50,000-Year-Old Human Feces Confirm That Neanderthals Ate Plants

Analysis of the world's oldest human feces provides the first direct evidence that Neanderthals ate plants.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of La Laguna have knocked down previous assumptions that Neanderthals were only meat eaters, and in a new finding claim that their diet included vegetables.

"We believe Neanderthals probably ate what was available in different situations, seasons, and climates," says Ainara Sistiaga, a graduate student at the University of La Laguna, who led the analysis.

The closets extinct relatives of Homo sapiens are Neanderthals and they roamed Eurasia some 230,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to LiveScience.

The evidence that our prehistoric cousins fed on a varied diet, albeit heavy on meat and also certain plant tissues such as tubers and nuts, comes from analysis of ancient human fecal samples from  El Salt, a site that is famous for Neanderthal occupation in Southern Spain and dates back some 50,000 years. They looked for certain biomarkers in the samples of the fossilized feces called coprolites.

All the poop samples had coprostanol, an animal derived compound, a lipid formed when the gut metabolizes cholestrol. However, they were surprised to see that two samples had traces of 5B-stigmastanol, a chemical that is produced when the gut breaks phytosterol -a cholesterol like compound that is present in plants. This indicates that the ancient humans did eat regular portions of plants such as tubers, berries and nuts.

"These lovely new data on fecal sterols confirm what many people have been increasingly thinking, which is that something is wrong with the inference that Neanderthals were 100 percent carnivores," Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, says.

The study is published in the journal PLOS One.