The dietary habits of Neanderthals are considered an issue of great interest in the literature and have opened an important number of fruitful debates. Indeed, understanding diets can provide important information regarding issues of palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and subsistence strategies. In this respect, dental remains can play a vital role in the conducted efforts to reconstruct the palaeoecological niches securely and accurately since dental microwear analyses have precisely detected dietary patterns of the populations in the past. In this context, the Iberian Peninsula forms an interesting model for examining Neanderthal populations, their subsistence strategies, and adaptive skills. This study aims the examination of already published data in order to provide a holistic approach regarding the dietary habits of H. neanderthalensis populations in the Iberian Peninsula, along with the importance of the utilization of dental microwear analysis in the archaeological record.

The author argues for a significant social and cognitive transition between the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Europe. Between about 300 000 and 200 000 years ago, early Neanderthals developed stone working techniques which combined methods that were previously discrete, began to occupy high-relief terrain and to settle systematically the highly seasonal environments of central and eastern Europe – skill-sets here termed the ‘incorporation of difference’. These findings make us rethink the competence of pre-modern hominins and to review, in the author's words, ‘the boundaries we erect to police the uniqueness of humanity’.