I stumbled on a source that confirms that the grains consumed at one of the Neanderthal sites were cereals, but as TD pointed out, this is old news that was already reported in earlier finds, the site with grains was in Iraq, which is one of the earliest regions on the planet for grain eating, whereas grains did not become important in most of Europe and Asia until much later, and just because some Neanderthalers ate some grains doesn't guarantee that grains are good for us. For all we know, those grains could have been detrimental to the health of those Neanderthalers and one blogger even posted a tongue-in-cheek hypothesis that grains could have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals to point out the absurdity of extrapolating too much from this single data point. Here's an excerpt from the source:
"a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (found here) found grain residues in the teeth of Neanderthals in Belgium and Iraq who are believed to have lived 36-46,000 years ago.
At the Iraq site, they found evidence of the consumption of 73 starch grains. Ten were members of the Triticeae tribe that includes wheat, barley, and rye, and most likely close relatives of barley. Fifteen appeared to be members of the Triticeae tribe that had been cooked with moist heat. They also found sixteen dental residues of different species of the fruits of the date palm, and four other unidentified tree fruit residues. The 136 dental starch residues at the Belgium site were more difficult to identify, but they included sorghum relatives.
The authors noted that the finding of starchy plant food consumption does not contradict isotope data, which can only detect meat and protein-rich plant foods. In other words, the types of evidence do not overlap enough to determine proportions of different food groups with any confidence." (
http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Paul-Shou-Ching-Jaminet-Perfect-Health-Diet-Review.html)
There is real evidence of prejudice in that article(eg:-" This study is the latest to suggest that, far from being brutish savages, Neanderthals were more like us than we previously thought. "
It is nice to see additional confirmation of my earlier point that some of the past opinions and extrapolations of scientists that Neanderthals were mere brutish savages incapable of culture, religion or even complex thought, were excessively negative. You may not like the term "demonization," call it whatever you like, I do think some scientists went overboard, particularly early on after the first discoveries of Neanderthals.
I acknowledged from the beginning that Neanderthals engaged in cannibalism and I even predicted that more evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism would be found, I just think that some of those early scientists exaggerated and extrapolated this into painting a picture of dumb brutes who engaged in extreme levels of cannibalism because they were crazed with bloodlust and violent emotions (and didn't focus as much on other less emotional or sensational potential reasons for the evidence at various sites like human brains and organs being high quality food sources that can be scarce at times or simply preferred to other food options, starvation, ritual consumption of some of the flesh and thereby spirit of a loved one or of the spirit of an enemy, or multipart burial that may or may not have included ritual post-mortem cannibalism) in order to show how we humans have progressed by becoming more "civilized" since and how history is a story of endless progress and utopian perfecting of humans, with the single utopian society for all being a "shining city on a hill" instead of a diversity of cultures matched to their local habitats.
The implication above is that eating raw or eating mostly meats somehow makes one a brutish savage. ....
Get used to it. Many people do seem to think we're brutish savages, Paleo re-enactors or fond of Noble Savage notions just because we eat raw meats and refer to our approach as a "Paleo diet". The same sort of "demonization" or negative stereotyping or whatever you want to call it that has been used against the Neanderthals is being used against us and will continue to be used against us.
