Carlos Orsi
Calcified bacterial plaques, also known as tartar or dental calculus, found in the dentition of Neanderthal remains revealed traces of DNA that point to regional differences in the diet of these hominins. The article describing the analysis of these remains is published in the magazine Nature From this week.
The authors, from an international group that includes institutions from Australia, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom, determined that the diet of the group inhabiting the Spy cave in Belgium consumed a lot of meat, including woolly rhinos and goats. The Neanderthals from the El Sidrón cave, in Spain, were vegetarians – at least, according to the traces found in their teeth – and ate mushrooms, pine nuts and other plants.
Diet differences were shown to be correlated with differences in the oral microbiota – the population of bacteria in the mouth – and the article points out that the main differentiator appears to have been meat consumption. Furthermore, the analysis confirmed signs, detected in previous work, of “medication” in a Spanish Neanderthal who suffered from a dental abscess and an intestinal fungal infection, which causes diarrhea.
This long-suffering Neanderthal, the article points out, was the only individual whose calculations included sequences from a plant that contains salicylic acid, a painkiller, and also from the fungus that produces penicillin. In addition to these discoveries about diet and medicine, the researchers were able to obtain from the calculations an almost complete genome of a 48-year-old bacterium.
Reference
Neanderthal behavior, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus
[Nature doi:10.1038/nature21674]
