The Neanderthals had a greedy appetite for the flesh. They hunted a big game and leaned around the fire to stir wool mammoth steak. Or we thought of many archaeologists studying the Stone Age.
Many studies revealing that our archaic cousins had a diverse diet, including pulses and shellfish, found that fresh meat was far from the only one on the menu.
Still, the chemical signature of the Neanderthal ruins suggests eating robust meat observed at higher levels than those found in top predators such as lions and wolves, which has been baffling researchers for decades. Now, new research suggests unexpected stone age food.
Seriously – fly larvae hatch and feed decay animal tissues – could have been a staple food in prehistoric diet, a study published in the Journal of Science Advancements suggests.
Lead author Melanie Beasley, an assistant professor of bioanthropology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, discovered that maggot taste could explain unique chemical characteristics detected in prehistoric human bones, such as Homo sapiens and Neanderthal, species that were extinct 40,000 years ago.
The findings backed up hypotheses proposed by John Spes, co-author of Beasley, anthropologist at the University of Michigan. His work was based on an ethnographic account of the diet of Indigenous groups.
“This seemed to have an idea, so not many people noticed it. And there was no data,” said Beasley, who spoke in 2017 when Speth gave a speech and then decided to test his hypothesis.
Understanding past diets
Understanding past diets and where animals sit in the ancient food chain, scientists have been studying the chemical characteristics of different isotopes or variants of elements such as nitrogen and carbon that have been preserved in teeth and bones for thousands of years.
Researchers first discovered that Neanderthal fossil bones, excavated in Northern Europe in the 1990s, had particularly increased levels of nitrogen-15 isotope. We found this to be a chemical characteristic that suggests that meat consumption is comparable to high carbides such as lions and wolves.
“Grasses have one (nitrogen) value, but grass-eating deer has higher values, while deer-eating carnivorous animals have even higher values,” Beasley explained. “Therefore, we can track nitrogen through this nutritional food web system,” she said, Neanderthals have even higher nitrogen values than carnivorous animals.
However, this was inexplicable because unlike wolves and lions, modern humans cannot scavenge large amounts of red meat in their stomachs. Overinducing it can lead to potentially fatal malnutrition, in which the liver breaks down proteins and fails to remove excess nitrogenous bodies.
This condition, known today as protein addiction, was more common among North American European explorers called the diseased “rabbit addiction” or “maldecaribou,” given that wild games are far more lean than today’s farming meat. Archaeologists believe Neanderthals understand the importance of fat nutrients, and in at least one location in Germany today, they processed animal bones on a large scale to extract fat.
Rotten meat may have higher nitrogen than fresh tissue, which may be responsible for increasing nitrogen levels in neanderthal bones, Speth’s study suggests.
Shortly after hearing about Speth Speak, Beasley, a former postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, was conducting research at the Center for Forensic Anthropology, but decided to investigate. Sometimes called body farms, research facilities, were established to study how the human body breaks down.
There, she analyzed the rotten tissues of donated human corpses left outside, as well as the nitrogen levels of fly larvae formed in the muscular tissue. She said the work carried out over two years requires a strong stomach.
Beasley found that nitrogen levels increase gently over time in human tissues. However, she observed much higher nitrogen levels in fly larvae, suggesting that Neanderthals and early modern humans likely consumed animal meat regularly mixed with maggots.
“We started regaining our (nitrogen) values, but they were only astronomically high,” recalls Beasley.
“John (Speth) and I started talking, not just the rotten meat, but the fact that… they can’t prevent the flies from reaching the meat and the Fry Raba will never become part of the delicateness,” she said.
Data from her research not only provide insight into Neanderthal diets, but also informs modern forensic medicine. This involves maggot nitrogen levels that form in human corpses, which help scientists identify the time since death, she noted.
Karen Hardy, a professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, said it was a “brailer” that the Neanderthals ate maggots.
Hardy, who was not involved in the study, said the author provided a “strong argument in favour of Maggo consumption,” but such actions were Serious artifacts are unlikely to be conclusively proven, as they cannot survive in archaeological records.
“The surprise element relates to the Western perspective on food and what isn’t,” she added.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, it is estimated that at least 2 billion people worldwide today consume insects.
The study also said historical accounts suggest that many indigenous peoples, such as Inuit, view “a food from completely corrupt, maggot-infected animals as a highly desirable fare and not a terrifying star.” According to the study, many such groups “alily allowed animal foods to break down to the point where they were raw with maggots.
Knud Rasmussen, a polar explorer from Greenland, documented the following cooking experiences cited in this study in his 1931 book, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture.
“The meat was green with age, and when we cut it off, it was like an explosion of boiling, so my terror was my companion scooping up a handful of things raw and criticising their taste. They taste just like meat and are refreshing in the mouth.”
This study also notes that maggots are not unknown in Western culinary traditions, and note that Sardinian cheese casmartz is full of cheese skipper larvae Flies.
