Eating snails is not at all a contemporary culinary trend, but a practice that's moved across the dining tables of the world over many, many centuries, new research shows.

In fact, artifacts recently uncovered in Spain's Cova de la Barriada suggest humans have been eating the shelled mollusks for at least 30,000 years -- with Paleolithic humans living along the east coast of Spain adding snails to their diets long before other communities in the Mediterranean started slurping up the slimy creatures, according to a report by BBC News.

Archaeologists discovered a large number of snail shells and stone tools in cooking pits that appeared to date back to the Gravettian era, a period before the glacial age that was noted for its tool development.

The new findings, announced the researchers, prove conclusively humans have been consuming snails for tens of thousands of years.

"What this suggests is that these groups had already opted for a strategy of diet diversification that allowed them to increase their population," Javier Fernández-López de Pablo, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Evolution, told BBC News.

Fernández-López de Pablo added the research further supports the theory that humans started experimenting with different types of foods very early in their evolutionary growth.

As human beings diversified their living methods, they diversified their eating habits according to the local conditions, the research confirmed.

Still, researchers are unsure about human populations elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast - such as France, Italy, Greece, Middle East and the Africa in North Africa, France - who didn't begin eating snails until 10,000 years later.

The Iberus alonensis snail, which was abundant and indigenous to the Iberian Peninsula and a member of Phylum Molluska, characterized by a soft body inside a shell, was a feasting favorite of the Romans.