Posted on 12/04/2006 5:01:47 PM PST by blam
Did starving Neanderthals eat each other?
22:00 04 December 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper
Neanderthals lived a desperately tough life, sometimes so close to starvation that when one of them died their compatriots would fall upon the body and devour it, according to new research.
Scorned as clumsy, idiotic brutes with little in the way of developed culture, our pitiless modern view of Neanderthals may be tempered by new findings that provide insight into the terrible life our evolutionary cousins faced.
Antonio Rosas, of the National Museum for Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues studied 43,000-year-old Neanderthal remains found in the El Sidrón cave in the north of the Iberian peninsula.
The cave is extraordinarily rich in Neanderthal remains. About 1300 Neanderthal fossils have been excavated since its accidental discovery in 1994. And the picture emerging from analysis of the remains is now enriching our understanding of the much-maligned species.
Spiritual life
Rosas and colleagues examined the teeth of eight individuals found in the cave and found hypoplasia lines – evidence that during growth, the individuals had probably gone through a period of starvation. Moreover, cuts discovered on some of the bones suggest that cannibalism was practiced by the group.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Great post--thanks.
Yeah, that's right! Neandertal WENT EXTINCT because he ate too much meat. Nothing political about that, eh?Taste for flesh troubled NeanderthalsThe extinction of the Neanderthals could have been caused by their choosy appetites - they ate virtually nothing but meat... "They were picky eaters," says Dr Paul Pettitt, at the University of Oxford, UK. "And this tells me that they are really unchanging - doing the same old thing year after year... Neanderthals were excellent hunters," Dr Petitt told BBC News Online. "But the issue that was at stake was whether they hunted every day of their lives or whether it was just a summer outing." ...The early humans themselves may have been better hunters than the Neanderthals, depriving them of their kills. Or the hunted animals may have been struck by disease or migrated away.
by Dr Damian Carrington
BBC News Online
Monday, 12 June, 2000
Hey, Henry Ford tried feeding his employees grass sandwiches. Maybe that was during his vegetarian fanatic phase, not unlike that of Paul and Linda who threatened to fire anyone working for their last tour who ate meat for the duration, or Ford's good friend and role model, Hitler.What the Hominid AteAnalyzing carbon atoms locked up in tooth enamel, two researchers challenge the widely held belief that Australopithecus africanus -- an upright, walking pre-human hominid that lived in southern Africa -- ate little more than fruits and leaves. Matt Sponheimer, an anthropology graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Julia Lee-Thorp of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, looked at four A. africanus fossil skeletons unearthed from South Africa. Living about 3 million years ago, A. africanus may be a direct ancestor of modern humans. A. africanus teeth were large and blunt with thick enamel, ideal for crushing nuts and chewing fruit as opposed to the sharp incisors one would want to rip into meat. The first stone tools, which would help in eating meat, didn't appear until about half a million years later. Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp took a new approach, looking at the chemical composition of the tooth enamel. After chipping about two milligrams of enamel with a diamond-tipped dental drill, the researchers analyzed the samples for the isotope carbon-13, which contains one extra neutron in the nucleus compared to the usual form of carbon. What Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp found was that the teeth of A. africanus had an in-between amount carbon-13 -- more than the fruit eaters, less than the grass eaters.
by Kenneth Chang
Laden and Wrangham wouldn't be vegetarians by any chance, would they?Veggies Really Are Brain FoodFire helped early humans evolve and become more intelligent not because it allowed them to barbecue meat, but because it allowed them to cook vegetables, researchers said on Tuesday. Learning how to cook probably also allowed humans to develop their unique monogamous society. Gregory Laden of the University of Minnesota, Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and colleagues noted that very early pre-humans, including the australopithecines such as "Lucy," had huge teeth and powerful jaws. By 1.9 million years ago, when Homo erectus appeared, teeth became smaller and jawbones less robust. Females got bigger—closer in size to males. Brains and bodies both grew. While some anthropologists argue it was because meat entered the diet, Laden and a team of anthropologists, nutritionists and primatologists said the changes occurred because the pre-humans had discovered fire and learned how to make roots and other vegetables easier to eat and more nutritious.
