Dental calculus indicates plant consumption in Neanderthal diet

The ecology of Neanderthals is a pressing area of enquiry in the study of the evolution of hominins (modern humans and their fossil ancestors). Diet appears to have played a major role in their adaptation to Eurasia—the combined continental land mass of Europe and Asia. Earlier studies have reconstructed the Neanderthal diet as heavily meat-based. However, a recent study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig found that the diet of Neanderthals did include widespread consumption of plants.

Only a fragmentary understanding of the Neanderthal dietary ecology and how it may have varied among habitats is available today because researchers lack broad and environmentally representative information about their use of plants and other foods. Therefore, the study examined plant micro-remains in dental calculus from 28 samples—representing 22 Neanderthal individuals—from five archaeological sites covering a variety of environments, from the northern Balkans, and the western, central and eastern Mediterranean.

The recovered micro-remains revealed that Neanderthals ate a variety of non-animal foods, including starchy plants. In contrast to some previous work, the researchers found no evidence that plant use was confined to the southern-most areas of Neanderthal distribution. Although interpreting the ecogeographic variation is limited by the incomplete preservation of dietary micro-remains, it is clear that plant exploitation was a widespread and deeply rooted Neanderthal subsistence strategy, even if they were predominately game hunters.

The study, titled “Dental calculus indicates widespread plant use within the stable Neanderthal dietary niche”, was published in the June 2018 issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

The study was conducted in collaboration with the University of Foggia in Italy, the Ephorate for Paleoanthropology and Speleology of Southern Greece in Athens, the University of Tübingen in Germany and the University of Murcia in Spain.