Want to know how a bunch of brawny apes evolved into brainy humans? It all comes down to a pair of tongs and a flame.
People and animals eat basically the same food; the only difference is that we cook our meals. But does the ability to flame-broil a burger and burn a meal really make us that special? According to Harvard anthropology professor Richard Wrangham, it does.
If Neanderthals ever shared a Thanksgiving feast with Homo sapiens, the two species may have had trouble settling on a menu.
Chemical signatures locked into bone suggest the Neanderthals got the bulk of their protein from large game, such as mammoths, bison and reindeer. The anatomically modern humans that were living alongside them had more diverse tastes. As well as big game, they also had a liking for smaller mammals, fish and seafood.
"It seems modern humans had a much broader diet, in terms of using fish or aquatic birds, which Neanderthals didn't seem to do," says Michael Richards, a biological anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Prehistoric menu
Such dietary differences could have played a role in the extinction of Neanderthals roughly 24,000 years ago.
