GALILEE -- HOARD OF STONE TOOLS UNCOVERED

An exceptional hoard, which includes more than one hundred prehistoric blades and implements, was discovered in the excavations that are currently being conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority at the Yiftah’el antiquities site in the Lower Galilee. The cache, which comprises eighty flint blades, eight arrowheads, three lumps of flint, two sickle blades and two bone implements, was apparently concealed in a pit that was dug in the floor of a building and dates to the Pre-pottery Neolithic Period B (9,000-8,700 YBP). A preliminary examination of the cache has revealed that these tools were produced by expert flint knappers who lived at the site and were engaged in the industrial knapping of blades, some of which were intended for local consumption, but most were knapped with the aim of exchanging them for other goods. The knappers’ high degree of professionalism is evidenced by the technology which they employed – the blades were knapped utilizing a flint knapping technology referred to as naviform technology. This technology was used to produce long, straight blades from lumps of flint that have two opposing striking platforms, while exploiting the flint bulbous in the most optimal manner. Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily, director of the excavation at the Yiftah’el site on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, stated “the hoard from Yiftah’el is unique, both from the standpoint of its contents and the number of items in it. The discovery of a number of arrowheads in different stages of preparation among the hoard’s components reflects the nature of it – a kind of domestic stockpile that was hidden away and meant for future use; that is to say, for bartering. If today we talk about hiding money under the mattress for use on a rainy day, then in the period prior to the invention of coins people accumulated products that they themselves would produce in order to exchange them for other items when they would need them”. Dr. Khalaily added that “hoards of flint blades are a rarity in Neolithic sites. Dr. Khalaily adds “the discovery was facilitated by the group of veteran laborers employed by the Israel Antiquities Authority whose extensive experience in the delicate work of prehistoric excavations made the exposure of the hoard possible”.

EGYPT -- EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE CITY OF THE SHARP-NOSED FISH

A facinating new book compiled from an ancient Egyptian rubbish dump offers glimpses into life in the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish Khaled Diab

Thanks to nearly half a million papyrus fragments uncovered in Hellenic Egyptian rubbish dumps that have been gradually decoded by the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, the fragments of ordinary people's lives have been salvaged from the dustbin of history.

The rubbish dumps in question belonged to the provincial but thriving Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus (City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish), about 100 miles south of modern Cairo, which was established during the pharaonic New Kingdom and became Hellenized in Ptolemic times, but was eventually reduced to a single standing column. Most of the unearthed documents, discovered in 1896 by two young Oxford archeologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, date from the time when Egypt was part of the Roman empire, and include a treasure trove of lost classics and non-canonical gospels.

Peter Parsons, an archaeologist who spent two decades leading the team deciphering the papyri, has written a book called The City of the Sharp Nosed Fish published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson that offers a fascinating reconstruction of life in Oxyrhynchus. It is available from Amazon.com or your local bookstore, in paperback at $19.63. Check the reviews on Amazon. They are 5 stars.

Says Parsons, (Peter Parsons, Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford emeritus) "For me, the mundane aspects of ordinary life highlighted in correspondences and letters in the book are among the most enthralling of all the finds because they reveal both how familiar and how different that lost world is. "... "Write to me about your health and what you need from here," Achillion exhorts his brother, Hierakapollon. "If you do this, you will have done me a favour: for we shall have the impression, through our letters, of seeing one another face to face."

Not everyone is as friendly as Achillion. Some letters reveal ancient snobberies and grievances. "You exult in your wealth and your great abundance of possession and so you look down on your friend," Theoninos chastises Didymos.

Serenos informs his wife, Isidora, of his sense of abandonment: "From the time you went away from me, I have been mourning, weeping by night and grieving by day ... You sent me letters that could shake a stone."

