Isotopic evidence for the diets of European Neanderthals and early modern humans

[FarCenter]

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/11/0903821106.full.pdf+html

Isotope evidence is a powerful tool for reconstructing past
human diets and subsistence adaptations (1–3), and it has been
applied to a number of Neanderthals and early modern humans
from Europe (4–12). In 2 earlier studies (10, 11), we argued that
Neanderthals had relatively uniform dietary adaptations while
early modern humans in Europe had more variable isotope
values—and therefore diets—than the Neanderthals. Specifically,
we proposed that a number of European early modern
humans had higher nitrogen isotope values than any Neanderthal
and that these values likely indicated that some of these
humans were obtaining much of their protein from aquatic
resources, namely freshwater fish (11). This interpretation was
largely based on the similarity of these isotope values to those of
freshwater fish consumers from Mesolithic Eastern Europe (13,
14). We further postulated that the isotope evidence demonstrated
a shift to a broader dietary spectrum by early modern
humans (11), which probably included small game, in addition to
fish, an inference supported by the faunal evidence (15, 16).
Since that study, there have been more isotopic studies of
Neanderthals (5–9) and early modern humans (4, 17, 18).
Importantly, we present here previously unrecorded isotopic
data from an early modern human from the Peçstera cu Oase (4),
which overlaps in time with the last Neanderthals (19), allowing
us a direct comparison between Neanderthal and modern human
diets when they were both present in Europe. Below, we
summarize the current isotopic evidence for Neanderthal and
modern human diets and suggest that the previously unrecorded
data support our original inference that there was a shift in
dietary spectra between the Neanderthals and early modern
humans in Europe.

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Eat more fish and seafood.

[TexasObserver]

1. Recommend

[d_r]

2. fish

wouldn't they be able to tell how much fish they at by how much mercury was in their bodies?

Oh wait, nevermind.