7 ms·

Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

296 points by andsoitis 6mo ago

irdc 6mo ago
This pairs nicely with the recent publications around Neanderthal cognitive abilities and how there likely similar to ours (https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-measure-up-to-ours-literally/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-m...).
- sokoloff 6mo ago
  I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
  - echelon 6mo ago
    Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning. If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time. Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.
    - dismalaf 6mo ago
      > Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play. Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.
      - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
        What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
        tsunamifury 6mo ago
        Ants won over humans? Worms?
        hrimfaxi 6mo ago
        When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.
        dismalaf 6mo ago
        Are numbers everything? Are sardines more evolved than whales? Anyhow, the traditional view is that Neanderthals were brutes who were actually out-competed and killed off by Sapiens. The more realistic view considering the evidence is that Neanderthals were much closer to Sapiens, equally or even more sophisticated, but less numerous, and thus their contribution to our DNA is smaller than Sapiens. But do keep in mind the Neanderthals live on because Europeans and Asians are all part Neanderthal.
        junofan 6mo ago
        I think especially given TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators who occasionally raped human women. I don’t much believe the friendly smiling museum depictions that have lately become fashionable. Their eyes alone would have made them something you didn’t want to run into at night.
        dismalaf 6mo ago
        > TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators All humans are. Neanderthals, Sapiens, modern humans, we are all apex predators. > occasionally raped human women The article doesn't suggest that. While it's plausible, there's also evidence of Sapien/Neanderthal cooperation and mingling: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.h... And lets not forget that all hominins fight amongst themselves, rape each other, etc... The assumption that Neanderthals were particularly brutish is just that, an assumption.
    - card_zero 6mo ago
      Hmm, more smarter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Cranial_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Cranial_capacity Not the lady Neanderthals: > average Neanderthal cranial capacity for females was 1300 cm3 and 1600 cm3 for males. [Modern humans, 1473 cm3.] Nor the dude Neanderthals, since they were using the swollen brainparts for vision and coordination: > Neanderthals had larger eyes and bodies relative to their height [...] when these areas were adjusted to match anatomically modern human proportions it was found Neanderthals had brains 15-22% smaller than in anatomically-modern humans. Edit since I don't even agree with the concept: even if the extra capacity was differently distributed such that they had more ... powerful? ... executive functions, what's smartness? More imagination, OK, more self-restraint, more planning. More navel-gazing, more doubt, more ennui. Or it could be more communication, often proposed as what gave sapiens the edge. Chattering bipeds. It's an association between the brain doing something and the species proliferating, that's what we're calling smart, but doing what? It could just mean our ancestors were compulsively busy. Same thing as smart, perhaps.
      - otherme123 6mo ago
        We will never get that the cranial volume is not the same as inteligence/brain function, or whatever you might call it. Reminder that Einstein brain was smaller than average, and female brain are smaller than male. Phrenology will haunt us forever, in one form or another. Most likely, some Neanderthals were asimilated into modern humans, most were exterminated in tribal clashes. Reminder also that our almighty specie was almost wiped out from history around 800,000 years ago (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487), being the most intelligent organism ever existed.
    - geysersam 6mo ago
      I don't think that matches archeological findings. From what I understand the reason neanderthals are understood to have been less intelligent than sapiens is because neanderthal tools found are cruder than sapien tools from around the same periods and areas.
    - dyauspitr 6mo ago
      But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.
      - wazoox 6mo ago
        The minuscule sample of tools we have are more primitive, but we don't have any examples of their wooden tools, nor any trace of most of their activities, languages, rites, etc. They could have invented animal husbandry and wool spinning and build awesome wooden cities and we have no way to know because everything would have disappeared without a trace, crushed by glaciers of later ages. We know almost nothing of them.
  - Epa095 6mo ago
    Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
    - cluckindan 6mo ago
      And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence. If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.
      - anamexis 6mo ago
        For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.
      - readthenotes1 6mo ago
        True, but irrelevant. Or, false and irrelevant. People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
      - jibal 6mo ago
