Scientists have analysed plaque on Neanderthal teeth and worked out what some of them actually ate. Could you stomach it?
We know that some Neanderthals actually ate mushrooms, moss, wild sheep and woolly rhinos because scientists have analysed the DNA found in ancient plaque on their teeth.
In a paper published in the journal Nature today, Laura Weyrich from the University of Adelaide and her colleagues describe what they found when they analysed the plaque found on the teeth of five Neanderthals: two found in Spain; two from Belgium; and one from Italy.
Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC
The team found traces of woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, showing that two of the Neanderthals lived up to their meat-eating reputation. But others show no evidence of having eaten meat, and seem to have made up a vegetarian diet including mushrooms, moss, and pine nuts by foraging from their surroundings.
This matches up with previous research which has also suggested the same group of Neanderthals from Spain did not eat meat. "We were joking around a lot saying that the [Spanish Neanderthals] are probably on the true Paleo diet, this opportunistic diet of eating anything you can find to keep yourself alive, rather than going into a grocery store and picking out what vegetables you'd like to eat," Weyrich told BuzzFeed News.
She cautions that it's not yet clear whether what she and her colleagues found gives a comprehensive view of what these populations ate, or just a snapshot of what they ate right before they died.
“We really don’t know if we’re looking at their last meal, or random bits over their last ten years of meals,” she said. "But we really think that the diets do reflect different lifestyles and ways of living and different environments the Neanderthals were living in, i.e. what food they had access to."
The team also found that one Neanderthal seemed to have treated a dental abscess using the bark from the poplar tree – a natural painkiller because it contains salicylic acid, an ingredient in aspirin.
from BuzzFeed - Kelly Oakes http://ift.tt/2m2ZrVP
