Our ancestors might have been less carnivorous than we think – or so suggests new research that examined the oldest known piece of hominid poop:
The poop comes from five separate soil samples taken from a known Neanderthal site in El Salt, Spain, and is believed to date back roughly 50,000 years. The find puts to shame the previous oldest hominid poop discovered in the Western Hemisphere, a 14,000-year-old piece of shit found in an Oregon cave (that particular fecal find is in dispute).
Some brave souls from MIT and the University of La Laguna (“samples were collected by hand,” the researchers said) analyzed the makeup of the samples and found that Neanderthals ate a diet dominated by meat, but definitely ate some plants, as well.
That’s because lead researcher Ainara Sistiaga and his team were able to identify, for the first time, the presence of metabolites such as 5B-stigmastanol and 5B-epistigmastanol, which are created when the body digests plant matter. The existence of those metabolites “unambiguously record the ingestion of plants,” Sistiaga writes…
But it’s possible Neanderthals didn’t eat their veggies directly:
Sistiaga said it was possible, though unlikely, that the fecal biomarkers she and her colleagues found were solely the result of Neanderthals eating the stomach contents of their prey. “In any case, this would represent another way to eat plants,” she said.
A few updates from readers:
This may be pedantic but please don’t refer to Neanderthals as our ancestors. We did not descend from Neanderthals. We share a common ancestor with them, and there is evidence for breeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, but that is different from calling Neanderthals our ancestors. With that line of thought, though, the diet of Neanderthals, a physically distinct and not-ancestral hominid, would not really have any pertinence towards what I ought to eat.
Another:
I need to correct that earlier comment from one of your other readers. Neanderthals are in your ancestral tree if you happen to have European or Asian ancestry. There was some interbreeding of Neanderthals with the populations of H. sapiens who left Africa. Between 1 and 4 percent of European and Asian genomes is Neanderthal. So, yes, they were our ancestors, unless you happen to of African origin with no European or Asian in your family tree …
Another attests:
According to my 23&me genetic profile, I’m 3.2% Neanderthal.
The Dish 