You can find out a lot about a person’s life by studying their teeth. Be they living or dead, teeth can tell us a great deal about people, their habits, their nutrition, and their general state of health. When it comes to Neanderthals, an examination of the teeth of three Neanderthal bodies recovered in Iraq’s Shanidar Cave and Belgium’s Cave of Spy revealed some interesting information. Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables as a part of their diet according to stuff captured between their teeth.
“The plants we found are all foods associated with early modern human diets, but we now know Neanderthals were exploiting those plants and cooking them, too. When you cook grains it increases their digestibility and nutritional value,” said Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who led the study of Neanderthal dining habits. “The whole question of why Neanderthals went extinct has been controversial for a long time and dietary issues play a significant part in that. Some scholars claim the Neanderthals were specialized carnivores hunting large game and weren’t able to exploit a diversity of plant foods. As far as we know, there has been until now no direct evidence that Neanderthals cooked their foods and very little evidence they were consuming plants routinely.”
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