The region of Estremadura in Portugal was home to a band of Neanderthals – an ancient evolutionary relative of modern humans – about 95,000 years ago. They made use of the patchwork of limestone caves, crags and river valleys, leaving traces of their activities in the form of stone tools, butchered animal bones and the remnants of fireplaces.
Now their teeth are providing new insights on how they hunted and interacted with their landscape. I was one of an international team of researchers that compared the levels of different forms of the chemical element strontium that had been preserved within the tooth enamel of two Neanderthals from the Almonda cave system in central Portugal, dating back about 95,000 years. The results have been published in the journal PNAS.
