Scientists Show Neanderthals Ate Plants, By Studying Their Poop
I could make a poop joke here. This is, after all, a story about the oldest human poop ever found. And I like a good poop joke as much as the next guy, of course, but what the discovery shows is a lot more interesting than the comic possibilities in the fact that scientist handled a coil some guy or gal laid down 50,000 years ago. It busts up once and for all the long-held image of Neanderthals as pure carnivores. Although other proof that Neanderthals ate more than meat has been found in their teeth and habitations, if you want to prove definitively that someone eats vegetables, finding the remains of vegetables in his feces would do it. And that’s just what Ainara Sistiaga, a PhD student at the University of La Laguna on the Canary Islands, and her colleagues did. Samples were collected by the team from a 50,000-year-old campfire in the El Salt dig site, a Neanderthal habitation near Alicante in Spain. The samples were taken to MIT, where