        This is wrong and confused in every possible way. Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance. That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by Epa095, sokoloff, and irdc and why they are or are not true. If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, all of their IQs will shoot up until the scoring of every IQ test is renormalized to a mean of 100.
        roysting 6mo ago
        I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise. It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”. Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.
  - cwnyth 6mo ago
    Precisely why is this hard to square away?
    - sokoloff 6mo ago
      If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was. Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off? (This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)
      - bonzini 6mo ago
        For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.
        ijk 6mo ago
        Literacy. Percentage of children to survive to adulthood. Global food surplus. The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...
      - pixl97 6mo ago
        >Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off? I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably. What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.
      - BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
        > Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off? It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.
  - behringer 6mo ago
    Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.
    - nephihaha 6mo ago
      I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
      - imbnwa 6mo ago
        This was Socrates' own warning about writing over 2000 years ago
        nephihaha 6mo ago
        Socrates was partly right. I am deeply indebted to written notes on just about everything. Pre-literate societies often had excellent memories, and have to rely on them for survival not just culture bearing. The Polynesians had excellent navigation skills without writing. Desert societies can remember oases and routes etc sometimes relying on song to memorise them.
      - BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
        As King Thamus said to Theuth.
    - thesz 6mo ago
      Better food.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
    The Flynn effect isn’t real. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect
  - ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
    The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it. Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted? Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important. Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.
    - sokoloff 6mo ago
      It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.). With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.
      - wizzwizz4 6mo ago
        I don't see why it's surprising: IQ is one of the few tools that modern scientific racists have in their toolbox. One wouldn't expect them to let such trifling concerns as "evidence" and "testable models with successful predictions" take that away from them.
        djaro 6mo ago
        There is such a thing as general intelligence which differs between different people. Arguing that IQ isn't real because IQ tests are imperfect, is like arguing in the year 1500 that temperature isn't real because all thermometers are imperfect. Our lack of ability to precisely measure something does not mean the underlying thing is not real. There is such a thing as general intelligence which correlates strongly with almost every type of performance and life outcomes.
  - ordu 6mo ago
    I wouldn't give the Flynn effect a lot of weight. The numbers are from IQ tests. No one knows what they measure, they are tuned for a population, for the most of time the Flynn effect had place IQ test scores were used for hiring, school placement, and policy decisions (so Goodheart's Law was at play, how'd you think?). It is a curious effect, I agree, I'd like to know why it was so, but probably I will not know for sure (I'm a big fan of a scientific method, but I don't believe it is up to a task), and so I personally prefer just ignore it.
- nullorempty 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - throwaway27448 6mo ago
    Did you just get in from the 90s? I haven't seen anyone pitch a fat-free diet since I was a child (barring a relevant health issue).
    - nullorempty 6mo ago
      So we got smarter in the last 20+ years. Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
      - monkpit 6mo ago
        3.25% is whole milk, they absolutely sell it in Canada.
      - lunatuna 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        perdenie 6mo ago
        homo sapiens milk is not naturally homogenized
      - cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
        Interesting, US grocery stores never stopped carrying whole milk. It was readily available amidst the 90s fat panic. It’s what my family always bought.
      - Romanulus 6mo ago
        [dead]
      - gucci-on-fleek 6mo ago
        I'm in Alberta (Canada), and I just saw some in the grocery store last week. I actually can't recall ever seeing a store without 3.25% milk here. It's usually called "homo(genized) milk" rather than "whole milk", but those two phrases both mean the exact same thing.
- tcp_handshaker 6mo ago
  The real reason why now, every two weeks, you are bombarded with articles about how great Neanderthals were... - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM
  - dijit 6mo ago
    They were pretty great though. I mean, racism and people using anthropology to try and act superior to each other aside (which, I will grant, is a pretty big fucking aside): neanderthals were crazy strong and had bodies which had much more "explosive" muscle fibres than that of modern humans (or H. Sapiens of the era). They, of course, had significant misgivings which likely led to their extinction- but I wonder how a stocky, heavy-browed, big-toothed, barrel-chested bloke with no chin but a jaw like a breeze block Neanderthal would get along in todays world. They're built for Rugby. Would be cool to experience.
