HEALTH × GENETICS

El Sidron, Neanderthal Diet and Medicine

~49,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

El Sidron is a cave in Asturias, in northern Spain, that has yielded the remains of at least twelve Neanderthals. Several kept their dental calculus, the hardened plaque that builds up on teeth and traps whatever passes through the mouth, then seals it for tens of thousands of years. Ancient DNA read from that calculus in 2017 detected no meat at all among the El Sidron individuals: mushrooms, pine nuts and moss indicate gathering under forest cover, while the calculus of Neanderthals from Spy, in Belgium, recorded woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, the fauna of open steppe. One El Sidron individual carried a dental abscess and a chronic gut pathogen, and his calculus yielded what the authors read as self-medication. An earlier chemical study had already recovered from the same deposit the smoke of burnt wood, cooked starches, and yarrow and camomile, two bitter plants of little nutritional value.

Why it matters

Two readings of Neanderthal life are at stake here. The contrast between the Spanish and the Belgian calculus shows subsistence bending to the local habitat, at a time when Neanderthals were still understood as predominantly meat-eaters wherever they lived. The medicinal reading is weaker and openly disputed, yet even its cautious form requires that plants of no food value reached the mouth of a sick individual, and that someone chose them.

Dating & uncertainty

A bone fragment from the cave gives a radiocarbon age of 48,400 +/- 3,200 years, obtained with an ultrafiltration protocol that strips modern contamination from the collagen; direct dates run earlier on the human fossils had scattered between 10,000 and 50,000 years, which is why the assemblage had to be redated. The occupation is placed on that basis at roughly 50,600 to 47,300 years ago. The uncertainty bears on the age and not on the contents of the calculus, which are read from the deposit itself. What it does affect is the comparison with Spy, since setting two groups side by side assumes they were contemporaries.

Sources

1. Weyrich et al. (2017), Nature · Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculusdoi:10.1038/nature21674
2. Hardy et al. (2012), Naturwissenschaften · Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculusdoi:10.1007/s00114-012-0942-0
3. Krief et al. (2015), Antiquity · Flavouring food: the contribution of chimpanzee behaviour to the understanding of Neanderthal calculus composition and plant use in Neanderthal dietsdoi:10.15184/aqy.2014.7
4. Wood et al. (2013), Archaeometry · A new date for the Neanderthals from El Sidrón Cave (Asturias, northern Spain)doi:10.1111/j.1475-4754.2012.00671.x

Our species’ history as one day

20:16:003 h 44 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day