Are you a massive fan of meat? Are you often overwhelmed with an urge for it, like Luis Suarez seems to be? Or do you just wish you were born in Neanderthal times so you could snack heavily on tasty mammoths?
Well, brace yourselves because scientists have shown Neanderthals were not averse to the odd vegetable now and again.
Rather than being our meat-only eating ancestors, a new study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has provided the first evidence of them eating plants.
Scientists had previously analysed their diet by checking carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone fragments. This allowed them to see if they were eating pigs or cows, by comparing protein levels, but showed nothing about plant materials.
Plant microfossils were recently identified in Neanderthal teeth but Ainara Sistiaga, a graduate student at the University of La Laguna, said that instead of eating these directly they could have consumed them through their prey's stomach contents.
The method Sistiaga and her team adopted had to do with soil. Specifically, faecal remains within it. They went to a site in Alicante, Spain, where numerous Neanderthal occupations have been unearthed. They dug out small samples of soil and then analysed them with Roger Summons, a professor of geobiology in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
As humans are able to break down more cholesterol than any other mammal, Sistiaga looked for a certain peak level of coprostanol - a lipid formed when metabolising cholesterol - that would indicate the sample came from a human.
They then used the same techniques to determine proportions between coprostanol and a substance called 5B-stigmastanol, which is derived from the breakdown of phytosterol from plants.
Results showed that as well as coprostanol, two samples held biomarkers of plants - which Sistiaga says could indicate a substantial plant intake.
As she explains it, gram for gram, there is more cholesterol in meat than there is phytosterol in plants - so it would take a significant plant intake to produce even a small amount of metabolized phytosterol.
Meat and two-veg then?
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/neanderthals-ate-greens-095953459.html
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