I guess Neandertal didn't invent bouillabaisse? ;')Shift In Eating Habits Of Early Modern HumansCompared to Neanderthals living in inland Europe up to 100,000 years earlier, who relied primarily on land animals for their protein, early modern humans supplemented their diets with a significant amount of fish and waterfowl. The evidence has been outlined in a paper entitled 'Stable isotope evidence for increasing dietary breadth in the European mid-Upper Paleolithi', which is scheduled to appear in the May 22 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Dr Michael Richards, of the Department of Archaeological Sciences, at the University of Bradford, said: "This new information highlights the differences in diets between Neanderthals and early modern humans and shows that modern humans were more flexible and adaptable in their dietary choices. This ability to adapt and use a range of resources could perhaps have given us, as a species, a competitive edge over the Neanderthals."
2 May 2001A Rumination on the Invention of SoupIt was a particularly tough and dangerous world back then. These hunter-gatherers were stuck in the last blast of the Wurm glaciation that killed off so much of their food and so many species. It was every man for himself as they ran fearfully from--and ran hungrily after--woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, wolves, and other hominids. And yet elderly Neanderthal skeletons have been found in France with teeth worn down below gum level--and deeply crippled skeletons have been found too. Implication: They could only have been kept alive through the compassion of their communities and the brilliance of some nouvelle cuisine chef who could find food alternatives to incredibly indigestible plants, meat tougher than my old aunt's shoes, and all of it cold. I try to put myself under the toque of that Stone Age Julia Child. I imagine him or her using bark to dip and carry water...putting food bits in it and noticing them soften or swell...marking how plants and berries, meat and marrow chunks would infuse the water with color and flavor. I imagine him or her getting the idea of warm broth from the 98.6 degree Fahrenheit mother's milk that kept little Neanderthal babies happy. That's when it hits me: Soup! It's an unbelievable achievement.
March 1, 2002
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"I don't want to talk about what Garry Studds and Barney Frank do!!"
they eat lots of wieners
Some scientist looks at some bones , comes up with a theory and it automatically becomes fact.
"Taste like chicken?"
Possibly like Long Pig?
There is very good proof that American Indians in the SouthWest were eating each other, based on human myoglobin found in human coprolites.
There is no reason to suppose Neanderthals were different.
Out of curiosity, when did knee-jerk contempt for science become fashionable around here?
Now if that isn't the truth.
Yes but scientists are not partisan nor are they biased. (sarc)
I guess around the same time scientists started using knee jerk evidence to support their thesis for Global Warming and other things they have no way of proving.
There is a little group of them who apparently sit around and wait for any science thread and go on to make inane comments. Not sure what the point is - if they don't like or understand a topic, why not just ignore it?
"Out of curiosity, when did knee-jerk contempt for science become fashionable around here?"
Just about the same time knee-jerk contempt for just about everything became fashionable.
Most countries.
All democrats.
Most Republicans.
Most religions.
Massachusetts.
Reagan's 11th Commandment.
etc.
One logical reason against cannibalism is that a dead body attracts food on its own. That is, the smell given off by a dead biped body will attract predators from miles around. Canines, carrion birds, bears, cats, etc.
All very edible. But the practice of burial is so that such animals *won't* be attracted, and show up when you don't want them to. If you don't bury your dead, you will soon be up to your elbows in critters.
Only during a hard winter this isn't the case. As the Donner Party learned to their unhappiness.
A half body will attract just as many scavengers as a whole body - and you get a snack to tide you over while waiting...
Actually, the number of instances when modern humans have faced starvation without resorting to cannibalism far outnumber those few remarkable cases when they have.
O boy! I have just been informed about the definition of the term "longpork."
Now I can use it.
Neanderthals liked a little sauce with their longpork dinners.
Tada!
I'd rather not comment.
This is the human condition...
CA....
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