Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies

sciencehabit (1205606) writes Scientists excavating an archaeological site in southern Spain have finally gotten the real poop on Neanderthals, finding that the Caveman Diet for these quintessential carnivores included substantial helpings of vegetables. Using the oldest published samples of human fecal matter, archaeologists have found the first direct evidence that Neanderthals in Europe cooked and ate plants about 50,000 years ago.

Comments

Seems strange.

[kruach aum]

Omnivores eating things that are edible? I thought extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof.

Re:Seems strange.

[Thanshin]

Omnivores eating things that are edible? I thought extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof.

In this case, extraordinary claims did require extraordinary poop.

Re:Seems strange.

[Ol Olsoc]

Omnivores eating things that are edible? I thought extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof.

Ohh, I hope it was gluten free.

Re:Seems strange.

[martin-boundary]

Poopycock!

Every animal when faced with hunger, will try to eat anything that looks remotely edible to it. The belief that neanderthals wouldn't be eating vegetables regularly is ridiculous.

Re:Seems strange.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's nice to see that somebody found some coproliths (isn't it nice that there's a scientific synonym for 'shit rocks'?) and managed to get more detailed data (tooth structure and clever isotopic work can distinguish carnivores from onmivores or herbivores; but actual digested material might even allow you to identify plant types, depending on preservation, presence of seeds, etc.); but I'd always had the impression that the 'Cavemen, like, ate meat all the time' considered so disproven as to be barely worth mentioning, given that the dental records suggested that neanderthals weren't wildly different from humans in terms of chewing optimizations, and basically every pre-agricultural society ever(except maybe inuit, since there isn't much to 'gather' on the ice) have combined some amount of hunting with some amount of gathering.

There is a fairly noticeable change when agriculture hits the scene (suddenly all rice/millet/wheat/etc. all the time becomes a thing for the squalid underclass, minus any small livestock that can be raised on scraps); but there is nothing suggesting that hominids with alternatives ever went meat-only.

Re:Seems strange.

[Shakrai]

In this case, extraordinary claims did require extraordinary poop.

Queue image of Jeff Goldblum, taking off his sunglasses, then saying "That is one big pile of shit."

Re:Seems strange.

[bored_engineer]

. . .except maybe inuit, since there isn't much to 'gather' on the ice. . .

They didn't really live on the ice. It was just a temporary place to use while hunting. While the Inupiat and Yupik (as well as other Inuit people) obtained (and many still do) most of their calories from hunting, they still gathered and preserved tubers, lichen, seaweed and berries. I don't think any Inuit cultivated crops, but some did practice animal husbandry.

Re:Seems strange.

[Axynter]

Dental records are not as relevant for a species that uses tools to process food; tools/food processing technologies can make any food item suitable for any dentition.

The thing with Neanderthals is that _direct_ evidence (c.f. article) from the isotopic composition of bone collagen indicates they obtained most of their _protein_ from meat. This doesn't mean they didn't eat veggies - low protein fruits, for example, would be more or less invisible isotopically. What the isotope data tells us is that they relied on meat to a greater extent than anatomically modern humans (AMHs), to the point that their nitrogen stable isotope ratios, which are enriched with each trophic level, are as high as those of carnivores. Such high values (or even higher) can be observed in AMHs whose diet includes a significant portion of fish, because the trophic chain in aquatic systems is longer and more complex, but the carbon stable isotope values do not show evidence for significant consumption of such aquatic resources with Neanderthals. So, basically, the isotopic evidence we have so far suggests that Neanderthals obtained much more of their protein from terrestrial animals than was/is the case with anatomically modern humans.

An important point to remember is that the isotopic values from bone collagen represent the _average_ diet over a long time span (it depends on the bone - e.g. a rib vs a femur - but it's several years). Dental calculus, and much more so poop, records the diet over a much shorter timespan, and are therefore not necessarily representative of overall diets. Dental calculus is particularly problematic in this regard because we don't understand all that well what gets preserved in it and what doesn't - a single meal of grains may leave a strong marker that will last years. Sure, you can look at dental calculus and say they ate grains, but the more interesting and/or important questions is: how often?

No thanks...

[overlook77]

Look how that worked out for them....

