Neanderthals Ate Bugs. Europeans Avoided Them for 9,000 Years.

Twenty-nine thousand years ago, someone in what is now the Czech Republic may have swallowed a lake-dwelling midge without realizing it. Thousands of years later, in Germany, another person may have eaten food infested with insects. In the teeth of ancient Europeans, bugs look less like food than accidental evidence.

Researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona analyzed dental plaque from 18 Neanderthals and 745 anatomically modern humans, then sequenced DNA from the plaque of 96 great apes known to eat insects. Ancient Europeans consumed insects only rarely and likely by accident, with far less insect DNA in their teeth than in those of Neanderthals or several insect-eating great apes.

The dietary gap has a biological counterpart. European populations have carried genetic variants linked to reduced chitin digestion (chitin is the tough material in insect exoskeletons) for at least 9,000 years. Chitin digestion depends on specific enzymes, and in both ancient and modern samples, researchers identified genetic variants associated with greater expression of those enzymes in populations near the tropics. Modern humans in Europe and the colder regions of Asia appear to have lost meaningful insect-digesting capacity by roughly 9,000 years ago.

The mechanism makes evolutionary sense. In the tropics, insects are everywhere, easy to catch, and worth eating. Over generations, the populations who ate them got better at digesting them.

Today, edible insects are widely promoted as a sustainable protein source, but Western consumers remain hard to convince. This study suggests the reason may reach further back than taste or culture.

The aversion, it turns out, is not merely a matter of squeamishness. It is also written into roughly 9,000 years of inherited biology.

Read the full story at Discover Magazine, June 5, 2026

Hot Take: The sustainable-food industry has spent a decade arguing that Western bug aversion is purely cultural, which was always a more convenient framing than a complete one. A genetic predisposition built over millennia of not eating insects is not a marketing problem to be solved with the right seasoning.