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home / 世界杯决赛2022

do you crave meat? you may be part neanderthal

and i mean that in a good way

by colby cosh

oct 19 2022
read time 3 minute read
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anthropologist svante paabo poses with a model of a neanderthal skeleton after winning the nobel prize in physiology or medicine on oct. 3, 2022, in leipzig, germany. jens schlueter / getty images
constant trash-talking between old-fashioned meat-eaters and vegan/vegetarian herbivores has become a feature of our civilization, perhaps a defining one. the herbivores seem certain that their diet is the morally superior one and will become universal, if only through ecological necessity, in the future; in their untroubled confidence in the path of history, they offer a useful reminder of what communists used to be like. (we still have a few, but they’re nowhere near as sure they’re going to win even in the long run.) the meat-eaters who proudly assert that their lifestyle is the natural one can be almost as obnoxious, although our view does coincide with theirs: we’re made out of meat, and it cannot be wrong for meat to eat meat.
one thing you’ll sometimes hear from the brute meat-lovers, especially the “paleo” and “keto” dietary trend-followers, is a stylized fact of anthropology: neanderthals, the cousins of modern humans who went extinct 40,000 years ago, seem to have eaten extremely meat-heavy diets similar to those of apex predators. you might think this was something meat addicts preferred to suppress: the neanderthals are, after all, a snapped-off branch of the tree of life, and it is generally thought that the more diverse diets of their homo sapiens successors must have been part of their decisive evolutionary advantage.

on the other hand, at the genomic level, neanderthals aren’t totally failed: they did interbreed with modern humans, and uniquely neanderthal genes are found (thanks to the work of new nobelist svante pääbo ) in human populations that evolved outside sub-saharan africa. so if you’re of european, asian or north american aboriginal descent, you can say, as paleo eaters sometimes do jokingly, that you’re of carnivorous heritage. veganism may be right for others, but, as the visionary poet william blake said, one law for both the lion and the ox is oppression.

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perhaps we are headed, in the long run, not toward universal vegetarianism but toward a redivision of the human species into meat-eating and herbivore subspecies. in any event, an impressive new scientific paper appeared yesterday that sheds new light on the neanderthal diet, whose overwhelming carnivory has been somewhat contested. in this corner of anthropology, the usual way of inferring diets from skeletal remains has been to look at ratios of various isotopes of nitrogen found in dietary collagen. this technique can reliably distinguish plant-eaters from meat-eaters, and even show a species’ precise spot on the food chain. but collagen normally degrades within about 50,000 years, making it hard to read earlier remains, and the signal in the isotopes could have been influenced by geographic location and dependence on other foods.

happily, there’s a new technique that examines isotopes in zinc from tooth enamel instead of nitrogen, and a group of human-origins scholars have applied this zinc analysis to a single neanderthal tooth — a first molar — found at a neanderthal site near gabasa, spain. the nice thing is that the dig site had contemporary bones from a wide range of other animals, including ancient wolves, foxes, hyenas, horses, deer, rabbit, and cave bears. so even though the paper is based on one hominin tooth, the zinc analysis could also be performed on those other species, revealing the neanderthal person’s “trophic position” — his or her precise local place on the food chain, more properly called the “food web.”
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it turns out this neanderthal was not just a carnivore, but a sort of super-carnivore. the zinc-isotope ratio is off the charts — the authors of the paper call it “extreme” — even when compared to those of wolves, foxes and lynxes. this is a data point that weighs in favour of the carnivore interpretation of the earlier nitrogen results from other neanderthal sites, and argues, though perhaps not decisively, against more vegetarian-friendly theories.
the paper, which appeared in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences (pnas), is worth reading just as an example of what cutting-edge work in the study of human origins looks like. it perhaps promises to open a new era in the study of proto-human diets, which in turn might help us to understand the compelling mystery of how h. sapiens ended up prevailing.
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