Neanderthals lived mainly on mammoth and rhino meat, as well as some plant food, says a team of researchers led by Prof. Hervé Bocherens from the University of Tübingen’s Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal. Image credit: Neanderthal Museum.
“We have taken a detailed look at the Neanderthals’ diet. In the process, we were able to determine that the extinct relatives of today’s humans primarily fed on large herbivorous mammals such as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses,” Prof. Bocherens said.
Two excavation sites in Belgium – Spy Cave and the ‘Troisieme caverne’ of Goyet — offered Prof. Bocherens and his colleagues a vast array of 45,000 to 40,000 year-old bones of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, wild horses, reindeer, European bison, cave hyenas, bears and lions as well as the remains of wolves. The immediate vicinity also revealed the bones of several Neanderthals.
Based on isotope studies of the collagen in the Neanderthal bones, the team was able to demonstrate that Neanderthals’ diet differed markedly from that of predatory animals.
“Previously, it was assumed that Neanderthals utilized the same food sources as their animal neighbors,” Prof. Bocherens said.
“However, our results show that all predators occupy a very specific niche, preferring smaller prey as a rule, such as reindeer, wild horses or steppe bison, while the Neanderthals primarily specialized on the large plant-eaters such as woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.”
But Neanderthals did not solely thrive on meat — studies of the isotope composition of individual amino acids in the collagen offer proof that plant matter constituted 20% of their diet.
“In scientific circles, this evolution-biologically relevant question has been discussed intensively for decades, albeit without leading to any tangible results,” the researchers said.
“In this study, we were able for the first time to quantitatively determine the proportion of vegetarian food in the diet of the late Neanderthals. Similar results were found for more recent Stone Age humans.”
Prof. Bocherens and co-authors reported their results in a pair of papers in the Journal of Human Evolution and the journal Quaternary International.
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Christoph Wißing et al. Isotopic evidence for dietary ecology of late Neandertals in North-Western Europe. Quaternary International, published online December 15, 2015; doi: 10.1016/j.quaint.2015.09.091
Y.I. Naito et al. 2016. Ecological niche of Neanderthals from Spy cave revealed by nitrogen isotopes of individual amino acids in collagen. Journal of Human Evolution 93: 82-90; doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2016.01.009
