Neanderthals, our extinct cousins, are often portrayed as eating nothing but meat—no fruit, no grains, no greens. But did Neanderthals really live on meat alone?
While there’s plenty of evidence that Neanderthals regularly chowed down on meat, a growing body of research shows our close evolutionary relatives, who went extinct more than 30,000 years ago, also ate other parts of animals besides their meat, such as fat extracted from bone marrow, as well as other foods, including pistachios, lentils, and wild peas.
### How Scientists Uncover Neanderthal Diets
Scientists can estimate the proportions of different foods eaten by ancient humans by analyzing the number of atoms with varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei, known as isotopes, such as carbon-13 and nitrogen-15. The isotopes humans consume end up preserved in their teeth and bones. These isotopes act as chemical fingerprints, revealing what people and animals ate thousands of years ago.
“Multiple independent isotope studies now converge on the same conclusion,” Ludovic Slimak, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and author of *The Naked Neanderthal* (Penguin Books, 2023) and *The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How Humans Die* (Polity, 2025), told Live Science in an email. “Neanderthals consistently present the isotopic signatures of top-level carnivores.”
At the site of Gabasa in Spain, for example, analyses of calcium, strontium, and zinc isotopes showed that Neanderthals were hypercarnivores who survived mainly on meat and bone marrow. From what we know, Neanderthals were apex predators, Slimak said, much like wolves and hyenas, which sit at the top of the food chain with no natural predators.
### Neanderthals: “More Carnivore Than the Carnivores”
This idea is supported by earlier nitrogen isotope studies, said Hervé Bocherens, head of the biogeology research group at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Nitrogen comes in two stable forms, or isotopes: nitrogen-14 and the less common nitrogen-15. When animals eat other animals, the heavier nitrogen-15 slowly builds up in their bodies. That means animals that eat meat have more nitrogen-15 than plant eaters.
“In most Neanderthal specimens that have been analyzed, the nitrogen-15 content was higher than those measured in large carnivores, such as cave lions, cave hyenas, or wolves,” Bocherens told Live Science via email. “The conclusion was that Neanderthals were ‘more carnivore than the carnivores’ (hypercarnivores).”
However, he added, this interpretation is too simple. Nitrogen levels can vary depending on which animals Neanderthals ate, not just how much meat they consumed.
“Woolly mammoths consistently exhibit the highest nitrogen-15 levels among herbivores, probably due to the consumption of plants with high nitrogen-15 levels,” Bocherens explained. The data suggest that Neanderthals were predators that consumed a higher proportion of mammoths than they did of other carnivores in the ecosystem.
### An Unusual Twist: Maggots and Nitrogen Isotopes
A 2025 study offered a different explanation for Neanderthals’ unusually high nitrogen-15 levels: they may have eaten maggots, either by accident, in the process of eating rotting meat, or on purpose.
“Both rotting meat and especially maggots feasting on the rotting meat have high nitrogen levels and any Neanderthal eating those foods regularly would have an isotopic signature that is off the charts,” said April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
### Could Neanderthals Survive on Meat Alone?
But could Neanderthals survive on a solely meat-based diet?
“They could not if they had a similar physiology as modern humans, which is likely,” Bocherens said. “There is a need for dietary sources of energy.” Eating too much protein without enough fat and carbohydrates, which supply most of our energy, can lead to a fatal condition known as protein poisoning or “rabbit starvation.”
Scientists think their solution was fat. At one 125,000-year-old site in Germany, researchers found evidence that Neanderthals systematically broke animal bones to extract fat from bone marrow. Animal brains were another probable source of fat, Bocherens added.
### More Than Just Meat and Fat: The Plant-Based Side of Neanderthal Diets
Neanderthals may have found creative ways to balance their nutrition. They might even have eaten the stomach contents of their plant-eating prey, Chris Stringer, a research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, suggested.
Scientists agree that Neanderthals also ate plants when they were available.
“There is extensive evidence for plant eating by Neanderthals,” Nowell said. That evidence includes actual plant remains discovered in caves, microscopic traces left on stone tools, and even plant residues preserved in dental plaque and fossilized feces.
Food remains found in modern-day Israel suggest Neanderthals ate legumes, acorns, and pistachios. In Greece and Iraq, plant remains suggest they soaked, pounded, and ground lentils, nuts, and grasses—a form of food preparation that may have helped remove bitter flavors.
In Gibraltar, researchers found the charred remains of edible plants like wild olives and stone pine nuts. In Italy, starch grains found on stone tools hint that Neanderthals were even making a kind of flour.
At El Sidrón Cave in Spain, chemical analyses of dental plaque revealed that Neanderthals ate plants like yarrow and chamomile, likely for medicinal purposes. And, at an open-air archaeological site called El Salt in Alicante, Spain, researchers found significant levels of plant sterols (fats in plants that are similar to cholesterol) in fossilized Neanderthal feces.
### Adapting to the Environment
In warmer regions, Neanderthals likely gathered a wider range of plant foods, including seeds, starchy root vegetables like tubers, and even dates in the warmest regions, said Robert Power, a research fellow in the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin.
Although Neanderthals were skilled hunters who relied heavily on animal foods, “they varied their diets depending on where and when they lived, adapting to local foods and changing with the seasons,” Nowell said.
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Through a combination of meat, fat, and diverse plant foods, Neanderthals crafted diets that allowed them to thrive in a variety of environments—not the meat-only diet often depicted in popular imagination.
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/did-neanderthals-eat-anything-other-than-meat
