By Victoria Bell For Mailonline
Published: 12:45 GMT, 22 March 2019 | Updated: 13:54 GMT, 22 March 2019
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The caveman diet consisted of mostly meat, reveals new analysis of a neanderthal woman's tooth found in France.
Radiocarbon dating and nitrogen isotope analysis has confirmed their main food source and diet was meat-based, including large mammals like reindeer and horse.
In what they describe as a 'very monotonous diet', the researchers found evidence of a high consumption of mammoth meat using compound-specific isotope analysis.
This is used to investigate the diets of past people by a tracing the 'trophic' level, the position an organism occupies in a food chain.
The question of what Neanderthals ate has been highly debated among scientists for decades.
Traditionally considered the first people to live on the caveman diet, many have challenged the theory because of evidence of plant consumption.
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The caveman diet really did consist mostly of meat, reveals new analysis of their teeth. They nearly always tucked into meat - including reindeer and horse - in what researchers described as a 'very monotonous diet'
Through nitrogen isotope ratios, which measures the position an organism has in the food chain, they found that neanderthals hold a slightly higher ratio than carnivores.
It has been suggested that the slightly higher values were due to the consumption of mammoth or putrid meat.
There have also been examples of cannibalism discovered at different Neanderthal sites.
Paleolithic modern humans, who arrived in France shortly after the Neanderthals had disappeared, exhibit even higher nitrogen isotope ratios which they interpreted as the signature of eating freshwater fish.
The Neanderthals come from Les Cottés and Grotte du Renne, in France, two sites where no fish remains have been found.
But the measurements were performed on a tooth root, which recorded the diet between four to eight years of the individual's life, and on a bone of a one-year-old baby.
To explain the exceptionally high nitrogen isotope ratios, Dr Jaouen and her colleagues decided to use a new isotope technique.
She explained that compound-specific isotope analyses (CSIA) allow to separately analyse the amino acids contained in the
