For much of the twentieth century, Neanderthals were cast as blunt, meat-obsessed hunters who had little use for anything green. Charred food remains recovered from two caves on opposite ends of the ancient world are forcing a rewrite of that picture. The evidence points to individuals who soaked, pounded, and combined ingredients with a level of deliberate food preparation that surprised the archaeologists who found it.
Two Caves, Tens of Thousands of Years Apart
The first site, Shanidar Cave in Iraq’s Zagros Mountains, was home to Neanderthals roughly 70,000 years ago and later to early modern humans around 40,000 years ago. The second, Franchthi Cave in Greece, was used by hunter-gatherer modern humans some 12,000 years ago. On paper, the two sites have almost nothing in common beyond both sheltering ancient people who needed to eat.
Yet researchers who examined charred food remains from both locations found strikingly similar preparation techniques despite the sites being separated by thousands of kilometers and tens of thousands of years, according to reporting on the peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Antiquity, carried by Smithsonian magazine. That overlap suggested a shared approach to food preparation rather than a coincidence.
Soaking, Pounding, and a Deliberate Recipe
The charred remains showed wild nuts and grass seeds combined with pulses such as lentils and wild mustard, plants that require real effort to make edible. Researchers identified evidence that both Neanderthals and early modern humans soaked and pounded the pulse seeds before eating them, a step that reduces bitterness and toughness in raw legumes. That kind of multi-step processing implies planning: gathering several different plants, preparing each one differently, and combining them into something resembling an actual dish rather than simply eating whatever was closest at hand.
Fossilized Plaque Adds a Second Layer of Evidence
The Shanidar and Franchthi findings are not the only clue to a more complex Neanderthal diet. Earlier research examined hardened dental calculus, the mineralized plaque that builds up on teeth over a lifetime, recovered from Neanderthal remains at Shanidar Cave in Iraq and Spy Cave in Belgium. That study, led by researchers from George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution and detailed by ScienceDaily, identified starch granules from date palms, legumes, and grass seeds such as barley trapped in the calculus of teeth roughly 40,000 years old.
Some of those grass-seed starch grains showed damage consistent with exposure to heat, evidence the researchers interpreted as a sign the grains had been cooked rather than eaten raw. The pattern held across two populations living in very different climates, one in the warmer eastern Mediterranean and one in colder northwestern Europe, suggesting Neanderthals adapted their food processing to whatever plants were locally available rather than relying on a single fixed diet. Together with the Shanidar and Franchthi cooking evidence, the dental calculus findings show that plant processing was not confined to a single cave or a single population.
Testing the Recipe by Eating It
To understand what the ancient meal might actually have tasted like, the research team tried recreating it using seeds gathered near the caves. The result was a dense, pancake-like flatbread that the lead investigator described as genuinely palatable, with a distinctly nutty flavor. That detail matters because it undercuts the idea that early plant processing was purely a survival tactic used only when meat ran short. Soaking and pounding pulses takes time and effort that would only make sense if the resulting food was worth the trouble.
A Diet Further From “Meat Only” Than Once Assumed
The old assumption that Neanderthals were pure carnivores was not just a matter of image. Some researchers had proposed that an overreliance on hunted meat, combined with an inability to adapt during major climate swings, contributed to the species’ eventual disappearance while early modern humans, who supposedly ate a more varied diet, survived. The starch and cooking evidence directly undercuts that theory, since it shows Neanderthals processing and cooking a range of plant foods using techniques just as sophisticated as those credited to early modern humans living in the same regions.
Taken together, the findings fit a growing body of evidence that the Neanderthal diet varied by location, season, and whatever plants were locally available, rather than following a single hunter-only template. Preparing pulses, grains, and nuts through soaking, pounding, and heat requires the kind of forward planning and multi-step execution once assumed to be unique to modern humans. Researchers not involved in the newer cave study have noted that the picture of Neanderthal diet has shifted substantially away from the old image of a species subsisting almost entirely on hunted game, replaced instead by a more flexible forager who adapted its cooking to whatever the surrounding landscape provided.
Neanderthals Also Ran “Fat Factories” for Bone Grease
Cooking plants was not the only sophisticated food-processing behavior Neanderthals appear to have practiced. Excavations at the Neumark-Nord site in central Germany uncovered evidence that Neanderthals living around a lake roughly 125,000 years ago did more than crack bones open for marrow. According to a study detailed by researchers at Leiden University, Neanderthals at the site systematically crushed the bones of at least 172 large mammals, including deer, horses, and aurochs, into tens of thousands of fragments, then rendered the fragments in water to extract calorie-dense bone grease, a labor-intensive process the researchers describe as an organized “fat factory.” That kind of large-scale, planned resource processing had previously been associated mainly with far more recent human groups, and finding it at a site this old pushes the timeline for that kind of complex food-processing behavior back by tens of thousands of years, reinforcing the same broader picture as the Shanidar and Franchthi cooking evidence: Neanderthals managed food resources with a level of planning once assumed unique to modern humans.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors.
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