One Sample

[wisnoskij]

Not sure how much one sample can tell us about the diet of an entire species.

Re:One Sample

[jeffb (2.718)]

Seems like it shoots down the idea that no Neanderthal ate cooked veggies.

One counterexample goes a long way toward rejecting a theory.

Re:One Sample

[netsavior]

The fact that they had a high rate of conversion (i.e. they digested the plant instead of passing it) it is reasonable to assume that they were ADAPTED to eating veggies, which means it was part of the reason they survived/evolved.

Finding veggies in stool is no big deal, wild cats poop out grass all the time, it doesn't make them true omnivores.

They found DIGESTED vegetable matter, that is the true find, and one that easily extrapolates across the entire species.

Wrong species

[Anonymous Coward]

Before people start claiming that this proves that our ancestors ate such-and-such... remember Neanderthals aren't ancestors of modern Homo Sapiens but a different evolutionary branch altogether.

Which isn't to say that their and our common ancestors must have eaten a substantially different diet. Also, apparently there was some cross-breeding between our various ancestral species.

So what was my point again? Never mind.

Vegetables out of necessity, or out of preference?

[timrod]

One thing I'd be curious to find out is whether or not the Neanderthals were doing this because they preferred vegetables, or because they had nothing else around to eat.

Re:Vegetables out of necessity, or out of preferen

[Attila Dimedici]

You are asking the wrong question. There is no reason to suppose that Neanderthals preferred vegetables, since the conclusion is that they ate both vegetables and meat. I like meat, but I also eat vegetables. I do not eat vegetables because I prefer them to meat. Nor do I eat vegetables because I have nothing else around to eat. I eat vegetables because I like them (and sometimes because they are good for me).

Re:Vegetables out of necessity, or out of preferen

[will_die]

It was done as a bar bet after of bunch of shepherds were out drinking beer.

Re:That's not what my crossfit instructor told me!

[i kan reed]

Stupid knows no borders.

Re:Vegetables out of necessity, or out of preferen

[gstoddart]

I've always assumed that if they were hunter gatherers, part of the 'gathering' is likely to be food derived from plants.

If it has teeth like an omnivore, and poops like an omnivore, it's probably a freaking omnivore.

I should think not long after they got fire, they started cooking stuff.

My guess, they collected anything they knew they could eat, and ate it.

Re:That's not what my crossfit instructor told me!

[Tyler Durden]

It turns our that most people get the Paleo diet wrong. The diets of these people would differ wildly depending on the land they occupied.

For many of the myths espoused on what the Paleo diet was see here.

Re:same species, different race

[dryeo]

Species is much more subtle then no fertile interbreeding. Example, ring species where you have types a,b,c and a can breed with b, b can breed with c but a can not breed with c. There are examples (big cats I believe) where the off spring are fertile if a is male and b is female but infertile if b is male and a is female. Then there are the species that are fertile across species but aren't turned on by the other species or have different breeding seasons so don't breed.
Basically species are more of a spectrum then boolean and when it comes to modern Humans vs Neanderthals it is border line whether sub-species or separate species.

Re:Vegetables out of necessity, or out of preferen

[hey!]

Some of us are old enough to remember the Vietnam war, which in turn brought us in contact with the long running civil war in Laos. Anti-communist Hmong from Laos fought alongside Americans and after both Vietnam and Laos fell to the Communists many Hmong refugees were resettled here in the US along with their families.

I remember this story about S. nigrum from a newspaper account back in the 80s about foraging by local Hmong refugees. There were lots of stories about Hmong settling in, and because this was pre WWW you read them because you read pretty much everything in the paper that was even vaguely interesting.

Re:In the same sense that your ancestors are dead

[cusco]

No, Africans south of the Sahara don't have any Neanderthal genes, nor do many (most?) Asian and American populations. Some Asian populations also have Denesovian genes, and another subset has genetic input from a hominid we can only refer to as "unknown" since we don't have any samples of its genetic makeup. The book 'Children Of The Ice Age' has quite a bit of interesting research about Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Did you know that population density was so low in ice-age Europe that a person would probably meet no more that 30-50 other people during their entire life? Inbreeding is much less of a threat than most people think.