Our extinct cousins, Neanderthals, are often depicted as eating only meat, without any fruits, grains, or vegetables. But did Neanderthals really survive on meat alone?
There’s plenty of evidence that Neanderthals regularly ate meat, but a series of studies has shown that our evolutionary relatives, who went extinct more than 30,000 years ago, also ate non-meat animal parts, such as fatty extracts from bone marrow and other foods such as pistachios, lentils and wild peas.
you may like
“Multiple independent isotopic studies have now converged on the same conclusion,” Ludovic Slimak, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and author of The Naked Neanderthal (Penguin Books, 2023) and The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How We Died (Polity, 2025), told Live Science by email. “Neanderthals consistently exhibit top-level carnivore isotopic signatures.”
For example, at the Gabasa site in Spain, analysis of calcium, strontium, and zinc isotopes showed that Neanderthals were hypercarnivores who survived primarily on meat and bone marrow. As far as we know, Neanderthals were apex predators, similar to wolves and hyenas at the top of the food chain with no natural predators, Slimak said.
This idea is supported by early nitrogen isotope studies, said Hervé Boherens, head of the biogeological research group at Germany’s University of Tübingen.
Nitrogen has two stable forms, or isotopes, nitrogen-14 and the less common nitrogen-15. When animals eat other animals, the heavier nitrogen-15 slowly accumulates in their bodies. This means that animals that eat meat have more nitrogen-15 than animals that eat plants.
“In most Neanderthal specimens analyzed, nitrogen-15 content was higher than that measured in large carnivores such as cave lions, cave hyenas, and wolves,” Boherens told Live Science via email. “The conclusion was that Neanderthals were ‘more carnivores than carnivores’ (hypercarnivores).”
But this interpretation is too simplistic, he added. Nitrogen levels can vary not only by the amount of meat Neanderthals consumed, but also by which animals they ate.
“Walty mammoths consistently have the highest nitrogen-15 concentrations of any herbivore, probably because they ingest plants with high nitrogen-15 concentrations,” Boherens said. The data suggests that Neanderthals were predators that preyed on mammoths at a higher rate than other carnivores in the ecosystem, Boherens added.
you may like
A 2025 study offered an alternative explanation for Neanderthals’ unusually high nitrogen-15 levels. Neanderthals may have eaten maggots by accident, while eating rotting meat, or on purpose.
“Rotten meat, and especially maggots that eat rotten meat, have high nitrogen concentrations, and Neanderthals who regularly ate these foods would have off-the-charts isotopic signatures,” April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, told Live Science in an email.
But could Neanderthals survive by eating only meat?
“Even if they had a similar physiology to modern humans, that’s not possible, and it’s likely,” Boherens said. “We need a dietary source of energy.” Consuming too much protein without enough fat and carbohydrates, which provide most of our energy, can lead to protein poisoning or a fatal condition known as “rabbit starvation.”
Their solution, scientists think, was fat. At a 125,000-year-old German site, researchers have found evidence that Neanderthals systematically crushed animal bones to extract fat from bone marrow. Boherens said animal brains could also be a source of fat.
An animal-based diet is completely viable if the entire carcass is consumed, including bone marrow and fat reserves, Slimak said.
Neanderthals ate more than meat and fat
Neanderthals may have found creative ways to balance nutrition. They may have eaten the stomach contents of their plant-eating prey, Chris Stringer, lead researcher on human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, told Live Science in an email.
Scientists agree that Neanderthals also ate plants when they were available. “There is extensive evidence that Neanderthals ate plants,” Nowell said. That evidence includes actual plant remains found in caves, minute traces left on stone tools, and even plant residues preserved in dental plaque and fossilized feces.
Nowell said food remains found in what is now Israel suggest that Neanderthals ate legumes, acorns and pistachios. In Greece and Iraq, plant remains suggest that lentils, nuts, and grasses were soaked in water and pounded into powder, a type of food preparation that may have helped remove bitterness. In Gibraltar, researchers found the charred remains of edible plants such as wild olives and pine nuts. In Italy, starch granules found in stone tools suggest that Neanderthals even made a type of flour.
In Spain’s El Sidrón cave, chemical analysis of dental plaque revealed that Neanderthals ate plants such as yarrow and chamomile, possibly for medicinal purposes. And at an open-air archaeological site called El Solto in Alicante, Spain, researchers found significant levels of phytosterols (plant fats similar to cholesterol) in fossilized Neanderthal feces.
Robert Power, a research fellow in archeology at University College Dublin, said Neanderthals likely foraged a wider range of plant foods in warmer regions, including seeds, starchy roots such as tubers, and even dates.
Neanderthals were skilled hunters who relied heavily on animal foods, but “they varied their diets depending on where and when they lived, adapting to local foods, and changing with the seasons,” Nowell said.
Neanderthal quiz: How much do you know about our closest relatives?
Source link