    - dijit 6mo ago
      After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies. Neanderthals didn't get a rebrand because white people found out they shared DNA; the bad reputation was always built on dodgy science that was already being dismantled. The whole "brutish caveman" thing traces back to 1908, when a French palaeontologist called Marcellin Boule got his hands on a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton and reconstructed it as a stooped, bent-kneed, gorilla-like creature[0]. Problem is, he got it completely wrong; the skeleton had severe arthritis, which he either missed or ignored, and he projected Victorian-era ideas about racial hierarchy onto the bones. It took until the 1950s for anyone to seriously challenge it[1], by which point the image was baked into popular culture. The thing is though that the prejudice didn't even start with Boule. From the very first specimen found in 1856[2], scientists were already calling Neanderthals primitive because 19th-century science was obsessed with ranking humans into racial categories. Neanderthals were useful as a "below us" rung on a ladder that was already bullshit. So yeah, the video's not wrong that racial ideology played a role, but framing it as "white people discovered shared DNA and then rebranded Neanderthals" is a bit too neat. The rehabilitation started decades before the DNA findings, because the racial hierarchy framework that created the caricature fell apart first. What we actually know now[3] is that they used pigments and art, made tools, cared for their sick, buried their dead, and survived wildly different climates for hundreds of thousands of years. They weren't H. Sapiens' thick cousins; they were a genuinely capable parallel branch of humanity that we happened to absorb (and probably helped push out, though the exact mechanism is still debated[4]). The DNA thing is interesting but it's more of a "well, this is awkward" footnote to a correction that was already happening, it doesn't seem to be the cause of it. [0] https://fossilhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/marcellin-boule/ https://fossilhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/marcellin-bou... [1] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anatomy-and-physiology/boule-reconstructs-first-neanderthal-skeleton https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anatomy-and-physiolo... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34350666/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34350666/ [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950475925000206 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S295047592... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541251/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541251/
kioleanu 6mo ago
If I enable reader mode on this article on my iPhone, I get an AI summary instead of the article text. I’d it the sure doing that or my phone? I hate it either way as there’s no way to read the article in reader mode
- Aardwolf 6mo ago
 Firefox reader view on PC shows the exact same text as is in the article
- rogerrogerr 6mo ago
 I assume you're seeing the text starting with "The authors emphasise the sheer quantity of herbivores"? I see that too in reader mode, both on my iPhone and Mac. The text is in the article, second paragraph under "survival strategies". I don't see any obvious reason in the HTML why reader mode is skipping everything else.
- Tagbert 6mo ago
 For some reason, Safari (on Mac) is only pulling two paragraphs from the source. it isn't AI generated but the parsing routine seems to break on this page. I don't see any particular properties that make these paragraphs stand out from the others. The Neumark-Nord discoveries are continuing to reshape our view of Neanderthal adaptability and survival strategies. They show that Neanderthals could plan ahead, process food efficiently and make sophisticated use of their environment. The authors emphasise the sheer quantity of herbivores that Neanderthals must have routinely been ‘harvesting’ in this warm-temperate phase: beyond the remains of minimally 172 large mammals processed at that small site alone within a very short period, hundreds of herbivores, including straight-tusked elephants, were butchered around the Neumark-Nord 1 lake in the early Last Interglacial, within the excavated areas only. Other exposures in the wider area around Neumark-Nord have yielded more coarse-grained evidence of regular exploitation of the same range of prey animals, at sites such as Rabutz, Gröbern and <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2309427120">Taubach</a>. The last site contained cut-marked remains of 76 rhinos and 40 straight-tusked elephants. Roebroeks: ‘Safely assuming that with these sites we are only looking at the tip of the proverbial ice-berg of Neanderthal impact on herbivore populations, especially on slowly-reproducing taxa, could have been substantial during the Last Interglacial.’
ewy1 6mo ago
university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!
JackFr 6mo ago
“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
- nntwozz 6mo ago
  Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!
Neywiny 6mo ago
Do we know how many people were in the community? Maybe I missed it in the article? 2000 people worth it food a day is hard to put into perspective otherwise. Though it's all very impressive regardless
- washadjeffmad 6mo ago
  Based on 20g rdv, they could be estimating ~40kg of rendered fat for 2000 servings. I can't tell from the wording whether they don't know the population and are implying that's a possible maximum or are just trying to relay the observed production capacity. Look into pre-Colombian grease trails, which we have much better logistical records for.
