Achievement

IGERT trainee and current post-doctoral fellow Amanda Henry with Faculty members Alison Brooks and Dolores Piperno discovered starch grains and other microfossils on Neanderthal teeth from Iraq, Belgium and other countries indicating that Neanderthals ate a wide range of plant foods throughout their range, and further, that some of these were cooked. This countered an earlier argument that Neanderthals were primarily meat-eaters, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Henry, A.G., Brooks, A.S. and D.R. Piperno, Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2): 486-491.