Yet ancient modern humans in Europe at the same time as entomophagic Neanderthals barely had bug DNA in their teeth. How did this discrepancy arise?
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Yet ancient modern humans in Europe at the same time as entomophagic Neanderthals barely had bug DNA in their teeth. How did this discrepancy arise?
09:00 PM • June 05 2026 IDT
Neanderthals ate flies, we learn from a new paper published on Friday based on the detection of insect DNA in their dental calculus. They consumed other insects too but the chief signal in their plaque was Diptera – flies and mosquitoes. But early modern humans in Europe living contemporaneously with Neanderthals didn't eat insects, or if they did, it was apparently rarely and by accident.
That doesn't necessarily mean Neanderthals were hunting insects. But, however it happened, the Neanderthals' insect ingestion rate was quantitatively comparable to that of great apes, while that of the ancient Europeans was very low, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado and colleagues revealed Friday in the journal of Science Advances.
Hunter-gatherers pushing into Siberia around 45,000 years ago, early farmers of Anatolia 9,000 years ago and later folk around the continent – all quantitatively ate less bugs than Neanderthals and the apes. A similar pattern was detected in paleo-Americans: not a fan of the bug.
Haaretz Podcast
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What is going on here? Did they not like them? We love crunchy food, so what's the problem? Did early humans have an early revulsion for bugs, while Neanderthals were culinarily more venturesome? And crucially, could the revelation that early Europeans didn't eat bugs doom modern efforts by the environmentally-minded to introduce the leg of locust rather than lamb?
No, insists Dror Tamir, head of the Hargol initiative to help save the planet through humane entomophagy (the practice of eating insects). In fact, eating bugs wouldn't be something new, he stresses to the queasy. It's going back to our roots.
Why did researchers compare plaque in Neanderthals and early Europeans in search of insect DNA to see if they ate bugs? The study began as an investigation into why Western societies are repulsed by entomophagy while hundreds of millions of people elsewhere eat insects regularly, Librado explains to Haaretz in conversation and email. It's the ecology, stupid.
"We wanted to understand when this behavioral divergence took shape, and the [pre]historical reasons," he says. "These are crucial questions today, with the emergence of a new agricultural sector [edible insects] aimed to bridge the gap between an already overexploited planet and a yet-increasing human population. The emerging industry is struggling to expand in part because of this aversion, meaning it is important to understand this 'why.'"
To be clear, if you eat food, you eat bugs: In today's society, consuming industrial food means involuntarily splurging on their body parts and waste. Happily, the contamination is governed by rules. For instance, per 50 grams of cornmeal, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows an average of 50 insect fragments, "an average of 1 or more" whole insects and an average of one or more rodent hairs.
Not mincing its words, the FDA's list of allowable "insect filth and insects", as well as "mammalian excreta" and/or mold makes for edifying reading. Frozen broccoli may permissibly host around 60 aphids, thrips and/or mites per 100 grams, for instance, and one would never have known.
Basically, most Westerners would rather not know that. We shrink at the thought of eating roaches, though technically they are just arthropods like lobsters. Though, to be fair to us, insect and lobster lineages diverged half a billion years ago.
Could it be that westerners eschew entomophagy because they evolved a hereditary "yuck factor"– certain bugs are poisonous, so disliking all bugs would be hereditarily efficient? Eat toxic bugs, die; avoid bugs, stay safe and live to have children and teach them to hate bugs?
No, science has never found traces of a genetic mechanism predisposing us specifically to entomophobia. Arguably, we are genetically predisposed to anxiety and bugs make some people anxious, but that's another thing.
Also, while edible insects are shunned in the West, grubs, caterpillars, larvae, crickets, beetles and mealworms are commonly eaten throughout tropical and subtropical zones.
The exceptions – Aficionados of "bee brood" are eating bee larvae and pupae. Italy is famed among foodies who dare to eat "casu martzu" cheese eaten with live maggots inside. It's also famed for people who wouldn't touch wriggling cheese with a gondola pole.
Ergo, in modern society, disgust of the creepy and crawly is clearly a cultural phenomenon common in the colder regions, less so in the tropics. And now, the team detected what appears to be insect aversion in early European humans compared with Neanderthals. So an eat/not eat divergence in humans happened quite early.
But why? Og may not have been grossed out. Possibly, eating bugs made him feel physically sick.
Neanderthals and the great apes shared a genetic ability that that goes back to time immemorial, and is shared by all eaters of arthropods throughout the animal kingdom: to digest chitin, the key component in insect body armor. Since arthropods go back hundreds of millions of years, so does the chitin and animals capable of eating it. Arthropods themselves possess chitinase, which among other things helps them break down their exoskeleton in order to molt and grow. And to eat other arthropods.
So it stands to reason that the underlying condition of the Homo genus is to be able to digest chitin. Yet prehistoric Eurasian hunter-gatherers lost that ability to a significant degree, the researchers discovered. A person with diminished chitinase activity who eats bugs may have felt like a lactose-intolerant person after eating ice cream: bloated, gassy, nauseated and in and pain, Librado explains. They might develop an aversion.
So the theory is that Neanderthals could digest insects much better than the early Europeans, who may have been sickened by them. And that could be why we find more insect DNA on Neanderthal and ape teeth than on human early European teeth. Ta da!