russellbeattie 6mo ago
Here's something random about "Neanderthal". The word comes from the Neander Valley (Neander-thal) where their fossils were originally discovered. It was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century German pastor. Neander is a latinization of his family name Neumann, meaning "new man". So not only did we discover a new type of man in a valley named new man, but the computers that are used for artificial intelligence (a future type of new man) all use the von Neumann architecture. I found that amusing. (Other random detail: The word "dollar" is derived from "thal". The Holy Roman Empire first minted standardized 1 ounce coins made out of silver from mines in Joachimsthal ("Joachim's Valley") and so were called Joachimsthalers. That got shortened to "thaler", then through Low German "daler" then Dutch to English.)
- alanbernstein 6mo ago
  As they say, history rhymes
  - ant6n 6mo ago
    Isn’t that what George Lukas said about Star Wars?
- xp84 6mo ago
  If you have a substack, I would subscribe to it
- andrekandre 6mo ago
  > The word "dollar" is derived from "thal". you are my hero; and this is why i love hn, cause this was something in the back of my mind that i wanted to find out about, and what do you know, a fellow hn'er just wrote it in a random comment. thanks!!
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- newsy-combi 6mo ago
  Wait till you find out we live in a Von Neumann Universe
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nntwozz 6mo ago
And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!
dr_dshiv 6mo ago
[flagged]
- advisedwang 6mo ago
  Any basis for this theory, or just your imagination?
paulgerhardt 6mo ago
Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.
- multjoy 6mo ago
  They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6mo ago
    "rabbit starvation" refers to a diet of mostly lean protein, deficient in fat. So much so that it results in malnutrition. Eating nothing but rabbits is one way to get it, but is not really about "subsisting on small herbivores". It's the fact that the meat is very lean, not fatty. Apparently "mal de caribou" is the same thing, and Caribou / Reindeer are not small.
    - prepend 6mo ago
      This is why the wolves also eat whole mice.
xp84 6mo ago
> the tip of the proverbial ice-berg of Neanderthal impact on herbivore populations, especially on slowly-reproducing taxa, could have been substantial during the Last Interglacial.’ translation: the Neanderthals probably completely wiped out a ton of the species of big animals that once existed in these regions. Homo sapiens isn’t the only hominid to do that…
- devilbunny 6mo ago
  Neanderthals were homo sapiens.
  - IAmBroom 6mo ago
    No, they were literally Homo neanderthalensis.
- snthpy 6mo ago
  Yeah like the rhinos and elephants that I didn't know you used to get in that area. Maybe they were too efficient and that's what limited their proliferation when they hit resource limits?
amitbidlan 6mo ago
Planning ahead, bulk processing, storing for later. Sounds less like primitive survival and more like logistics. Every time we dig deeper the gap between them and us gets smaller.
- tastyfreeze 6mo ago
  Primitive survival in places with winter requires storing rations for the winter months. Dried meat, fruit, seeds, and rendered fat are what it takes to survive winter.
- suddenlybananas 6mo ago
  To be fair, squirrels store things for later.
- m3047 6mo ago
  It's possible to make potted meats which will store for a time at room temperature (for extra credit, ferment it like sausage) by covering them in fat. But they didn't have ceramics apparently, I don't know offhand if you could do it in something like an animal stomach. Of course, we put sausage into intestine casings... I dunno make sausages and dip them in fat?
sandworm101 6mo ago
Question: why do we know this was about food? Bones are boiled for other reasons. Boiling down bones is how you make basic glue. Could this have been something more industrial, the creation of a useful ingredient for weapon making?
- fnordpiglet 6mo ago
  Fat is also very very important for soap.
- beezlewax 6mo ago
  Soup
  - ant6n 6mo ago
    Soap, soup, goop
myspeed 6mo ago
I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.
- thehappypm 6mo ago
  Link?
  - myspeed 6mo ago
    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM
askos 6mo ago
Fascinating. Considering the industrial scale fat production that the neanderthals managed to operate according to this article, it makes me wonder even more whether we still understand why exactly they went extinct in 80 thousand years later.
- beezlewax 6mo ago
  I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?
  - peacebeard 6mo ago
    Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
    - egeozcan 6mo ago
      Doesn't outcompete include murder? We are a very tribal species, and the history is full of genocides and mass murders, so from a very uneducated viewpoint, this sounds reasonable. If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?
      - peacebeard 6mo ago
        Great question. When people say outcompete it can certainly include violence but we’re talking about populations spread over continents over thousands of years. Factors like technology, fertility, adaptability, etc. are more what people mean when they said outcompete.
        kjkjadksj 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        peacebeard 6mo ago
        This is accurate for post history but evidence doesn't support this for prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes.
deleted 6mo ago
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netcan 6mo ago
