Sixty thousand years ago, two groups of Neanderthals lived just a stone’s throw apart in what’s now northern Israel. But they had very different cultures when it came to food, according to a recent study. Archaeologist Anaëlle Jallon of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues examined dozens of animal bones from both sites, looking for clues about Neanderthal meal prep. It turns out that something as mundane as the cut marks left by butchering an animal can reveal differences in ancient people’s way of life.
These ungulate bones from Amud (left) and Kebara (right) caves show distinctly different patterns of cut marks. Credit: Jallon et al. 2025
What did Neanderthals eat? It depends.
The Neanderthals who lived around the Sea of Galilee between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago had their pick of meat entrees on the hoof. The area was home to several species of deer, from tiny roe deer to larger red deer, along with gazelles, wild goats, boar, and larger game like aurochs and relatives of modern horses. For Neanderthal hunters equipped with wood and stone hunting tools, the place was a veritable buffet. And you might expect that one group of Neanderthals would eat pretty much the same things as any others in the area.
However, what Jallon and her colleagues found in their recent study looks more like the Pleistocene version of New York and Chicago having very different styles of pizza: same ingredients, different ways of using them.
One group of Neanderthals lived in a cave now called Kebara on the western flanks of Mount Carmel, while the other lived in a cave now called Amud on a steep cliff overlooking the valley floor. They may not have lived at the same moment; the range of dates for both sites spans about 20,000 years. But both were just a few kilometers from the Sea of Galilee, living in very similar environments populated by the same plants and wildlife, and they used very similar stone tool technology.
Jallon and her colleagues looked at the piles of animal bones archaeologists have unearthed at both sites. They noted which bones, from which types of game, tended to show up with cut marks more often. They also noted how many cut marks the bones tended to bear and what those marks looked like. And their study revealed that Neanderthals just 70 kilometers apart were hunting slightly different prey and choosing different cuts of meat—and one group apparently liked their meat a little fresher than the other.