Fresh meat is excellent, unless you’re a Neanderthal. Then you might’ve preferred it crawling with maggots.
A new study published in Science Advances suggests our Ice Age cousins weren’t just tough—they were culinary opportunists. And their favorite seasoning? Time. Lots of it. Enough for the meat to rot, squirm, and ooze. “Although this may seem unpalatable to us today,” researchers wrote, “such food may have been not only tolerated but potentially preferred.”
It started with a mystery. Neanderthal bones contain nitrogen isotope ratios so high that scientists once assumed they were eating like lions. But there’s a catch: humans can’t process that much protein. Too much meat without fat or carbs leads to something called “rabbit starvation,” where your body essentially self-destructs. So, unless Neanderthals were secretly part wolf, the theory didn’t hold.
That’s where maggots come in.
Neanderthals Ate Maggot-Filled Meat On Purpose, Study Finds
Researchers analyzed fly larvae grown on decomposing human tissue at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center. The results were both gross and illuminating. Three-quarters of the maggots had nitrogen levels higher than any Ice Age plant-eater ever recorded. That’s significant. Eating maggots or rotting meat that harbored them could explain the sky-high nitrogen values in Neanderthal remains. And honestly, it’s not as wild as it sounds.
Many Indigenous groups have been documented eating decomposed meat deliberately. Some considered maggots a delicacy. One account describes explorers watching in horror as people scooped out “handfuls of the crawling things and ate them with evident relish.” When asked how they could stomach it, the reply was simple: “We don’t eat the smell.”
To survive in Ice Age Europe, you had to be scrappy. Kills weren’t guaranteed, refrigeration didn’t exist, and mammoth steaks didn’t keep long. But if you could stomach the funk—and the flies—you could stretch a carcass for weeks. Maggots are calorie-dense, full of fat, and totally edible. Kind of like prehistoric protein bars, if you squint.
The team also found that winter maggots had even higher nitrogen levels than those found in summer. That makes sense: fur-trapped heat, even in subzero temps, allows decay to continue. Meaning frozen meat wasn’t necessarily safe from rot, but it was still on the menu.
To be clear, the study doesn’t prove Neanderthals were chomping down on maggots. But it does offer a solid explanation for decades of weird data.
They weren’t wild cavemen scarfing down raw mammoth. They were strategic, calorie-savvy survivors. And if that meant eating meat that squirmed back, so be it.
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