There is evidence for neanderthals making gum/glue from birch bark. It's useful for hating stone onto wood for tool making. I wonder if this bone grease was an edible product or something else. Oils have many uses.
deleted 6mo ago
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ncr100 6mo ago
I read this as 'RAT factories' - like Neanderthal decided to breed thousands of rats presumably for food. Assuming rats were meaty and not taboo then, as they are now.
- aix1 6mo ago
  Your comment reminded me of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (I won't spoil the punchline): https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
  - el_io 6mo ago
    I've heard exactly the same story about snakes, but that took place in British India. Probably that (the one I heard) derived from this one.
  - IAmBroom 6mo ago
    That's amazing, thank you!
- biztos 6mo ago
  They’re still meaty and they aren’t taboo everywhere! Whenever I go to the family farm I check to see if there are any fat juicy grilled rats at the local market. Alas, I’m still too squeamish to eat them, but I’m working up to it!
- card_zero 6mo ago
  I keep reading Neanderthal rat factories too! HP Lovecraft would be pleased with us.
- comandillos 6mo ago
  Same, and I also read Netherlands instead of Neanderthals.
  - DonHopkins 6mo ago
    Yeah me to! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rat%2C_IJlst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rat%2C_IJlst >De Rat (English: The Rat) is a smock mill in IJlst, Friesland, Netherlands, which was originally built in the seventeenth century at Zaanstreek, North Holland. In 1828 it was moved to IJlst, where it worked using wind power until 1920 and then by electric motor until 1950. The mill was bought by the town of IJlst in 1956 and restored in the mid-1960s. Further restoration in the mid-1970s returned the mill to full working order. De Rat is working for trade and is used as a training mill. The mill is listed as a Rijksmonument (No. 39880).[1]
nomilk 6mo ago
The article mentions "rendering fat (from bones)" many times, but doesn't say how neanderthals actually did it? My best guess is they broke the bones into many little pieces, threw them in a fire, and waited for the fire to extinguish and cool, thus producing hardened (rendered) fat. Feels like the most interesting part of the article was omitted!
- deafpolygon 6mo ago
  It's in there. > At this location, researchers found that Neanderthals not only broke bones to extract marrow but also crushed large mammal bones into tens of thousands of fragments to render calorie-rich bone grease through heating them in water.
  - nomilk 6mo ago
    AFAIK Neanderthals didn't have clay pots - how would they hold the water to heat it and put the bone pieces in? EDIT: I asked claude and it doesn't know for sure but guessed "stone boiling into an organic container — animal stomach, hide, or a bark vessel — remains the most plausible explanation for how they heated the water."
    - card_zero 6mo ago
      One point here is that you can boil water over a fire in a flammable container. Here, this isn't about boiling, but similar: "Because the Neanderthals had no pots, we presume that they soaked their seeds in a fold of an animal skin," says Chris Hunt, a genuine (checks) expert in cultural paleoecology. https://archaeologymag.com/2022/11/neanderthals-cooked-surprisingly-tasty-dishes/ https://archaeologymag.com/2022/11/neanderthals-cooked-surpr...
    - deafpolygon 6mo ago
      They can use skulls of animals, shells of tortoises in direct heat (though not in direct flame). If they were harvesting megafauna like elephants, presumably their skulls are large. It's not implausible to assume that they were capable of controlling heat to the point where they can get the amount of heat needed to boil just water/heating up water to get marrow out. Animal stomach, bladder can be heated to boil water indirectly (fire to heat stone, stone to heat said vessel).
deafpolygon 6mo ago
Maybe when megafauna disappeared, so too the Neanderthals because their survival strategy was too dependent on them.
lkm0 6mo ago
Reminds me of the Barbegal mills, built in ancient Rome. The site produced 4.5 tons of flour per day, according to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills
nephihaha 6mo ago
Some would argue they still do. ;)
shevy-java 6mo ago
That also must mean that Neanderthals must have been very clever, early on. We already knew they were clever, but 125.000 years ago is really pushing that further. Now the main question is still why and how they went extinct. We have some pieces of the puzzles (mitochondrial DNA found in human mitochondrial DNA) but not a complete picture yet (or, somewhat more complete; we can obviously never reconstruct all pieces of the puzzle).
- Qem 6mo ago
  Perhaps they were very smart, but also they were all autistic[1], so they had poor social skills and had a hard time coordinating large groups against encroaching H. Sapiens Sapiens tribes. [1] https://communities.springernature.com/posts/neanderthal-dna-implicated-in-autism-susceptibility https://communities.springernature.com/posts/neanderthal-dna...
- contubernio 6mo ago
  Most likely scenario is a more aggressive, bloodthirsty, violent species of comparable intelligence came along ...
hashlock_p2p 6mo ago
I am fat so?
- ant6n 6mo ago
  …so you were produced in Neanderthal fat factory?
ozgung 6mo ago
What is the modern version of this process/product?
- Mistletoe 6mo ago
  https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bone-marrow https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bone-marrow A dish like that picture or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products)
andrewl 6mo ago
This is the first I’ve heard of straight-tusked elephants, which are almost twice the mass of modern day elephants. You’d need a lot of cooperation and coordination to kill one of them.
alexreysa 6mo ago
[dead]

