Maggots may be the secret ingredient responsible for extremely high nitrogen values found in Neanderthal remains, new research suggests. The work challenges an established theory that Late Pleistocene hominins ate as much fatty meat as lions, wolves, and other hypercarnivores. Eurasian Neanderthal remains have very high nitrogen isotope values, on par with those typically seen in hypercarnivores at the top of the food web. Archaeologists originally attributed these extremely high levels to heavy consumption of mammoth and other large land species. “While it is possible for humans to subsist on a very ‘carnivorous’ diet, many traditional northern hunter-gatherers such as the Inuit subsisted mostly on animal foods, hominins simply cannot tolerate the high levels of protein consumption that large predators can,” Melanie Beasley and colleagues note. They point towards an alternate nitrogen source: maggots. Ethnographic records report that some Indigenous cultures historically consumed putrefied food ripe with larvae for extra nutrients. Beasley et al. theorize that Neanderthals probably did as well. To confirm that maggots can even contain such high nitrogen values, they conducted stable nitrogen isotope ratio analyses on 389 larvae from three fly families (Calliphoridae, Piophilidae, and Stratiomyidae) gathered from the flesh of postmortem donors putrefying over two years in a forensic anthropology laboratory. Results showed that the maggots had far greater nitrogen values (as high as 43.2%) than the levels present in tissue and decomposed tissue alone. “It is the maggots, more so than the carcass tissues themselves, that gave Late Pleistocene hominins both a rich source of fat and a very highly 15N-enriched source of protein,” Beasley et al. conclude.
