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.

[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.

No thanks...

[overlook77]

Look how that worked out for them....

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.

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.