This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher in Tagayata.

The paleo diet, it's pretty trendy.

Eat like a caveman, no dairy, no grains, no sugar, and so on. But what you probably won't... a Laura Wierrick, a paleo microbiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

What we would like to call it the true paleo diet.

It's basically what you could find in a forest if you're not eating meat.

Wierrick and her colleagues clean the teeth of Neanderthals found in Belgium and Spain.

They popped off bits of ancient dental plaque and then sequenced the DNA contained within,

to see if it matched up to any known sequences today. What they found suggests that the

northern Neanderthals ate a meat-heavy diet, stuff like woolly rhino and wild sheep.

Whereas their southern counterparts, they ate that forest-foraged vegetarian fare, mushrooms, pine nuts, and moss.

One of the Spanish specimens also appeared to have taken a tree-derived painkiller

related to aspirin and might have self-medicated with antibiotic penicillium bacteria too.

And the Neanderthal's mouth microbiome, on average, resembled that of chimps more than modern humans.

And they have a much healthier set of bacteria in their mouth as well.

They don't have the nasty bacteria in the right proportions to really chew

holes in their teeth and cause paradolidal disease.

They really weren't very healthy. And their teeth, they really weren't very healthy.

And their teeth, she says, are still sparkly white today.

The studies in the journal Nature.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, might be that humans and Neanderthals appear to swap mouth

microbes at one point in time, something that Wierck says probably happened not through

violent interactions, but when kissing or sharing food.

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