Neanderthals may have medicated with penicillin and painkillers
Well we will never know the full story, but interesting anyway .
The team focused on three Neanderthals – two 48,000-year-old specimens from a site called El Sidrón in Spain and a 39,000-year-old specimen from a site called Spy in Belgium. The results suggested that the Spy Neanderthal often dined on woolly rhinoceros, sheep and mushrooms – but no plants. The El Sidrón Neanderthals ate more meagre fare: moss, bark and mushrooms – and, apparently, no meat.
Vegetarian cannibals?
“That was really a surprise to us,” says Weyrich. “I think the assumption has always been that Neanderthals had diets based around heavy meat consumption. For us not to find any meat in the El Sidrón individuals was quite strange.”
There is a certain irony to that finding, says Paola Villa at the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder, given that cut marks on Neanderthal bones from El Sidrón are often interpreted as evidence of cannibalism. “They may have had a diet of mostly plants but paradoxically they provided meat to the Neanderthals that killed them,” she says.
Well we will never know the full story, but interesting anyway .
The team focused on three Neanderthals – two 48,000-year-old specimens from a site called El Sidrón in Spain and a 39,000-year-old specimen from a site called Spy in Belgium. The results suggested that the Spy Neanderthal often dined on woolly rhinoceros, sheep and mushrooms – but no plants. The El Sidrón Neanderthals ate more meagre fare: moss, bark and mushrooms – and, apparently, no meat.
Vegetarian cannibals?
“That was really a surprise to us,” says Weyrich. “I think the assumption has always been that Neanderthals had diets based around heavy meat consumption. For us not to find any meat in the El Sidrón individuals was quite strange.”
There is a certain irony to that finding, says Paola Villa at the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder, given that cut marks on Neanderthal bones from El Sidrón are often interpreted as evidence of cannibalism. “They may have had a diet of mostly plants but paradoxically they provided meat to the Neanderthals that killed them,” she says.
