Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Taste, though, doesn’t just signal what’s good. Bitter sensations especially warn of danger, and genetics confirms that Neanderthals could detect one such compound. Known as PTC,32 it’s found in some plants and is safe only when consumed in small amounts. Intriguingly, this Neanderthal mutation is different to that in many people today and was accompanied by another partially blocking PTC signals. This may mean Neanderthals had a higher tolerance for such flavours, and combined with genetic evidence for a wider array of bitter and sour taste perceptions, sampling unfamiliar plants or fermented meats might have been safer for them. The duo of taste and smell combine to produce what we experience as flavour, so it’s even possible that Neanderthals lived in a richer culinary world than ours.