13 ms·
Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- baxtr 1y ago> The production of bone grease, which required huge quantities of bone to be worthwhile, was previously considered to be something limited to Upper Paleolithic modern humans. This find pushes back the timeline by thousands of years and represents a fundamental shift in our knowledge of Neanderthal diet and adaptation. If I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.
- ricksunny 1y agoI still struggle with the repeated assertions from the scicommss set that the 'neanderthals died out' or 'humans outcompeted neanderthals who went extinct', while at the same time acknowledging that 3% of DNA of everyone outside the African content is neanderthal. With that being the limit of 'the data' generally cited at hadn't, wouldn't a gradual, passively amicable merging (e.g. absorption) be just as explanatory as that Neanderthal's 'went extince' or 'were outcompeted'?
- Nursie 1y agoIt's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here. However they are still extinct! It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'. Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.
- Ono-Sendai 1y agoAlso the Normans were vikings!
- clarionbell 1y agoFrench speaking descendants of vikings yes. But they didn't have that much in common with Norwegians at the time.
- kergonath 1y agoThey had been vikings. They integrated very quickly on the continent, inter-married with locals and absorbed the culture within a couple of generations. It was nothing like the power structure that was put in place in England.
- bee_rider 1y agoIt doesn’t seem that much of a coincidence that some of the history’s foremost boat-based pillagers and raiders were the descendants of Vikings, right?
- Nursie 1y agoHa! I hadn't thought of it that way but you have a point :)
- pbmonster 1y agoI think it's because that 3% number is so small, it actually comes down to "outcompeted". A merger of two equally fit sub-species would result in more DNA persisting.
- josefx 1y agoIsn't there already an overlap in the upper 90% between humans and apes? I don't know how much the neanderthal DNA differed back then, but it couldn't be more than that, could it? So wouldn't 3% of the total be at least a third of the parts that did differ?
- pbmonster 1y agoIt's always confusing how those DNA comparisons are worded. We share almost 99% of our DNA with chimps, for example. But this just means that if you go down the genome, we have 99% of the same types of genes. And that's true even though we don't even have the same number of chromosomes as chimps! (We also share 50% of DNA with bananas - which just shows how incredibly complex basic stuff like cell respiration is.) This is different than the statement that you share 50% of your DNA with your siblings, of course. Because in that case, you actually have the exact identical alleles as your siblings in 50% of your DNA. The 3% neanderthal DNA is the second type of comparison.
- JohnMakin 1y agoWhen stated this way, 3% seems like quite a lot.
- pbmonster 1y agoYes! You have 32 great^3-grandparents, 3% DNA is equivalent to one of them being purebred neanderthal.
- samuell 1y agoThe 99% identity with chimps is extremely misleading without clear qualification. The fact that it has been used without qualification has a lot to do with the fact that most of our genome was assumed to be junk, which we know today is not the case, per the ENCODE project for example. Thus, the 99% number needs to stop being perpetuated. Today we know that the alignable parts (parts that are similar enough that they can be aligned with each other) are down in the 80s percents between humans and chimps, which can be digged out from e.g. this recent big study (some numbers are in the paper, and some needs to be digged out of the supplementary material): Yoo, D. et. al. (2025). Complete sequencing of ape genomes. Nature, 1-18. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08816-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08816-3 Then remember that a 15%-ish difference with chimps means hundreds of millions of base pairs of difference.
- atoav 1y agoI am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides complexity. Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI've long assumed it's typical patriarchal historical/anthro bullshit. History is memorizing kings and wars; there have to be winners and losers; etc.
- 14 1y agoI am convinced that early humans were a lot smarter then given credit for. My guess is the same as yours and that they were part of a long chain of steps of learning and development that went back much farther then we have evidence for.
- hoseja 1y agoNeanderthals especially were probably kinda autistic.
- IAmBroom 1y agoUm, cite?
- Gupie 1y agoPossibly however homo erectus used the same design for their hand axes for over a million years. This implies the design was hardwired in their brains, in the same way the design of nests are hardwired in bird brains, as opposed to a rationally thought out design.