296 points by andsoitis 6mo ago

irdc 6mo ago

This pairs nicely with the recent publications around Neanderthal cognitive abilities and how there likely similar to ours (https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-measure-up-to-ours-literally/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-m...).

sokoloff 6mo ago
I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
- echelon 6mo ago
  Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning. If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time. Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.
  - dismalaf 6mo ago
    > Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play. Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.
    - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
      What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
      - tsunamifury 6mo ago
        Ants won over humans? Worms?
        hrimfaxi 6mo ago
        When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.
      - dismalaf 6mo ago
        Are numbers everything? Are sardines more evolved than whales? Anyhow, the traditional view is that Neanderthals were brutes who were actually out-competed and killed off by Sapiens. The more realistic view considering the evidence is that Neanderthals were much closer to Sapiens, equally or even more sophisticated, but less numerous, and thus their contribution to our DNA is smaller than Sapiens. But do keep in mind the Neanderthals live on because Europeans and Asians are all part Neanderthal.
        junofan 6mo ago
        I think especially given TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators who occasionally raped human women. I don’t much believe the friendly smiling museum depictions that have lately become fashionable. Their eyes alone would have made them something you didn’t want to run into at night.
        dismalaf 6mo ago
        > TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators All humans are. Neanderthals, Sapiens, modern humans, we are all apex predators. > occasionally raped human women The article doesn't suggest that. While it's plausible, there's also evidence of Sapien/Neanderthal cooperation and mingling: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.h... And lets not forget that all hominins fight amongst themselves, rape each other, etc... The assumption that Neanderthals were particularly brutish is just that, an assumption.
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    Hmm, more smarter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Cranial_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Cranial_capacity Not the lady Neanderthals: > average Neanderthal cranial capacity for females was 1300 cm3 and 1600 cm3 for males. [Modern humans, 1473 cm3.] Nor the dude Neanderthals, since they were using the swollen brainparts for vision and coordination: > Neanderthals had larger eyes and bodies relative to their height [...] when these areas were adjusted to match anatomically modern human proportions it was found Neanderthals had brains 15-22% smaller than in anatomically-modern humans. Edit since I don't even agree with the concept: even if the extra capacity was differently distributed such that they had more ... powerful? ... executive functions, what's smartness? More imagination, OK, more self-restraint, more planning. More navel-gazing, more doubt, more ennui. Or it could be more communication, often proposed as what gave sapiens the edge. Chattering bipeds. It's an association between the brain doing something and the species proliferating, that's what we're calling smart, but doing what? It could just mean our ancestors were compulsively busy. Same thing as smart, perhaps.
    - otherme123 6mo ago
      We will never get that the cranial volume is not the same as inteligence/brain function, or whatever you might call it. Reminder that Einstein brain was smaller than average, and female brain are smaller than male. Phrenology will haunt us forever, in one form or another. Most likely, some Neanderthals were asimilated into modern humans, most were exterminated in tribal clashes. Reminder also that our almighty specie was almost wiped out from history around 800,000 years ago (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487), being the most intelligent organism ever existed.
  - geysersam 6mo ago
    I don't think that matches archeological findings. From what I understand the reason neanderthals are understood to have been less intelligent than sapiens is because neanderthal tools found are cruder than sapien tools from around the same periods and areas.
  - dyauspitr 6mo ago
    But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.
    - wazoox 6mo ago
      The minuscule sample of tools we have are more primitive, but we don't have any examples of their wooden tools, nor any trace of most of their activities, languages, rites, etc. They could have invented animal husbandry and wool spinning and build awesome wooden cities and we have no way to know because everything would have disappeared without a trace, crushed by glaciers of later ages. We know almost nothing of them.
- Epa095 6mo ago
  Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
  - cluckindan 6mo ago
    And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence. If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.
    - anamexis 6mo ago
      For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.
    - readthenotes1 6mo ago
      True, but irrelevant. Or, false and irrelevant. People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
    - jibal 6mo ago
      This is wrong and confused in every possible way. Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance. That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by Epa095, sokoloff, and irdc and why they are or are not true. If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, all of their IQs will shoot up until the scoring of every IQ test is renormalized to a mean of 100.
      - roysting 6mo ago
        I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise. It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”. Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.
- cwnyth 6mo ago
  Precisely why is this hard to square away?
  - sokoloff 6mo ago
    If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was. Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off? (This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)
    - bonzini 6mo ago
      For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.
      - ijk 6mo ago
        Literacy. Percentage of children to survive to adulthood. Global food surplus. The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      >Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off? I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably. What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.
    - BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
      > Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off? It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.
- behringer 6mo ago
  Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.
  - nephihaha 6mo ago
    I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
    - imbnwa 6mo ago
