Reconstructing the caveman diet and converting carnivores

Abstract

Rancid research Many twentysomethings who follow a meat-heavy, low-carb paleo diet presume they’re re-creating the eating patterns of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Presumption, however, is of little value to Kimberly Foecke. An anthropology graduate student at the George Washington University (GW), she instead is trying to reconstruct the diet that Neanderthals actually ate, and part of that involves a whole lot of rotten meat. Studies on Neanderthals present a paradox: Neanderthals’ fossils are high in nitrogen-15 relative to nitrogen-14 compared with other animals, which implies that their diet was closer to that of hypercarnivores, like hyenas and coyotes, which eat almost entirely meat, than to that of humans. But “this doesn’t make sense from the point of view of human nutrition because if you are a hypercarnivore, you starve from an imbalanced diet,” says Alison Brooks, Foecke’s research adviser. Further, recent work on Neanderthals’ dental buildup show remnants of starchy plants.