New research suggests that maggots may be the secret ingredient responsible for extremely high nitrogen values found in Neanderthal remains.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
People who study Neanderthals have often wondered about nitrogen. You see, the more meat that an animal eats, the more the isotope nitrogen-15 shows up in its remains. And Neanderthals, who were believed to be omnivores, had nitrogen levels in their bodies like those of hypercarnivores, like wolves or lions. So where did all that nitrogen come from?
MELANIE BEASLEY: No one’s really looked at that increase in what happens in nitrogen in fly larva as they are feeding on that putrid tissue.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
That’s Melanie Beasley, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. And you heard her right. She looked at nitrogen levels in maggots, fly larvae growing in decomposing meat. She had the help of University of Michigan anthropology professor emeritus John Speth.
BEASLEY: In the ethnohistoric quotes that John had collected, there were reference to meat teeming with maggots and slimy and gooey, and they ate it with such relish, and it was a delicacy. And so I went back to John and said, hey, what if we do maggots as well?
CHANG: John Speth has documented that many Indigenous cultures ate and still eat decaying meat infested with insects. For example, for some reindeer hunters in the Arctic, it’s considered a spring delicacy.
BEASLEY: Disgust is culturally learned. So if you’re a little kid and you grow up in a culture where you see mom and dad eating this delicacy of fermented aged meat that is teeming with maggots, you think of that as a delicious food item.
SUMMERS: In a study published in Science Advances, Beasley’s team found that the nitrogen-15 content of fly larvae was much higher than the meat they were growing in. That suggests that Neanderthals ate putrefied meat, including the maggots, in part because those maggots increase the nutritional value.
BEASLEY: The maggots actually convert that lean game meat into a fatty substance.
CHANG: Yummy. Of course, the study could not account for the exact species of flies that would have been around back then or how exactly Neanderthals prepared or cooked this meat. But Beasley said that this could point to a key moment when these cultural practices started in our human ancestors.
BEASLEY: Hominins are unique and special in the ways that they process food, store food, cook food and that all of these things are things that nonhuman animals don’t do.
SUMMERS: I mean, seriously, has anyone mentioned this to the gym bros who can’t seem to eat enough protein? I mean, this could make their pancake mixes a thing of the past.
CHANG: (Laughter).
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