Plants and the meat of mammoths, red deer and horses were a major part of the diet of anatomically modern humans who lived in what is now Crimea, Ukraine, between 38,000 and 33,000 years ago.
Cro-Magnon artists painting woolly mammoths by Charles R. Knight.
“Anatomically modern humans colonized Europe around 45,000-43,000 years ago, replacing Neanderthals approximately 3,000 years later, with potential cultural and biological interactions between these two human groups,” said Professor Hervé Bocherens, a biogeologist at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and lead author of a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Many studies examine the question of what led to this displacement — one hypothesis postulates that the diet of the anatomically modern humans was more diverse and flexible and often included fish.”
In order to reconstruct the diet of Europe’s early Homo sapiens, Professor Bocherens and co-authors analyzed directly dated human and animal specimens from the Paleolithic site of Buran-Kaya III in Ukraine.
“Buran-Kaya III is a rock shelter located on the eastern bank of the Burulcha river in the Belogorsk region of south Crimea,” the researchers said.
“The site was discovered in 1990 by A. Yanevich (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) and excavated until 2001. It has provided a rich archaeological sequence including two Upper Paleolithic layers, from which human fossils were retrieved and directly dated as from 37,800 to 33,100 years before present.”
Proportional contribution of Deer&Horse (red deer and horse), Saiga (saiga antelope), Mammoth (woolly mammoth) and Hare (hare) as estimated by Drucker et al for human remains from different layers of Buran-Kaya III; each symbol corresponds to the mean protein diet contribution to a given human individual. Bars indicate standard deviations. Image credit: Drucker et al, doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-07065-3.
The scientists measured the percentage of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the bones of early humans and the locally present potential prey animals such as saiga antelopes, horses, and deer.
They also analyzed the nitrogen-15 content of individual amino acids, making it possible to not only determine the origin, but also the proportion of the nitrogen.
“Our results reveal a very high proportion of the nitrogen isotope 15N in early modern humans,” Professor Bocherens said.
“However, contrary to our previous assumptions, these do not originate from the consumption of fish products, but primarily from mammoths.”
“The proportion of plants in the diet of the anatomically modern humans from Buran-Kaya III was significantly higher than in comparable Neanderthal finds — mammoths, on the other hand, appear to have been one of the primary sources of meat in both species,” said lead author Dr. Dorothée Drucker, a biogeologist at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.
“According to our results, Neanderthals and the early modern humans were in direct competition in regard to their diet, as well — and it appears that the Neanderthals drew the short straw in this contest.”
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Dorothée G. Drucker et al. 2017. Isotopic analyses suggest mammoth and plant in the diet of the oldest anatomically modern humans from far southeast Europe. Scientific Reports 7, article number: 6833; doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-07065-3
