Neanderthals: How A Carnivore Diet May Have Led To Their Demise

AncientPages.com - Imagine that you have an unhealthy interest in your neighbors' lives. Unable to ask them directly, you rifle through their rubbish bins. You find the bones of cooked chickens and try and work out what else they eat.

This is a bit like how archaeologists study the diets of extinct humans such as the Neanderthals and early homo sapiens. This is about more than satisfying curiosity. Understanding our ancestors' diets may reveal critical clues about their evolutionary success or failure.

Credit: Adobe Stock - Gorodenkoff

A recent study which analyzed zinc from the tooth of a Neanderthal from Spain reveals they were mainly carnivores, wherever they lived. This discovery helps explain why they became extinct.

Neanderthals dominated Europe and western Asia during the last 200,000 years of the Ice Age, while homo sapiens were developing in Africa. Their remains and characteristic stone tools are abundant across Europe and the near East, and in smaller numbers as far east as Tadjikistan (which shares a border with China).

The Neanderthals lived in the heartlands of the Eurasian steppes (the largest grassland in the world, extending from Hungary to China), an area not rich in nutritional vegetables. But surveys of their campsites have revealed they ate nuts, fruits, mushrooms, shellfish and other food that can be easily gathered.

Neanderthals were a species constantly on the move who needed a high calorie diet. The butchered remains of horse, reindeer, bison and mammoths that Neanderthals left on their campsites reveal they hunted the most dangerous animals in their world. But that doesn't tell us whether their diets varied from group to group across their massive range.

Low carb diet

For the last two decades, advances in molecular biology have deepened archaeologists' understanding of early human diets. The cool conditions in northern Europe, such as France and Germany, help preserve collagen in fossil bone. With a technique called stable isotope analysis we can recover minute amounts of carbon and nitrogen from the collagen in early human bones, and find out where the protein they ate came from.

Cutmarks left by stone tools on this wing bone of a velvet scoter (sea duck), show that. smaller animals were part of Neanderthals’ diet. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Author provided

Isotopes are groups of atoms belonging to the same element but have different mass. Studies of these bones' isotopes have shown Neanderthals in northern Europe got 80–90% of their protein from animals. That's up there with the wolves and hyenas. In the arid southern parts of Europe we're not so lucky. Collagen in fossil bone easily disintegrates in warmer climates, taking with it the clues to southern Neanderthals' diets.

But over the last year archaeologists have found that traces of zinc in Neanderthal bones also preserve information about the diet of the ancient person who they belong to.