28: The Dirt on Neanderthal Diets with Dr. Anna Goldfield

AnthroDish is back and ready to kick off the new year and new season! We have a lot of really amazing interviews in store for you.

I want to start off the new season with a topic that I find endlessly fascinating: Neanderthals! I'm speaking this week with Dr. Anna Goldfield about what Neanderthal diets looked like and how that impacted their lives. Anna is a zooarchaeologist whose PhD research focused on Neanderthal nutrition and subsistence behaviour. In addition to all of her super cool research, Anna is one of the co-hosts of one of my favourite new podcasts, The Dirt, where she and co-host Amber get excited about all the weird, amazing, mysterious, and fascinating stories from our human past.

In this interview, we explore what Neanderthal diets generally would have looked like by breaking down some of the major findings of her doctoral work. She analyzed the faunal remains from Neanderthal (Middle Paleolithic) and anatomically modern human (Upper Paleolithic) archaeological sites to understand how these two populations used the food resources around them. What emerges is an interesting and nuanced understanding of what their diets might have looked like, and what food-related practices might have contributed to their extinction.

Listen to the episode in the player above, or find it on Stitcher, iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or iHeartRadio! And if you love AnthroDish, please drop us a line or leave us a rating and review on iTunes!

Resources Mentioned:

Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

Anna's SAPIENS Column: https://www.sapiens.org/column/field-trips/

John D Speff's Paper, "Putrid Meat and Fish in the Eurasian Middle and Upper Paleolithic: Are We Missing a Key Part of Neanderthal and Modern Human Diet?": http://www.paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20170044.pdf

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