Of course, most of the names above sound Greek. That is because, following Alexander's conquest of Egypt, in 332 BC, Oxyrhynchus and other Egyptian cities were Hellenised. This meant that, over the next millennium, they became home to perhaps 500,000 Greeks as well as Hellenised Egyptians. How "Greek" these urban dwellers were is open to question, since their culture and lifestyle was a heady blend of Egyptian and Greek elements. But they did speak Greek and studied the classics. "To some extent, the Greeks remade Egypt; to a much larger extent, it remade them," notes Parsons.

At the same time, as a "foreign" ruling elite, the Greeks of Egypt looked down on the native Egyptians and mocked their weird beliefs and practices, such as sibling marriage. Greek myth, like many strands of Orientalism, stereotyped Egyptians as "cruel, perverse, depraved and treacherous".

One area of particular venom was the relative freedom enjoyed by Egyptian women. "Egyptians rear all their offspring," one Egyptian Greek mocked, referring to the fact that Egyptians did not dump their unwanted children, particularly girls, in the city's rubbish dumps.

Prior to the Hellenisation of Egypt, Egyptian women enjoyed equal legal rights with Egyptian men and "marriage" was an oral affair, easily entered into and easily dissolved. In Hellenic Egypt, Greek norms in which women had no independent legal status from men began to filter into the Egyptian system. Roman rule brought a certain amount of relief for women because it allowed women with three children to own property and conduct their own affairs.

So, much about Oxyrhynchus is like contemporary city life but with a peculiarly ancient twist. The city had its own town council, with a mayor (prytanis) and magistrates. However, the council was staffed by prominent citizens who had to pay out of their own pockets if they failed to meet their targets. Tax collecting was outsourced to private individuals, and the city
implemented a Roman version of the dole in which free rations were given to the wealthy and prominent citizens, not the poor and needy. Oxyrhynchus, like other towns, had the equivalent of banks, bank accounts and cheques, and clients could order payments to be made or receive funds in other cities, too. The twist here was that wheat was a recognised currency back then. People also entered into surprisingly detailed and binding contracts.

Just as the ordinary people of Oxyrhynchus were ignored by history, they also paid little heed, judging by the fragmentary evidence, to the grand events of history going on about them: the rise and fall of different emperors in Rome, rebellions in Alexandria and Judea, and the persecution of Christianity followed by the persecution of pagans. "We hear nothing about political attitudes, nothing about the deeds, characters or deaths of great men. It may be a matter of prudence; it may be a matter of indifference," Parsons observes. In a way, that's poetic justice.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/khaled_diab/2008/05/found_the_dustbin_of_history.html

IRAQ ARCHAEOLOGY ASSESSMENT FROM LEBANONESE PAPER

Copyright (c) 2008 The Daily Star

Friday, May 16, 2008

Experts assess extent of Iraq's cultural catastrophe five years after the US invasion

The priceless archaeological treasures of Mesopotamia are still being plundered

By John White Special to The Daily Star Excerpts from the article:

BEIRUT: Donny George Youkhanna, Iraq's most prominent archaeologist and National Museum director in 2003, called the looting "the crime of the century." He said that some 14,000 objects, a dozen of them "world-class masterpieces," were plundered from the National museum. Fewer than half have been located and some of the most prized treasures have vanished into the hidden world of the private art collector, possibly never to be seen again. George was forced to flee with his family to Syria on August 27, 2006, thence to the US, because of alleged threats from the Shiite Islamists who by then ran Iraq. He is now visiting professor of anthropology at Stony Brook State University in New York. After five years, robber gangs still loot Iraq's cultural heritage at the estimated 11,000 archaeological sites across the country, with dealers buying the protection of the clans who control large tracts of the country. A 1,400-strong Mobile Archaeological Site Protection Force was mustered in 2006 but it proved to totally ineffective - usually outgunned by the gangs, its men poorly paid and motivated. Security officials estimate that it would take a force of 50,000-75,000 to protect the sites properly - and there's little prospect of that amid the chaos of Iraq. Most are massive quarrying operations with bulldozers, mechanical diggers and dump trucks. They are operating in broad daylight with virtual impunity since protecting these sites is low on US security priorities. Many of the plundered sites are now barren, cratered moonscapes because of the holes dug by the looters. This rape of Mesopotamia's fabled history, archaeologists say, is probably more devastating than the pillaging of the museums because priceless artifacts that cast light on mankind's origins are being lost, so that experts cannot piece together how ancient societies developed. "We may never know how many Gilgamesh-like epics have been lost," lamented Mehiyar Kathem, a fundraiser for the Cultural Heritage Awareness Initiative, a project of the Baghdad-based educational non-governmental organization Culture For All. He calls the wholesale looting "one of the greatest catastrophes to befall humanity." McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian history at the University of Chicago who has led major archaeological projects in Iraq, estimated in early 2007 that up to 15,000 objects were being taken daily from these sites. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney and a colonel in the US Marine Corps reserve helped stem the chaos in the Museum in 2003. During a two-day United Nations conference in Athens on returning antiquities to their countries of origin, Bogdanos said there were "undeniable" links between the smuggling and extremist groups. "The Taliban uses opium to finance their activities in Afghanistan," he said. "Well, they don't have opium in Iraq. What they have an almost limitless supply of is antiquities." Security officials are skeptical about the extent that profits from the illicit sale of antiquities fund the insurgency. Donny George talks of "a huge mafia for smuggling antiquities" and says "there are a lot of people inside Iraq" near the plundered sites "buying these things from the looters there. They're not Iraqis. They're Europeans." Other corrupt dealers, he says, have operated from Iran, Turkey, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. According to Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh-Bajjaly - a tireless campaigner for international action to help staunch this archaeological catastrophe, who helped document the stolen treasures - says the looters have ransacked sites of 4,000-year-old Sumerian cities in the south. "In the Nassariyya area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites. They have all been systematically looted," she said. The robber gangs have not spared "one meter of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years. Farchakh warns that the looting is eradicating the ancient history of Mesopotamia. These days, she says, "the robbers are destroying everything because they're going down to bedrock. What's new is that the looters are becoming more and more organized, apparently with lots of money. "Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There's been a US base at Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It's like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake."

AFRICAN ROCK ART

African rock art

The continent's true history

May 1st 2008 | NAIROBI
From The Economist print edition

Protecting cave paintings can restore Africa's pride in its history

TARA

!

SO LATE to be “discovered” by the rest of the world—Henry Stanley made the continent's first crossing only in 1877—Africa, it can be forgotten, is probably the cradle of humanity. Palaeoanthropologists, archaeologists and, more recently, geneticists have all bolstered the “out of Africa” theory, which holds that early man wandered out of the Rift Valley. Yet little is known of pre-colonial African cultures. Some vanished out of history, along with their languages and beliefs, before they ever came to be named. That is one reason why Africa's rock art is so precious. The faintest ochre scratches of prehistoric antelope in a cave open a rare window into Africa's—and humanity's—distant past.

Africa may have 200,000 rock-art sites, more than any other continent. The oldest known site, in Namibia, is between 18,000 and 28,000 years old. Several African universities now have programmes to decipher the paintings and carvings. They are being helped by the Kenya-based Trust for African Rock Art (TARA), which seeks to discover and digitally archive as much of the art as it can for future scholars.

The best is in the Sahara desert, particularly in Niger's Air mountains, in the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad and southern Libya, and in south-east Algeria's Tassili n'Ajjer range. Such desert sites are too remote to be damaged by graffiti, though wars involving the local Tuareg have resulted in some being shot up or smashed apart for sale to foreign collectors. David Coulson, one of TARA's founders, raves about a recent find in the Tassili n'Ajjer range: an anatomically perfect four-metre-long carving of a hippo hunted by an Egyptian-looking figure with a superbly sinuous bow. This in a region that dried up several thousand years ago.

Elsewhere in Africa, rock art often chronicles the hunting magic of Bushmen and Pygmies. Not much rock art survives in western Africa, and in eastern and central parts of the continent more recent but still invaluable paintings have been poorly preserved.