- amarait 1y agoThe deeper you go into those thoughts the more you realize theres no rationalization if you go the hard deterministic way
- jbotz 1y agoWhen I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions. Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2]. [1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z
- 14 1y agoYes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in a wooden container if done right. But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and building a fire by it. Then you place some hot burning pieces on top of the log. Keep adding them and burning on top of the log until it burns a bowl sized indentation. Then you take a rock or stick and scrape the hole and get it clean sort of. Then you put water into that and if no container to carry water is shows soaking a shirt and carrying it that way. After the large bowl sized hole is filled with water you take a few rocks that were sitting in the fire and drop them in. You will be amazed how fast it will boil the water. This is done to allow you to drink from a potentially unsafe water source. I guess what I am thinking is that there are probably dozens of ways they could have achieved it. Ways that with our knowledge of today escapes us but to them it was common knowledge. If I had to take a guess they would have used rocks and use a large flat rock and encircle that rock with rocks making a pit or rocks then covered the sides with dirt. Then dug a hole under part of the large flat rock and made fire under it. This primitive pot would not work well at first but my guess is that as fat melted and oozed into the cracks it would eventually seal and then would work very well to boil things. Anyways just fun to think about I know very little about the time period.
- freetime2 1y ago>The study indicates that Neanderthals, in addition to smashing bones to access the marrow—a behavior shared by their earliest African ancestors—also crushed them into fragments and boiled them to obtain bone grease, a nutrient-rich resource. I wish the article went into more details about how they boiled the bones. My first thought was that smashing bones and boiling them is not all that impressive. And then I thought about how I would boil bones without a pot to boil them in... and actually that does sound like it would be a challenge and require a lot of collaboration and planning.
- bluGill 1y agoThis is likely a case of we cannot know. There are many options that we know would work - that would biodegrade in just a few decades. The breakthrough is the claim that they were doing this.
- arrowleaf 1y agoFrame or shape leather hide to hold water, add water and hold over flame or add hot rocks.
- pbmonster 1y ago> cut-marked remains of 76 rhinos and 40 elephants were also discovered at nearby sites like Taubach. Remarkable how different the previous interglacial periods were. Herds of elephants and rhinos in today's Berlin, at 51° north!
- Roark66 1y agoAnd how could they've done this without language? I've heard this statement that neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language and they did not (something about the way their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds). I call BS on that now. You can't do this kind of stuff without ability to communicate your intentions, future plans, rewards for other people and so on. Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their wheel axles with...
- cdrini 1y agoBoth of those things can be true. Just because they didn't have language, doesn't mean they couldn't communicate, it just means they could likely only communicate primarily by showing instead of telling. And it's also clear why being able to communicate with language would indeed offer quite the competitive edge over that system.
- b112 1y agoDuring a period of high trust, I've watched crows training their young via showing. While crows have "crafty" intelligence, neanderthals would be more apt at this. But really, the logical first language would be gesture, an extension of already existing body language. And such language is employed by humans when hunting, at war, whenever quiet is preferred. Even a gesture language of a few dozen concepts is almost automatic, pointing, waving, directional motions, hushing motions, pointing at your head, clapping, etc. This being extended as full language in beings incapable of complex sound, seems viable.
- cdrini 1y agoVery cool anecdote! And agreed, I think we're being a bit "handwavy" about what we mean when we say "language"; it seems like more of a spectrum. I'm not sure where we draw the line between, say, language that animals use which, to the best of our knowledge, do not show complex/abstract communication, and human languages. And who knows where Neanderthal language/communication would fall on that spectrum!
- samuell 1y agoNeanderthals were people. Even Nobel laurate Svante Pääbo, who sequenced their DNA, admits it.
- codingwagie 1y agoYeah but theres also sorts of political implications for admitting that
- FrustratedMonky 1y ago? Can you expand? What is the political implication?
- umeshunni 1y agoWhat do you mean?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- meindnoch 1y ago[flagged]
- nyeah 1y agoThis is the only comment here that I'm 100% sure is accurate.
