Neanderthals “loved to eat maggots”

Neanderthals loved eating maggots, and were not all of the carnivores that people often believed that they were, as a study showed.

It has long been assumed that Neanderthals, the old cousin species of our human ancestors, ate almost nothing but meat in a similar way to lions or wolves.

However, a study has found that this is wrong and proves that Neanderthals have largely eaten meat cut with maggots.

The meat of successful hunts would be hidden and inevitably left to the fuses, but the maggots that took root were probably also a staple for their diet, as new analyzes were found.

Earlier studies on Neanderthals have shown that they had the same chemicals in their bones as Hypercarnivore predators, which indicates a purely carnivorous diet.

This, combined with the knowledge that Neanderthals chased animals such as mammoths, bison, deer and reindeer, led to the widespread assumption that Neanderthals ate almost nothing but meat.

But Dr. Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University in Indiana, US, suspected that this is wrong, and studied maggots who go to humans to see if they could explain the chemical signature what a carnivore diet implies.

The analysis showed that the muscles themselves, when a carcass falsifies, is only slightly enriched with the specific shape of the nitrogen found in Neanderthal remains.

But if maggots eat the meat and are consumed themselves, they can be up to 43 percent in nitrogen that scientists have previously behaved as carnivore.

“We suggest that the nitrogen values are inflated, perhaps essentially, since these committed hunters had saved large mammals of large parts of their kills for later use or stored in order to compensate for unpredictable returns,” wrote the student team.

“Backup reserves of animal foods, either as packages with processed meat and fat or as partially or as part or complete carcass, would be in functional above-ground rock or logarithmic Cairns that are hung on tree branches or hung on above-ground designs or stages, in ponds and swamps or in underground pits or in sub-died Pits Personal or underground Pits were brought.

“Such reserves, whether fresh, dried or smoked, applied slightly during their processing, and in the course of the useful life, the content began to fell almost inevitably and have affected with maggots.”

This slowly rotting meat, which was devoured by maggots, could have been eaten for weeks, months or even years after his first hunting.

In order to assess which nutrients contained maggots that bury the scientists 34 human bodies that were donated to research in the establishment of the Body Farm of the University of Tennessee.

After two years, the maggots were examined and it was found that they were the likely reason for the high nitrogen content in Neanderthal shelves, which led to the assumption that they were almost exclusively carnivore.

Another factor in the conclusion of the scientists about the Neanderthal diet is that it is impossible for a human body to survive for a very long time if it consumes more than 300 g protein a day. A longer exposure to a diet. In addition, a “rabbit hunger”, in which the body begins, can come to a “rabbit hunger” in which the body begins to close.

This biological incompatibility with protein-heavy diet and the Maggot nitrogen finding is strong evidence that the Neanderthals was not a hypercarnivore like lion, the scientists say.

“A lion consumes an average of two and a half times more protein per kg body weight than the absolute maximum that a late Pleistocene Hominin would be able to tolerate,” wrote the scientists.

The Neanderthal diet probably had tongue, ribs, briskets, guts, kidneys and other inner organs and probably also the brain, the scientists believe.

“Fascination” of the Hypercarnivore picture

But Dr. Beasley believes that Neanderthals have often eaten these high -fat tissues in a spoiled or lazy state together with their almost inevitable infestation of living and dead maggots.

“It is very likely that Hominine in the late Pleistocene would often have consumed animal foods from spoiled or lazy reserves with living and dead maggots,” she told The Telegraph.

“I think the Hypercarnivore narrative over Neanderthals was wrong for a long time, but this picture contributes to its exception and fascination, so that the story existed.

“Hominine regularly ate meat, starting with Homo erectus, but they also ate a variety of other foods.

“We only say that we have to take these other dietary inputs into account such as the inevitable stored foods, which would have been advantageous with high -fat maggots that would have been advantageous.”

The study is published in scientific advances.