      This was Socrates' own warning about writing over 2000 years ago
      - nephihaha 6mo ago
        Socrates was partly right. I am deeply indebted to written notes on just about everything. Pre-literate societies often had excellent memories, and have to rely on them for survival not just culture bearing. The Polynesians had excellent navigation skills without writing. Desert societies can remember oases and routes etc sometimes relying on song to memorise them.
    - BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
      As King Thamus said to Theuth.
  - thesz 6mo ago
    Better food.
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
  The Flynn effect isn’t real. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect
- ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
  The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it. Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted? Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important. Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.
  - sokoloff 6mo ago
    It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.). With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.
    - wizzwizz4 6mo ago
      I don't see why it's surprising: IQ is one of the few tools that modern scientific racists have in their toolbox. One wouldn't expect them to let such trifling concerns as "evidence" and "testable models with successful predictions" take that away from them.
      - djaro 6mo ago
        There is such a thing as general intelligence which differs between different people. Arguing that IQ isn't real because IQ tests are imperfect, is like arguing in the year 1500 that temperature isn't real because all thermometers are imperfect. Our lack of ability to precisely measure something does not mean the underlying thing is not real. There is such a thing as general intelligence which correlates strongly with almost every type of performance and life outcomes.
- ordu 6mo ago
  I wouldn't give the Flynn effect a lot of weight. The numbers are from IQ tests. No one knows what they measure, they are tuned for a population, for the most of time the Flynn effect had place IQ test scores were used for hiring, school placement, and policy decisions (so Goodheart's Law was at play, how'd you think?). It is a curious effect, I agree, I'd like to know why it was so, but probably I will not know for sure (I'm a big fan of a scientific method, but I don't believe it is up to a task), and so I personally prefer just ignore it.
nullorempty 6mo ago
[flagged]
- throwaway27448 6mo ago
  Did you just get in from the 90s? I haven't seen anyone pitch a fat-free diet since I was a child (barring a relevant health issue).
  - nullorempty 6mo ago
    So we got smarter in the last 20+ years. Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
    - monkpit 6mo ago
      3.25% is whole milk, they absolutely sell it in Canada.
    - lunatuna 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - perdenie 6mo ago
        homo sapiens milk is not naturally homogenized
    - cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
      Interesting, US grocery stores never stopped carrying whole milk. It was readily available amidst the 90s fat panic. It’s what my family always bought.
    - Romanulus 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - gucci-on-fleek 6mo ago
      I'm in Alberta (Canada), and I just saw some in the grocery store last week. I actually can't recall ever seeing a store without 3.25% milk here. It's usually called "homo(genized) milk" rather than "whole milk", but those two phrases both mean the exact same thing.
tcp_handshaker 6mo ago
The real reason why now, every two weeks, you are bombarded with articles about how great Neanderthals were... - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM
- dijit 6mo ago
  They were pretty great though. I mean, racism and people using anthropology to try and act superior to each other aside (which, I will grant, is a pretty big fucking aside): neanderthals were crazy strong and had bodies which had much more "explosive" muscle fibres than that of modern humans (or H. Sapiens of the era). They, of course, had significant misgivings which likely led to their extinction- but I wonder how a stocky, heavy-browed, big-toothed, barrel-chested bloke with no chin but a jaw like a breeze block Neanderthal would get along in todays world. They're built for Rugby. Would be cool to experience.
  - dijit 6mo ago
    After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies. Neanderthals didn't get a rebrand because white people found out they shared DNA; the bad reputation was always built on dodgy science that was already being dismantled. The whole "brutish caveman" thing traces back to 1908, when a French palaeontologist called Marcellin Boule got his hands on a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton and reconstructed it as a stooped, bent-kneed, gorilla-like creature[0]. Problem is, he got it completely wrong; the skeleton had severe arthritis, which he either missed or ignored, and he projected Victorian-era ideas about racial hierarchy onto the bones. It took until the 1950s for anyone to seriously challenge it[1], by which point the image was baked into popular culture. The thing is though that the prejudice didn't even start with Boule. From the very first specimen found in 1856[2], scientists were already calling Neanderthals primitive because 19th-century science was obsessed with ranking humans into racial categories. Neanderthals were useful as a "below us" rung on a ladder that was already bullshit. So yeah, the video's not wrong that racial ideology played a role, but framing it as "white people discovered shared DNA and then rebranded Neanderthals" is a bit too neat. The rehabilitation started decades before the DNA findings, because the racial hierarchy framework that created the caricature fell apart first. What we actually know now[3] is that they used pigments and art, made tools, cared for their sick, buried their dead, and survived wildly different climates for hundreds of thousands of years. They weren't H. Sapiens' thick cousins; they were a genuinely capable parallel branch of humanity that we happened to absorb (and probably helped push out, though the exact mechanism is still debated[4]). The DNA thing is interesting but it's more of a "well, this is awkward" footnote to a correction that was already happening, it doesn't seem to be the cause of it. [0] https://fossilhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/marcellin-boule/ https://fossilhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/marcellin-bou... [1] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anatomy-and-physiology/boule-reconstructs-first-neanderthal-skeleton https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anatomy-and-physiolo... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34350666/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34350666/ [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950475925000206 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S295047592... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541251/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541251/