- poulpy123 1y agoWhile the discovery is great, there are quotes that are very clickbaity like "They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently.” No they didn't understand the nutritional value better than any other homo something before or after, or even any carnivorous animals. It's just that evolution engineered them to look for food everywhere. For example the bearded vulture diet is based on bone and bone marrow, it's not because it understands the nutritional value of bone marrow better than the other birds but because all carnivorous animals evolved to eat fat, and evolution provided a way for this bird to get the marrow more easily than the others.
- thfuran 1y agoNeanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does. And "any homo something before or after" includes us today. While it might be reasonable to say there are things we don't fully understand about the way fat affects the body, we do understand the nutritional value of fat.
- IAmBroom 1y agoMy huskies and some of my neighbors have equivalent educations on nutritional science.
- poulpy123 1y ago> Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does. Understanding the nutritional value of a food goes beyond than working to get the food. You need to have a theory of nutrition (true or false), and there is nothing that can suggest this. Saying that they ate fat because fat is good for them is tautologic > And "any homo something before or after" includes us today. It is obvious that I include our specy only until the first research and experiments on the topic
- hombre_fatal 1y agoWhat more did they know about dietary fat than that it was edible and it would help them survive, the same as any animal? This just sounds like romanticizing.
- qoez 1y agoThis is the first time in the wild I've seen an image credited to an artist that is clearly AI made (with some minor detail like smoke added to the foreground). You can tell it's AI by the details of the bone and piles of wood.
- echelon 1y agoIt doesn't make them not an artist. There are lots of VFX professionals on LinkedIn having a total field day with AI tools and posting mind-blowing stuff. Somehow it hasn't reached the rest of social media yet. On that last point: AI is going to propel individual artists ahead of big Hollywood studios. They won't need studio capital anymore, and they'll be able to retain all the upside themselves.
- andrewflnr 1y agoIt doesn't make them not an artist, but it might make them a bad artist. That image gets more nonsensical the more you look at it. How big is that skull in the foreground supposed to be?
- fivestones 1y agoCan you link to some of this mind-blowing stuff?
- bee_rider 1y agoI guess the line is quite blurry, but they could have used some sort of AI-based fill-in for those areas, right
- umeshunni 1y agoSome other articles explicitly call out that the image is AI generated: e.g. it's labeled with An AI generated impression of activities at the “Fat Factory” site. The image was generated with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT (version 4o, 2025), and subsequent modification and retouching by a graphic designer | Quelle: F. Scherjon | Copyright: F. Scherjon, LEIZA-Monrepos at https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/07/02/neanderthals-ran-fat-factories-125000-years-ago https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/07/02/neanderthals-ra...
- tpoindex 1y agoGary Larson's take on fat farming: https://i.redd.it/697huclnulme1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/697huclnulme1.jpeg (The only image I could readily find was on Reddit :-)
- FooBarBizBazz 1y agoI clicked to learn what a "fat factory" is, then realized -- Soup. They were making soup. I would like to know what seasonings they used.
- octaane 1y agoAs I'm understanding it, it was primarily for grease, not soup itself. They certainly could have been making soup as well, but grease itself is a much more valuable product. It has utility for waterproofing, warmth (if you smear it on your body) lubricant, and is also highly calorically dense. You can also use it to preserve food (see "Potted meat") and on it's own, stays edible at room temp for a long time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- octaane 1y agoInteresting find. As mentioned by other comments, there are other ways you can boil things and render fat than with ceramic containers. However, there are even easier ways. For example, you could simply dig a hole in the ground, fill it with your fat, tendons, sinews, etc, top it with water, and toss in rocks that have been heated in a fire. That will boil the water and render the grease out; you just need to wait for the whole thing to solidify/cool. Also, you can dig a hole, add your un-rendered fat, then pour boiling water on top of it, then skim off the fat once it cools. Native Americans did that for a long time to get grease from candlefish [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulachon#Economics_and_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulachon#Economics_and_trade