Seafood gave us the edge on the Neanderthals

Variety pays off

Such flexibility may explain why modern humans thrived in ancient Europe while Neanderthals perished, says Hervé Bocherens, a biological anthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. "If modern humans were hunting big game, like Neanderthals, they would compete with them and deplete the resources."

When big game were scarce, modern humans could have survived and even flourished by eating fish and smaller animals. Neanderthal populations, by contrast, probably shrank and eventually disappeared in areas from which their more limited meal options disappeared.

However, Bocherens cautions against drawing too many conclusions from 13 Neanderthal skeletons, all unearthed in northern Europe. Collagen doesn't survive well in warmer climates, so researchers know less about the diet of Neanderthals in southern Europe and the Middle East, he says.

"There is evidence from a number of southern European sites in Portugal, Gibraltar, Spain and Italy that Neanderthals did exploit marine resources at times and, I would say, probably to a significant extent," says Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. His team recently found cut marks on seal and dolphin bones in a Neanderthal cave in Gibraltar.