Neandertal versus Modern Human Dietary Responses to Climatic Fluctuations

April Neandertal versus Modern Human Dietary Responses to Climatic Fluctuations Sireen El Zaatari 0 1 Frederick E. Grine 1 Peter S. Ungar 1 Jean-Jacques Hublin 1 0 Paleoanthropology, Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen , Tübingen, Germany , 2 Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology , Leipzig, Germany , 3 Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University , Stony Brook , New York, United States of America, 4 Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University , Stony Brook , New York, United States of America, 5 Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas , Fayetteville, Arkansas , United States of America 1 Editor: Roberto Macchiarelli, Université de Poitiers , FRANCE The Neandertal lineage developed successfully throughout western Eurasia and effectively survived the harsh and severely changing environments of the alternating glacial/interglacial cycles from the middle of the Pleistocene until Marine Isotope Stage 3. Yet, towards the end of this stage, at the time of deteriorating climatic conditions that eventually led to the Last Glacial Maximum, and soon after modern humans entered western Eurasia, the Neandertals disappeared. Western Eurasia was by then exclusively occupied by modern humans. We use occlusal molar microwear texture analysis to examine aspects of diet in western Eurasian Paleolithic hominins in relation to fluctuations in food supplies that resulted from the oscillating climatic conditions of the Pleistocene. There is demonstrable evidence for differences in behavior that distinguish Upper Paleolithic humans from members of the Neandertal lineage. Specifically, whereas the Neandertals altered their diets in response to changing paleoecological conditions, the diets of Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have been less affected by slight changes in vegetation/climatic conditions but were linked to changes in their technological complexes. The results of this study also indicate differences in resource exploitation strategies between these two hominin groups. We argue that these differences in subsistence strategies, if they had already been established at the time of the first contact between these two hominin taxa, may have given modern humans an advantage over the Neandertals, and may have contributed to the persistence of our species despite habitat-related changes in food availabilities associated with climate fluctuations. - OPEN ACCESS Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This study was supported by Max Planck Society, Wenner Gren Foundation through a Hunt Post-Doctoral Fellowship to SEZ (8554), the National Science Foundation to FEG and SEZ and PSU (0452155; 0315157), and the LSB Leakey Foundation to SEZ and FEG (800320). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Over the course of the last half million years, western Eurasian hominins lived during times of extreme climatic instability characterized by high amplitude fluctuations between cold glacial and warmer interglacial phases. These fluctuations constantly shaped and reshaped the landscape, greatly affecting both plant and animal communities [ 1 ]. Paleolithic hominins relied on these communities for subsistence, and therefore would have had to adapt to the frequent and sometimes dramatic, multisecular scale changes in dietary resources in order to survive. The occupation of Europe by members of the Neandertal lineage for hundreds of thousands of years amidst these continuously changing conditions suggests that they had effective subsistence strategies that allowed them to survive for such a lengthy period. Yet, it appears that during the severe millennial scale climatic fluctuations of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 [ 2 ], the survival strategies of the Neandertals failed, perhaps in part due to competition with modern humans who first entered Europe during this period [ 3 ]. Although a small amount of introgression of Neandertal DNA is documented in early modern Eurasians [ 4–6 ] and such an introgression is still detectable in extant non-African humans [ 7 ], there was undoubtedly a major population replacement in MIS 3. It seems counterintuitive that Neandertals, who had been living in Europe for such a long time and had managed to overcome earlier climatic cycles, disappeared, leaving the invading modern humans to flourish. Simply stated, Neandertals might be expected to have been better adapted than Homo sapiens—a species that evolved in Africa—to live in Europe during the fluctuations of MIS 3. But, the replacement of Neandertals by modern humans suggests that the latter may have had some advantages over the former. Here, we present ev (...truncated)