Outside, the wind is icy and the temperature hovers around zero degrees, but inside the cave, a group of Neanderthals huddles around a fire. On flat stones, adults, children, and even an elderly person wait for a piece of gazelle they managed to hunt that morning to finish cooking. There are no pots or spoons, but there is technique. The piece of meat was dismembered following a specific cutting pattern, using something similar to a knife made from a sharpened piece of flint. For those who are still hungry, there are also seeds, remains of a tuber, and, of course, the house specialty: rotting meat teeming with nutritious larvae and maggots.
This scene could have taken place 300,000 years ago somewhere between what is now central and western Europe. But unraveling with certainty how the Neanderthal communities that inhabited the region lived and, above all, what they ate is a titanic and painstaking task. However, little by little and thanks to scientific work, information is beginning to become increasingly conclusive. A pair of recently published studies elaborate on the idea that, while we cannot speak of gastronomy among Neanderthals, we can say that certain cultural practices existed around food.
One of these studies, published last Friday in the journal Science Advances, proposes that worm consumption was the secret ingredient responsible for the extremely high nitrogen levels found in Neanderthal bones. For decades, analyses of bone remains from this species have shown exceptionally high levels of stable nitrogen isotopes, often higher than those of carnivorous animals such as wolves, hyenas, or lions. This has been interpreted to mean that Neanderthals were hypercarnivorous humans, occupying the highest level of the food chain. However, this hypothesis has been challenged. Human metabolism does not allow for the consumption of high amounts of protein, as specialized carnivores do. Therefore, a paradox arises: could Neanderthals show isotopic signatures typical of extreme carnivores if their physiology did not allow it?
“There are elements that could explain many things about the lives of Neanderthals that we don’t usually consider because they’re not part of our food imagination, but they must be taken into account,” says Ainara Sistiaga, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen who did not participate in the study. This includes, for example, eating rotten meat, full of maggots. Something that today, except in some specific cultures like the Inuit (who eat seal meat fermented underground), is unthinkable and dangerous.
This research suggests that Neanderthals’ signature dish was rotting meat infested with fly larvae, which are responsible for the extremely high nitrogen levels discovered at various sites throughout history. The authors’ explanation is as follows: the larvae, feeding on rotting meat, have even higher nitrogen levels than the meat itself, and when consumed along with the tissues, they significantly alter the isotopic record of the person who ingested them — in this case, the Neanderthals. It is also believed that this was a deliberate and strategic decision to increase the consumption of fats and proteins, especially during the colder months.
The study has its limitations. Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, a professor at the University of Alcalá, Spain, points out that the hypothesis posed by the new research is “highly speculative.” For the academic, the high presence of nitrogen in prehistoric populations “could be the result of many different processes.” He gives as an example the fact that if Neanderthals had consumed large amounts of manure, they would have had the same level of nitrogen in their bones. “The problem is how to move from a speculative idea, such as the one presented in this article, to a scientifically verifiable proposition,” he summarizes. Until this happens, the expert asserts that the extremely high meat consumption among these humans continues to be more heuristic than “unproven alternative scenarios.”
These uncertainties surrounding what really happened “demonstrate the complexity of reconstructing the diet of an extinct species that survived for thousands and thousands of years in climatic and geographic contexts so changing that we can’t even understand them today,” says Sistiaga. These types of studies, the expert points out, “contribute new pieces to the puzzle of human evolution.”
From generation to generation
Another piece of research comes from a study published on June 17 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. The authors compared the differences in the way two Neanderthal lineages that lived in nearby caves in the Levant (Near East) butchered animals they intended to eat.
Anaëlle Jallon, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of the study, explains that “finding differences between these two sites indicates that there was a certain cultural diversity surrounding food among contemporary Neanderthal groups.” These communities used the caves for the same purposes: residential sections with areas dedicated to daily activities such as flint knapping, cooking, and garbage disposal, as well as for the burial of the deceased. Furthermore, both were surrounded by Mediterranean vegetation with the same animal species, and were occupied primarily during the winter.
“For these reasons,” Jallon ventures, “we might expect that, if all Neanderthal groups behaved the same way, we would recover the same animal butchering techniques at these sites.” However, scientists now know that this was not the case and that each community had its own method of processing food. They also discovered that the differences persisted over time, indicating that the knowledge or traditions underlying these variations endured and were passed down from generation to generation.
While the available evidence is insufficient to accurately reconstruct specific food preparation techniques, the researchers suggest that there were likely differences in tastes and cooking skills. “We can imagine that different Neanderthal groups used similar ingredients, but each had their own signature dishes, or that they cooked similar dishes, albeit following different recipes,” the author emphasizes.
A food atlas
Defining the Neanderthal diet is almost as difficult as trying to define a single human diet. Today, people in the Mediterranean don’t eat the same way people do in Southeast Asia. The same is true of our cousins. They occupied such a vast territory that compiling their food atlas is a risky undertaking. Furthermore, some foods, like meat, leave their mark, in this case on the bones. But others, like legumes or vegetables, don’t.
Sistiaga goes into detail: “Plant remains, for example, are difficult to find in bones. Techniques such as dental tartar analysis have been used to detect plant DNA or proteins, but the findings are anecdotal.” The plant fibers found in the teeth of different individuals could have gotten there in many ways, not just through ingestion. “Plant remains are less well preserved in archaeological sites, so we still have an overrepresentation of animal proteins.” Hence the myth of hypercarnivores.
But there was much more. A study published in 2023 found that 90,000 years ago, in what is now Lisbon, Portugal, Neanderthals feasted on charred seafood. Further into the central Iberian Peninsula, a 2017 study found that these early humans gathered and ate mushrooms. A 2011 review even suggests that honey may have been an important source of energy back then.
What is beyond doubt is that the race for good food decisively shaped the genus Homo. A 2015 study suggested that the germ of the ability to cook appeared more than six million years ago. And that since then, the taste for cooked food has helped the human brain achieve its modern size and power, since once cooked, food becomes easier to digest and, in the same quantities as raw food, leaves more calories in the body.
Evidence suggests that flavor optimization may have been one of the major evolutionary drivers. And it all began, perhaps, with a piece of maggot-infested meat.
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