But there is progress. Locals are being encouraged to see the value of showing off their sites to tourists. National museums are being overhauled, with new displays of lost peoples. New history textbooks may follow. New finds are being made. A sensational discovery in a cave in Kenya is being kept under wraps until it can be properly dated.

Some think African rock art should provide a pan-African rallying point, free of politics or religion. A rich rock-art heritage could connect Libya and South Africa, two of the African Union's biggest backers, which sometimes struggle to find anything in common. Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, is a big rock-art fan. He reckons it represents nothing less than the earliest record of the human imagination

SILBURY HILL -- WHY THE BRONZE AGE MONUMENT

The secret of Silbury Hill, the most enigmatic prehistoric 4500 year old monument in Europe , isn't the monument but the monumental effort which went into building it, according to the archaeologist who has spent most of the last year slipping around on wet chalk deep in the heart of the hill. Engineers and archaeologists devoutly hope that their work will prevent the
4,500 year old hill from collapsing - 10 months and £1m over budget.

Jim Leary, the archaeological director for English Heritage throughout the work, thinks he has solved a riddle which archaeologists have fretted over for centuries: why thousands of people piled up 35 million baskets of chalk into the largest artificial hill in Europe, now part of the Stonehenge World Heritage site. It wasn't the final structure, but the staggering contribution of work which was important, he now believes, marking a site of immense but only guessable significance to the hunters and farmers of Bronze Age Wiltshire.

After following their predecessors into the heart of the monument, and then leaving the warren of Georgian, Victorian and 20th century tunnels packed again with chalk slurry so that they hope nobody will ever follow in their footsteps, the archaeologists and engineers are convinced there is no secret chamber, prehistoric passage or treasure hoard, only the hill itself rising 40 metres above the Wiltshire watermeadows, by the shoulder of the modern A4 following the line of the Roman road which jinked to avoid it.

Leary, announcing his preliminary findings to a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in London, thinks the builders were revering the site - overlooking both sacred springs, and the source of the Kennet which he believes was then seen as the source of the mighty Thames - by joining in a spectacular communal effort, continued over generations. Even before the first hill rose, he has discovered a dense layer of compacted clay, which appears to be the result of thousands of feet trampling - or dancing - across the site.

Leary now believes there were scores of Silburies, some left for long periods, others worked on
continuously. His research is a by-product of eight years of near disaster for Silbury, since incredulous English Heritage and National Trust authorities heard that a gaping hole had opened at the summit in the torrential rains of the year 2000: the Duke of Northumberland's 1776 shaft, believed securely filled centuries earlier, had collapsed. While they were still debating what to do, there was a further collapse, swallowing the temporary cover. Further
collapses followed, and a remote camera probe uncovered to their horror a series of spreading voids inside the hill.

Last May, Skanska Engineering reopened the 1849 tunnel dug by Dean Merewether, and the 1960s BBC tunnel, to get into the hill and start plugging the holes: the work was planned to last only a few months, but the worst summer floods on record followed, and further collapses forced everyone off the site. Once back in, they were confident of finishing by Christmas - and then a further hole opened in the flank, as another void reached the surface. When completion was finally announced last week, the project had cost at least three times the original £500,000 budget.

Post excavation work will continue for years on the land snails and broken sarsen stones, wisps of still green grass and beetle wings taken from the heart of the hill. Nothing has been left behind except a cable to monitor movement - which they hope will lie idle. They hope that a job begun 4,500 years ago is complete, and no man will ever set foot inside Silbury Hill again.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0%2C%2C2279497%2C00.html

NEADERTHAL A SEPARATE SPECIES -- NOT US!

A new, simplified family tree of humanity has dealt a blow to those who contend that the enigmatic hominids known as Neanderthals intermingled with our forebears. Neanderthals were a separate species to Homo sapiens, as anatomically modern humans are known, rather than offshoots of the same species, the new organigram published Sunday by the journal Nature declares.

The method, invented by evolutionary analysts in Argentina, marks a break with the conventional technique by which anthropologists chart the twists and turns of the human odyssey. That technique typically divides the genus Homo into various classifications
according to the shape of key facial features -- "flat-faced," "protruding-faced" and so on.

