This just hot off the press! The National Geographic press, that is. Based on some collogen studies a few years back, a lot of workers started claiming that Neandertals ate nothing but meat. I won't go into the reasons, at this point, as to why this is just beyond silly, but when it came out, I thought that it was. Now, apparently, my suspicions have been confirmed. Because a tooth study of the famed Shanidar 3 fossil, seems to suggest that they ate, as the Natinal Geographic , a "variety" of grasses(e.g. grains). Of course, Shanidar is somewhat farther south than Vindija, where the other study was done, but even Vindija probably had a growing season of some length. And other, more indirect evidence has been provided elsewhere. So, one asks, why would Neandertals ignore edible grains when they were available? It wasn't as if food was going to be abundant, in all its forms, at all times. And they didn't survive for 200,000 years by ignoring available foodstuffs.
'Nuff said,
Anne G
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