NUTRITIONAL ECOLOGY AND THE EXTINCTION OF EUROPEAN NEANDERTHALS

Nutritional ecology is the study of the relationships between essential nutrient intake and human health patterns. Nutritional ecology states that diverse diets lower infant mortality rates and increase average life expectancies. This may positively effect demographic trends, and lead to the spread of human populations at the expense of others. Diets consisting of numerous species of terrestrial mammals were not diverse from the nutritional ecology perspective because most mammals hunted by Paleolithic foragers contained relatively equal proportions of essential nutrients per 100 grams of flesh. Diverse diets could only be achieved by consuming a variety of food items such as terrestrial mammals, birds, fish, shellfish, and plants. Northern populations of Neanderthals consumed mainly terrestrial mammals, while the southern Neanderthals consumed a more diverse diet; therefore, southern Neanderthals probably were healthier and lived longer than northern Neanderthals. Early Upper Paleolithic diets associated with AMHS show a trend toward even greater diversification. Early AMHS populations probably were healthier than most of the Neanderthal populations with which they may have had contact. Some have suggested that "economic competition" contributed to Neanderthal extinction; nutritional ecology adds an explanatory framework to these propositions. Healthier Neanderthals living in southern latitudes may help to explain the delay in the occupation of these regions by AMHS populations, as well as the dating of Neanderthal skeletons as late as 28,000 BP. Many Neanderthal populations were part of a long list of large, terrestrial carnivores that went extinct in Europe in the face of rapidly changing and diversifying ecosystems between 30,000 and 40,000 BP. Neanderthals successfully competed with other large carnivores for tens of thousands of years across much of their range; but they were eventually demographically swamped by healthier hunter-gatherers exhibiting a "broader-spectrum" subsistence base.