The authors of the new study, led by Rolando Gonzalez-Jose at the Patagonian National Center at Puerto Madryn, Argentina, say the problem with the conventional method is that, under evolution, facial traits do not appear out of the blue but result from continuous change. The team goes back over the same well-known set of specimens, but uses a different approach to analyze it, focusing in particular on a set of fundamental yet long-term changes in skull shape.

They took digital 3D images of the casts of 17 hominid specimens as well as from a gorilla, chimpanzee and H. sapiens. The images were then crunched through a computer model to compare four fundamental variables -- the skull's roundness and base, the protrusion of
the jaw, and facial retraction, which is the position of the face relative to the cranial base.
When other phylotogenic techniques are used, the outcome is a family tree whose main lines closely mirror existing ones but offers a clearer view as to how the evolutionary path unfolded.

The paper suggests that, after evolving from the hominid Australopithecus afarensis, the first member of Homo, H. habilis, arose between 1.5 and 2.1 million years ago. We are direct linear descendants of H. habilis. H. sapiens started to show up around 200,000 years ago.

Neanderthals are declared "chronological variants inside a single biological heritage," in other words, evolutionary cousins but still a separate species from us.

The squat, low-browed Neanderthals lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East from around 170,000 but traces of them disappear some 28,000 years ago, their last known refuge being Gibraltar. Why they died out is a matter of furious debate, because they co-existed
alongside


http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/05/05/neanderthal-species.html

IRAQ MUSEUM --- 2,000 ARTIFACTS RETURNED

Ordinary people have surrendered 2050 artifacts to antiquities officials in southern Iraq, according to a senior Antiquities Department archaeologist. The pieces were handed over to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in a ceremony in Baghdad, said Ali Kadhem. Kadhem heads the Antiquities Department’s branch in the southern Province of Nasiriya, home to some of the most fascinating remains of the Sumerian civilization, including their fabulous capital city of Ur.

He said 1100 pieces were metal coins belonging to various Mesopotamian epochs.

The other pieces included pottery jars and utensils of various shapes and decorations.

But most intriguing, according to Amira Aydan, head of the Antiquities Department, has been a “door hook whose presence in the past has almost always led to the discovery of a Mesopotamian temple.” But the scientists would have first to know where the hook came from since they did not come across it while digging but was passed to them by an Iraqi man as part of the department’s campaign to collect pieces that have gone missing either due to looting or illegal digging.

Aydan said nearly 4,000 missing artifacts have been returned to the Iraq Museum which was looted shortly after U.S. troops landed in Baghdad five years ago.

The pieces handed over to the Museum recently were not part of the nearly 15,000 artifacts, some of them unique and priceless, which were stolen in the 3003 U.S. invasion aftermath. [This makes this a very odd story.... this paragraph refutes the paragraph preceeding. If true, where did these come from? Strange!]

UK-HERTFORDSHIRE-AMAZING ROMAN FIND

A Roman cemetery containing items of national importance has been uncovered Herefordshire. One of the biggest historical finds in the Marches has been made at Stretton Grandison. A complete wooden coffin - only the third to be found in the UK - was one of the items uncovered by Leominster-based Border Archaeology (BA).

A kiln, various urns and a working brooch were also unearthed, along with the remains of up to 19 bodies. The results of the four-month dig - kept secret until now for fear of theft.

Neil Shurety, BA managing director, was thrilled at the discovery, but believes the site is hiding more. "We had indications it was a Roman site, but we had no idea it was going to be this big. The major find was the coffin - this is only the third complete Roman coffin ever found in the UK, and the others were found in London in the Thames." The dig coincided with major pipeline work, being carried out by Welsh Water and Laing O'Rourke between Lyde and Ledbury.

