environments and utilizing marine resources. What’s more, the Neanderthals here didn’t eat shellfish in large quantities all the time. Instead, they knew to make the most of them between November and April during the colder seasons. “They consumed marine resources …