Meanwhile, outside Europe's cold clime, other humans retained the ability. A key research find was a latitudinal gradient of chitinase in humans – cold areas, less; hot areas, more.
"We all have different frequencies of the chintinase variants, meaning that not all modern Europeans can or can't digest bugs. But the situation between Europe and the tropics is very different," Librado sums up. The team believes this was an adaptation: Humans reaching colder regions encountered fewer insects in their food than in the tropics, and didn't need it any more.
Okay so why did Neanderthals retain theirs? Because of their small family groups. Wait for it.
The paper is based on metagenomic analyses of dental plaque on teeth from 18 Neanderthals, and 745 anatomically modern humans, dating from about 45,000 years ago to about 1,500 years ago. The team also sequenced DNA in plaque from the teeth of 96 great apes known to eat insects – western chimpanzees and mountain gorillas.
Of the study subjects, gorillas had the most insect DNA in their plaque: chiefly beetles, followed by flies and mosquitoes, caterpillars and locusts. Next were Neanderthals and their main insect was Diptera - flies and mosquitoes. (They ate mosquitoes? No, they simply register together with flies, Librado explains.) Ancient Europeans had the least.
One remembers research claiming that Neanderthals allowed meat to fester in order to "cultivate" nutrition-rich maggots for consumption. Librado agrees that's probably not the cause of the fly DNA in their teeth. Neanderthals were plausibly as revolted by decaying meat as we are. No, they likely weren't eating infested rotting meat, they were eating infested turning meat.
If they didn't sup on stinking fly-ridden carrion, how did Neanderthals wind up eating enough flies to rank with gorillas and far beyond humans, who seem not to have an inherent disgust, but a cultural one?
The answer probably lies in social activities, Librado suggests. "Neanderthals lived in small groups and had very different hunting practices [than humans]. They preserved animal carcasses differently," he says.
They did? Say a small Neanderthal group brings home a deer; they can't eat the whole thing at once, but save some, and the leftovers would get colonized by flies. Subsequently, eating remains crawling with creepies would deliver the Neanderthals an extra nutritional kick from their buck. Humans, on the other hand, lived in bigger groups and could finish the deer.
Asking as a westerner who doesn't know, maybe bugs don't taste good to us? Pablo answers that crickets reportedly taste like bacon. That evidently isn't the problem.
Chimpanzee results were like Neanderthals and lower than gorillas, but gorillas eat bugs year-round with their fruit and leaves, while chimps live in savannahs with wet and dry seasons. In wet seasons, they have fruit and leaves to eat; in the dry season, they supplement their diet by termite fishing. The data on chimpanzees shows that the insect they most commonly ate was Lepidoptera – winged insects.
Butterflies! Ooh! Chimpanzees are attracted to pretty crystals, research has shown. Could our cousins also be attracted to consuming beauty? "The Menu" à la pan, coming soon to a savannah near you?
Librado giggles at the fanciful notion. No, that signal is from eating caterpillars, he clarifies. As for beetle eaters, he points out there is a vast diversity of beetles. Signals of Blattidae in teeth of humans, Neanderthals or apes don't signal cockroaches – that family also includes termites. Somehow, for cultural reasons apparently, one feels relieved.
"Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper." – Leviticus 11:22
Insect revulsion is sad because no less than the world Food and Agriculture Organization has been promoting insects as a way to supplement the nutritional needs of the growing world population, on the grounds that herbivore husbandry is insufficient, inhumane and ecologically insane. It has not been smooth sailing.
We eat what our parents give us and if we're culturally trained to detest bugs, by age 3 the lesson has landed, says Dror Tamir of Hargol FoodTech. After that the child will have an aversion. Overcoming aversion is a matter of marketing.
Indeed, not having been fed insects in childhood, this author is squeamish but didn't hesitate at candy made of insects.
Actually, Tamir feels that people shy away from new products. "If I try to say, here's a new product – [protein powder shakes from locusts] for athletes, they say yuck, who knows if it's good. But eating locusts is not new. John the Baptist ate locusts."
"Manna from heaven – what do people think that was?" he adds. Probably not insects, was it? Come on, manna was described more like a croissant than a cricket – sweet and flaky, not hopping and screaming.
The bottom line is that some modern humans lost our chitinase when we reached an environment where insects were scarce and hunting them became energetically more costly than the nutritional benefit we would get, Librado sums up the plight of the ancient European. And, also, the Jomon people of prehistoric Japan were reduced to basically no chitinase at all. That is terrible. No bugs for us.
But it isn't that the cultural yuck factor started in prehistory, it's that their biology adapted to an insect-poor environment, we now realize. Neanderthals got their fix of flies not by lurking in swamps with their mouths open, competing with frogs, but rather because they ate colonized carcasses, the team surmises. The early Europeans in their big groups didn't leave remains around in such a fashion, and their example does not support an innate, unconquerable revulsion for insects, even if it may demonstrate the emergence of chitin intolerance. Candy made of bugs demonstrates just how sturdy that revulsion is (not very). Moreover, industrial processes can remove chitin from dehydrated powdered insects, leaving behind the protein.
So, yes, bugs for us. In the industrial age, natural abundance is not a barrier anymore, just our minds. We just have to overcome the cultural repulsion drummed into us from age zero. Bon appetit!
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