Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Abstract

a b s t r a c tDuring recent decades, Neanderthal diet has been a major research topic in palaeoanthropology. This has been accelerated by the maturation of different techniques, which have produced a plethora of new information. However, this proliferation of data has led to confusing and contradictory results. Furthermore, most of the ecological dietary studies have been carried out on specimens drawn from different time periods and regions, almost exclusively those characterized by cold, open environmental conditions. Subsistence models based on these fragmentary data have been applied to Neanderthals living in a variety of different regions and environments, even though their dietary strategies may have been as variable as regions they inhabited. In this paper we integrate different dietary approaches (studies of the zooarchaeology, stable isotopes and plant remains) from the central and southeastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia in order to develop a broader and more complex picture of Neanderthal diet in different Mediterranean environmental conditions. Our results suggest that there may have been some minor dietary variation due to climatic or environmental differences, but that Neanderthal diet focussed on large terrestrial game, supplemented by plant foods when these were available.Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Neanderthal dietary ecologyThe dietary behaviours of Neanderthals and the relationship between their diet and their social organization, technological abilities, and even their eventual disappearance, have been hotly debated in the anthropological literature. Examining the diets of Neanderthals requires the synthesis of data that have been collected by numerous researchers over the last 150 years. In many cases, the differences between Neanderthal and early modern human diets have been emphasized, at the expense of cogent discussion of the variation within each group. Early modern humans lived in a wide variety of environmental contexts and likely pursued a variety of behaviours throughout this range of environments. The exclusively Eurasian distribution of Neanderthals did not include as many environments, but neither was it the exclusively cold Arctic climate that many have supposed it to be. A more detailed examination of the Neanderthal range and the effects of shifting global climates reveals that this group would have been exposed to a diverse range of environments (Hoffecker, 2009;MacDonald et al., 2009). Just as modern human dietary behaviour likely varied with environments, so, too, can we predict that Neanderthals had different diets in different environments.Our understanding of the diets of Neanderthals comes from three main lines of evidence. The first is the study of the human remains themselves, including the isotope signal recorded in their bones, the microwear on their teeth, and how factors of their lifehistory are related to diet. The second line of evidence includes the study of the remains of their food, in the form of animal and plant remains preserved ...

Neandertals revised

“…These results have been complemented by studies demonstrating a much broader diet, including aquatic foods (fish and molluscs), small animals (including tortoises, birds, and rabbits), and a variety of plant resources across their range (2,66,67). Some of those plant remains were very probably cooked, as suggested by plant microfossils recovered from the calculus of Neandertal teeth (68), a new source of data regarding the food of early hominins (69)(70)(71). A recent study (67) compared Neandertal plant use to that of African Middle Stone Age (MSA) populations and Upper Paleolithic groups, but failed to find any differences between Neandertals and contemporary near-modern humans, as well as more recent ones.…”

Stable isotope ratio analysis of bone collagen as indicator of different dietary habits and environmental conditions in northeastern Iberia during the 4th and 3rd millennium cal B.C.

“…In that case, the study of plant microremains trapped inside dental calculus by microscopy (e.g. Power et al 2014;Salazar-García et al 2013a), or metagenomics analysis (e.g. Weyrich et al 2017) can be very useful to detect plant consumption and complement isotopic dietary information in this regard.…”

A combined dietary approach using isotope and dental buccal-microwear analysis of human remains from the Neolithic, Roman and Medieval periods from the archaeological site of Tossal de les Basses (Alicante, Spain)

“…The application of these analytical techniques in Mediterranean Iberia has significantly increased during the past few years, creating an important corpus of dietary data from the region. Studies from the Palaeolithic (García-Guixé et al, 2009;Salazar-García et al, 2013a), Mesolithic (Fernández-López de Pablo et al, 2013;García-Guixé et al, 2006;Salazar-García et al, 2014a), Neolithic-Chalcolithic (Fontanals-Coll et al, 2015;Fuller et al, 2010;García-Borja et al, 2013;McClure et al, 2011;De Juan, 2004, 2007;Salazar-García, 2009, 2011a, 2014, Bronze Age (McClure et al, 2011;Polo-Cerdá et al, 2007;Romero and De Juan, 2007), Iron Age (Salazar-García et al, 2010), Punic Salazar-García, 2011b), Roman and Medieval (Alexander et al, 2015;Fuller et al, 2010;Salazar-García et al, 2014b) periods have been performed in Mediterranean Iberia and the nearby island of Ibiza. However, to date only a few studies have had a wide diachronic approach to diet in Spain (see Fuller et al, 2010;Salazar-García et al, 2013b).…”