by Neanderthals had an insatiable appetite for meat. They chased Big Game and pulled onto the woolen mammoth steak when they turned around a fire. At least many archaeologists who study the Stone Age thought.
Fresh meat was far from being the only one on the menu, according to a growing research that showed that our archaic cousins ate a varied diet that included impulses and shellfish.
A chemical signature in Neanderthals, which indicates that a robust meat eating is observed at higher levels than with top predators such as lions and wolves – researchers for decades. Now new research work indicates an unexpected stone age feed.
Maden – The larvae of flies that hatch and feed in decaying animal fabric – could also have been a staple for prehistoric diets, a study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances.
The senior author Melanie Beasley, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, found that a taste for maggots could explain an unmistakable chemical signature that was demonstrated in the bones of prehistoric people, including Homo Sapiens and Nearander, which died out 40,000 years ago.
The results support a hypothesis that Beasley’s co -author John Speth, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, had been proposed, which has argued for almost a decade that lazy meat and fish had formed an important part of prehistoric diets. His work was based on ethnographic reports on the nutrition of indigenous groups, of which he said that they found lazy meat and maggot acceptable dishes.
“Not a lot of people noticed because it was an out-out idea. And there was no data,” said Beasley, who heard a lecture in 2017 and then decided to test his hypothesis.
Understanding of previous diets
In order to understand earlier diets and in which an animal was sitting in the old food chain, scientists examine the chemical signature of different isotopes or variants of elements such as nitrogen or carbon, which are preserved in teeth and bones for thousands of years.
The leading author Melanie Beasley has taken this picture of a “Maggot Mass” for a follow-up study in connection with the newly published paper. – Melanie Beasley
The researchers found for the first time in the nineties that the bones of the Neanderthals triggered in Northern Europe had particularly increased values of the nitrogen 15 isotope, a chemical signature that indicates that their meat consumption with hypercarnivors such as lion or wolves corresponds.
“Grass has a (nitrogen) value, but then the deer that eats the grass has a higher value, and then the carnivore that eats the deer will have an even higher value,” said Beasley. “This way you can track nitrogen through this trophic food network system.” Neanderthals have even higher nitrogen values than carnivores.
However, this was puzzling because, unlike wolves and lions, modern people cannot endure large amounts of lean meat. Allocation can lead to a potentially fatal form of malnutrition, in which the liver cannot destroy the protein and free the body of excess nitrogen.
The disease known as protein poisoning was more common among European discoverers of North America, which described the disease as “rabbit poisoning” or “Mal de Caribou”, since the wild game was far more slim than today’s breeding meat. Archaeologists believe that Neanderthals have understood the importance of fat nutrients, and at least in a place in today’s Germany processed animal bones on a large scale to extract fat.
Rotten meat can be higher in nitrogen than fresh tissue and may have been responsible for increasing the nitrogen level in Neanderthal bones, as the research of Speth proposed.
Shortly after Speth Speak had heard, Beasley, previously decided to investigate a postdoctoral at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she carried out research in her forensic anthropology center. The research facility, which is sometimes referred to as a body farm, was set up to examine how the human body is decomposing.
There she analyzed the nitrogen level in the rotting tissue of mealed human corpses that were left outdoors and in the fly larvae formed in the muscle tissue. The work that was carried out over a period of two years required a strong stomach, she said.
Mids that form with decomposing meat may have played an important role in diets from Stone Age. – Ian Thraves/Alamy Stock Photo
Beasley found that the nitrogen level increases slightly over time in human tissue. However, she observed much higher nitrogen levels in the fly larvae, which indicates that Neanderthals and early modern people probably consumed animal meat regularly.
“I started getting back the (nitrogen) values and they were only astronomically high,” recalled Beasley.
“John (Speth) and I started talking: what if it is not just the foul meat, but it is the fact that … they will never be able to fly and land on the meat, so the fly larva simply become part of the delicacy,” she said.
The data of your work not only offers insights into the Neanderthal diet, but also provides information on modern forensic science with nitrogen levels in maggots that form in human bodies that have determined scientists since death, as it has stated.
“No child’s play”
It was a “no breeze” that Neanderthals ate maggots, said Karen Hardy, professor of prehistoric archeology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
Hardy, who was not involved in the study, said the authors made a “strong argument for Maggoten consumption”, although such behavior is probably not conclusive, since Maggot’s remains in archaeological reconciliation.
“The surprise element has more to do with our western perspective what is edible and what is not,” she added.
Nowadays, according to the United Nations organization, at least 2 billion people worldwide are consumed as part of traditional nutrition.
The study also found that, according to historical reports, many indigenous peoples such as the Inuit “thoroughly vaguely furred Maggot -supplied animal feed as extremely desirable tariff and not hungry rations”. According to the study, “many of such groups allowed them to be routinely, often deliberately decorated animal foods to a point at which they crawl with maggots, even started to liquefy, and inevitably spend a stench that was so overwhelming that early European explorers, furry trappers and missionaries became sick.”
Knud Rasmussen, a Polar explorer from Greenland, recorded the following culinary experience in his book “The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spirit Culture”, which was cited in the 1931 study.
“The meat was green with the age, and when we made a cut in it, it was like the bursting of a cooking, as full of large white maggots. To my horror, my companions were pulled out handful of the creeping things and ate them with obvious sensitively. They taste just like the meat and refreshing up to the mouth.”
The study also found that maggots in western culinary traditions are not unknown, and found.
Casu Marzu is a hard cheese that bridles so that maggots soften its taste. – Anja Barte Telin/The disgusting Food Museum
Beasley said that northern width groups still process these foods today and consume them safely if they are prepared for traditional practices.
restrictions
Beasley’s research on modern corpses was exploratory and had several restrictions, she warned.
The work, which included small samples, focused on human muscle tissue, not on the tissue or the organs of animals that could have been hunted by Neanderthals. In addition, the fly larvae, which came from three different families, might have deviated from those that existed in the late Pleistocene, which ended around 11,000 years ago.
The study also did not make up the large number of climate zones and temperatures that would affect stored meat in the Stone Age. She also added that the human body tissue was not cooked, processed or prepared in any way.
Beasley spoke to researchers in Alaska in the hope of combining with local groups that would be interested in sharing traditional food preparations. Your goal is to better understand how this could affect the nitrogen content.
The new research has opened a fascinating line of investigation into the culinary practices of hunters and collectors of stone times such as Neanderthals, said Wil Roebroek, emeritus professor of Paleolithic archeology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He was not involved in research.
“There is certainly a fresh one – if this is the right word here – perspective on Neanderthals and other diets of the late Pleistocene,” added roeebroks.
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