Neanderthal Use of Fish, Mammals, Birds, Starchy Plants and Wood 125-250,000 Years Ago

Hardy, Bruce; Moncel, Marie‐Hélène

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023768

Cited by 213 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Studies from Neanderthal sites outside Iberia suggest that Neanderthals hunted extensively (e.g., Lieberman, 1993;Lieberman and Shea, 1994), but focused almost exclusively on large game (e.g., Stiner and Kuhn, 1992;Stiner et al, 2000;Stiner, 2006), indicating a narrow diet. There is evidence that some Neanderthal groups in certain areas, such as the Caucasus (Adler et al, 2006;Adler and Bar-Oz, 2009) and France (Hardy and Moncel, 2011), may have had a wider diet that included plants and smaller animals, but this pattern is not very widespread.…”

Section: Zooarchaeological Dietary Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Salazar‐García

Power

Serra³

et al. 2013

Quaternary International

112

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a b s t r a c tDuring recent decades, Neanderthal diet has been a major research topic in palaeoanthropology. This has been accelerated by the maturation of different techniques, which have produced a plethora of new information. However, this proliferation of data has led to confusing and contradictory results. Furthermore, most of the ecological dietary studies have been carried out on specimens drawn from different time periods and regions, almost exclusively those characterized by cold, open environmental conditions. Subsistence models based on these fragmentary data have been applied to Neanderthals living in a variety of different regions and environments, even though their dietary strategies may have been as variable as regions they inhabited. In this paper we integrate different dietary approaches (studies of the zooarchaeology, stable isotopes and plant remains) from the central and southeastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia in order to develop a broader and more complex picture of Neanderthal diet in different Mediterranean environmental conditions. Our results suggest that there may have been some minor dietary variation due to climatic or environmental differences, but that Neanderthal diet focussed on large terrestrial game, supplemented by plant foods when these were available.Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Neanderthal dietary ecologyThe dietary behaviours of Neanderthals and the relationship between their diet and their social organization, technological abilities, and even their eventual disappearance, have been hotly debated in the anthropological literature. Examining the diets of Neanderthals requires the synthesis of data that have been collected by numerous researchers over the last 150 years. In many cases, the differences between Neanderthal and early modern human diets have been emphasized, at the expense of cogent discussion of the variation within each group. Early modern humans lived in a wide variety of environmental contexts and likely pursued a variety of behaviours throughout this range of environments. The exclusively Eurasian distribution of Neanderthals did not include as many environments, but neither was it the exclusively cold Arctic climate that many have supposed it to be. A more detailed examination of the Neanderthal range and the effects of shifting global climates reveals that this group would have been exposed to a diverse range of environments (Hoffecker, 2009;MacDonald et al., 2009). Just as modern human dietary behaviour likely varied with environments, so, too, can we predict that Neanderthals had different diets in different environments.Our understanding of the diets of Neanderthals comes from three main lines of evidence. The first is the study of the human remains themselves, including the isotope signal recorded in their bones, the microwear on their teeth, and how factors of their lifehistory are related to diet. The second line of evidence includes the study of the remains of their food, in the form of animal and plant remains preserved ...

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Section: Zooarchaeological Dietary Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Salazar‐García

Power

Serra³

et al. 2013

Quaternary International

112

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“…Phytoliths from edible plants have been recovered from sediments in several Near Eastern Neanderthal sites (Henry et al, 1996(Henry et al, , 2004Albert et al, 1999Albert et al, , 2000Rosen, 2003). More direct evidence for Neanderthal use of plants comes from studies of residues on stone tools from several sites in France (Hardy and Moncel, 2011;Hardy et al, 2013), and from the study of residues in dental calculus from El Sidron, Spain (Hardy et al, 2012). However, none of these studies have documented Neanderthal plant use across their range of environments and many are limited in their application, either providing only indirect evidence of plant use (plant remains in sediments) or giving limited or no information about which exact species were consumed (tool and tooth residue analysis).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plant foods and the dietary ecology of Neanderthals and early modern humans

Henry

Brooks

Piperno

2014

Journal of Human Evolution

199

135

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“…O ver the last few decades, a renewed interest in ancient diets has led to particular attention being paid to the plant residues recovered from tool surfaces and dental calculus in Paleolithic sites (e.g., refs. [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The data that we have collected have expanded our knowledge of the lifestyle of ancestral humans, indicating their familiarity with a wide variety of edible plants and their capacity for complex, multistep food processing.…”

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confidence: 80%

Multistep food plant processing at Grotta Paglicci (Southern Italy) around 32,600 cal B.P.

Lippi

Foggi

Aranguren³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Residue analyses on a grinding tool recovered at Grotta Paglicci sublayer 23A [32,614 ± 429 calibrated (cal) B.P.], Southern Italy, have demonstrated that early modern humans collected and processed various plants. The recording of starch grains attributable to Avena (oat) caryopses expands our information about the food plants used for producing flour in Europe during the Paleolithic and about the origins of a food tradition persisting up to the present in the Mediterranean basin. The quantitative distribution of the starch grains on the surface of the grinding stone furnished information about the tool handling, confirming its use as a pestlegrinder, as suggested by the wear-trace analysis. The particular state of preservation of the starch grains suggests the use of a thermal treatment before grinding, possibly to accelerate drying of the plants, making the following process easier and faster. The study clearly indicates that the exploitation of plant resources was very important for hunter-gatherer populations, to the point that the Early Gravettian inhabitants of Paglicci were able to process food plants and already possessed a wealth of knowledge that was to become widespread after the dawn of agriculture.starch grains | Avena | pestle-grinder | flour | Early Gravettian

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Neanderthal Use of Fish, Mammals, Birds, Starchy Plants and Wood 125-250,000 Years Ago

Cited by 213 publications

References 56 publications

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Plant foods and the dietary ecology of Neanderthals and early modern humans

Multistep food plant processing at Grotta Paglicci (Southern Italy) around 32,600 cal B.P.

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