Almonda

• The region of Estremadura in Portugal was home to a band of Neanderthals – an ancient evolutionary relative of modern humans – about 95,000 years ago.
• Now their teeth are providing new insights on how they hunted and interacted with their landscape.
• Some researchers have wondered whether differences between the subsistence strategies of modern humans and Neanderthals contributed to the disappearance of the latter around 40,000 years ago.

From rocks to enamel

• As rocks weather, these isotopic “fingerprints” are passed into plants via sediments and make their way along the food chain –- eventually passing into tooth enamel.
• Using a technique for analysing elements in archaeological samples, we were able to take thousands of strontium isotope measurements along the length of the tooth enamel, measuring variation over the two or three years it takes for the enamel to form.
• We also looked at isotopes in the tooth enamel of animals found in the cave system.

Seasonal patterns

• The Magdalenian human showed a different pattern of subsistence, with seasonal movement of about 20km from the Almonda caves to the banks of the Tagus River, and a diet that included rabbits, red deer, wild goat and freshwater fish.
• The Neanderthals obtained their food over approximately 600 sq km, whereas the humans occupied a much smaller territory of about 300 sq km.
• By the Magdalenian period, an increase in population density reduced available territory, and human groups had moved down the food chain to occupy smaller territories, hunting mostly rabbits and catching fish on a seasonal basis.