A new study on Neanderthal dietary practices has just been published in the journal PNAS by researchers from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and several German scientific institutions. They were able to determine that a Neanderthal who lived in a cave on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Paleolithic period (50,000 years ago) ate exclusively carnivorous food using a newly developed method for studying the chemical signatures of ancient tooth enamel.
This isn't the first study to find this, either. Despite this, it is a one-of-a-kind and significant discovery because it was made through the development of a novel analytical method that could be used to learn more about the diet and way of life of Neanderthals who lived in other parts of Eurasia in the distant past.
To investigate the diet and eating habits of Neanderthals, numerous research projects have been initiated. However, they have resulted in contradictory outcomes. The CNRS researchers wrote in their PNAS paper, "The diet of Neanderthals is a topic of ongoing debate, especially since their disappearance has been frequently attributed to their subsistence strategy."The degree to which their diets varied over time and space is debatable.
The conventional testing of nitrogen isotope ratios has generally supported the notion that the Neanderthal diet was exclusively carnivorous, as the CNRS researchers acknowledge. However, a few studies have demonstrated convincing evidence that some Neanderthals were omnivorous.
For instance, a 2014 Science study that looked at fossilized Neanderthal excrement found at the El Salt site in Alicante, southern Spain, was published. The compounds in this 50,000-year-old feces were related to cholesterol and only came from plant-based foods.
Source: Ancient Origins