More than we wanted to know about Neanderthals? --Anthropological research gets down and dirty: Neanderthals might have been less carnivorous than we think – or so suggests new research that examined the oldest known piece of hominid poop: The poop comes from five separate soil samples taken from a known Neanderthal site in El Salt, Spain, and is believed to date back roughly 50,000 years. The find puts to shame the previous oldest poop discovered in the Western Hemisphere. ,Some brave souls from MIT and the University of La Laguna (samples were collected by hand, the researchers said) analyzed the makeup of the samples and found that Neanderthals ate a diet dominated by meat, but definitely ate some plants, as well. Thats because lead researcher Ainara Sistiaga and his team were able to identify, for the first time, the presence of metabolites such as 5B-stigmastanol and 5B-epistigmastanol, which are created when the body digests plant matter. The existence of those metabolites unambiguously record the ingestion of plants,
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 19:25:32 +0000