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A record of the regular exploitation of aquatic foods has been lacking in Neandertal Europe. By contrast, marine resources feature prominently—alongside personal ornaments, body painting, and linear-geometric drawings—in the archeology of Last Interglacial Africa. A competitive advantage scenario of human origins is that the habitual consumption of aquatic foods and the fatty acids they contain, which favor brain development, underpins the acquisition of modernity in cognition and behavior. The resulting innovations in technology, demographic growth, and enhanced prosociality would therefore explain modern humans’ out-of-Africa expansion with regard to both dispersal process (along coastal routes and to southern Asia first) and outcome (the demise of coeval non-modern Eurasians). A corollary of this view is that the paucity of marine foods at Neandertal coastal sites is a genuine …