The coffin and the body - nicknamed Lucius - is being preserved, following tests at Durham University. According to archaeologists, Lucius was 46, 5ft 9 ins tall, suffered toothache and died around 1,800 years ago. Most bodies were from the second to the fourth centuries AD, but some dated to the Middle Ages. Neolithic stakes, used for fishing, were also discovered, suggesting much earlier occupation. "These are made of alder and they date to 3,500 BC - it's so humbling to think that man has been working on this land for all this time."

The coffin, Lucius, and recovered items will go on display in Hereford next year, while
the other bodies will be given a proper burial. A book is also being planned, while BA intends to meet villagers to discuss their finds.

http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/3121083.Stunning_finds_on_archaeological_dig/

AUSTRALIA -- 35,000 YEAR OLD TOOLS FOUND

Tools dating back at least 35,000 years have been unearthed in a rock shelter in Australia's remote northwest, making it one of the oldest finds in that part of the country. The tools include a piece of flint the size of a small cell phone and hundreds of tiny sharp stones that were used as knives. One local Aboriginal elder saw it as vindication of what his people have said all along-that they have inhabited this land for tens of thousands of years.

"I'm ecstatic, I'm over the moon, because it's now indisputable," Slim Parker, an elder of the Martidja Banyjima people, told The Associated Press by telephone from Western Australia.

The tools, along with seeds, bark and other plant material, were found nearly 6.5 feet (about 2 meters) beneath the floor of a shelter-a slight crevice in the hillside protected by an overhang of rock-on the edges of an iron-ore mine site about 590 miles (950 kilometers) northeast of Perth, the capital of Western Australia.

TURKISH SITE - VERY EARLY NEOLITHIC TEMPLE COMPLEX

URFA, Turkey - As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, as a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable. "This place is a supernova," said Mr. Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of the Syrian border.
Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian Plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-colored sea, stretches south hundreds of miles to Baghdad and beyond. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe, his workplace since 1994, are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.

Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles that have been excavated, four out of an estimated 20, is more than 100 feet across. Two of the slender, T-shaped pillars tower at least three feet above their peers. What makes them remarkable are the carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions that cover them, and their age. Dated at about 9500 B.C., these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of
Mesopotamia and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Nevermind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages, but were hunters, not farmers. "Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture," said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University anthropology professor who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's most-famous
Neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex, and it is pre-agricultural. That fact alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."

With only a fraction of the site opened after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it was the center of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the center of each circle representing a man and woman. Mr. Schmidt, however, is skeptical. He agreed the site could well have been "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy" and pointed out that if it is in near-perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.

Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found - "two square meters of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - a bit like a Paul Klee painting," according to Eric Coqueugniot, the University of Lyon archaeologist who is leading the excavation. (see our earlier blog on this)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080421/FOREIGN01/54504074/1003/FOREIGN

NEANDERTHALS DIET

Neanderthals living in southwestern France 55,000 to 40,000 years ago mostly ate red meat from extinct ancestors of modern bison, cattle and horses, according to a new study on a large, worn Neanderthal tooth. The extinct hominids were not above eating every edible bit of an animal, since they were dining for survival, explained Teresa Steele, one of the study's co-authors.

The new findings, which have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution, also suggest beans, grains and nuts were off the Neanderthal menu. "We assume that Neanderthals were eating some plant foods, but given the present evidence, these plant foods were not significant sources of protein," explained Steele, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis.

She and her colleagues extracted fine powder from an upper right Neanderthal premolar, excavated at a now-collapsed rock shelter called Jonzac in southwest France. For comparison, they also extracted and analyzed bone collagen from animal remains unearthed at the site. These animals included the Steppe bison, aurochs, ancient horses, reindeer and hyenas.

The Neanderthal diet was limited in comparison to modern human diets, noted Steele, since early modern humans ate "more small, fast game, including birds and fish." This gave our ancestors "greater dietary flexibility and ultimately allowed their population sizes to increase more rapidly, allowing them to live at higher population densities."

"The study reconfirms previous studies that the Neanderthals were highly carnivorous and fed primarily on large mammals," said Richard Klein, a professor of anthropological sciences in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, adding, "I think it is totally convincing."
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/04/23/neanderthal-meal.html