kioleanu 6mo ago

If I enable reader mode on this article on my iPhone, I get an AI summary instead of the article text. I’d it the sure doing that or my phone? I hate it either way as there’s no way to read the article in reader mode

Aardwolf 6mo ago
Firefox reader view on PC shows the exact same text as is in the article
rogerrogerr 6mo ago
I assume you're seeing the text starting with "The authors emphasise the sheer quantity of herbivores"? I see that too in reader mode, both on my iPhone and Mac. The text is in the article, second paragraph under "survival strategies". I don't see any obvious reason in the HTML why reader mode is skipping everything else.
Tagbert 6mo ago
For some reason, Safari (on Mac) is only pulling two paragraphs from the source. it isn't AI generated but the parsing routine seems to break on this page. I don't see any particular properties that make these paragraphs stand out from the others. The Neumark-Nord discoveries are continuing to reshape our view of Neanderthal adaptability and survival strategies. They show that Neanderthals could plan ahead, process food efficiently and make sophisticated use of their environment. The authors emphasise the sheer quantity of herbivores that Neanderthals must have routinely been ‘harvesting’ in this warm-temperate phase: beyond the remains of minimally 172 large mammals processed at that small site alone within a very short period, hundreds of herbivores, including straight-tusked elephants, were butchered around the Neumark-Nord 1 lake in the early Last Interglacial, within the excavated areas only. Other exposures in the wider area around Neumark-Nord have yielded more coarse-grained evidence of regular exploitation of the same range of prey animals, at sites such as Rabutz, Gröbern and <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2309427120">Taubach</a>. The last site contained cut-marked remains of 76 rhinos and 40 straight-tusked elephants. Roebroeks: ‘Safely assuming that with these sites we are only looking at the tip of the proverbial ice-berg of Neanderthal impact on herbivore populations, especially on slowly-reproducing taxa, could have been substantial during the Last Interglacial.’

ewy1 6mo ago

university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!

JackFr 6mo ago

“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

nntwozz 6mo ago
Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!

Neywiny 6mo ago

Do we know how many people were in the community? Maybe I missed it in the article? 2000 people worth it food a day is hard to put into perspective otherwise. Though it's all very impressive regardless

washadjeffmad 6mo ago
Based on 20g rdv, they could be estimating ~40kg of rendered fat for 2000 servings. I can't tell from the wording whether they don't know the population and are implying that's a possible maximum or are just trying to relay the observed production capacity. Look into pre-Colombian grease trails, which we have much better logistical records for.

russellbeattie 6mo ago

Here's something random about "Neanderthal". The word comes from the Neander Valley (Neander-thal) where their fossils were originally discovered. It was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century German pastor. Neander is a latinization of his family name Neumann, meaning "new man". So not only did we discover a new type of man in a valley named new man, but the computers that are used for artificial intelligence (a future type of new man) all use the von Neumann architecture. I found that amusing. (Other random detail: The word "dollar" is derived from "thal". The Holy Roman Empire first minted standardized 1 ounce coins made out of silver from mines in Joachimsthal ("Joachim's Valley") and so were called Joachimsthalers. That got shortened to "thaler", then through Low German "daler" then Dutch to English.)

alanbernstein 6mo ago
As they say, history rhymes
- ant6n 6mo ago
  Isn’t that what George Lukas said about Star Wars?
xp84 6mo ago
If you have a substack, I would subscribe to it
andrekandre 6mo ago
> The word "dollar" is derived from "thal". you are my hero; and this is why i love hn, cause this was something in the back of my mind that i wanted to find out about, and what do you know, a fellow hn'er just wrote it in a random comment. thanks!!
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
newsy-combi 6mo ago
Wait till you find out we live in a Von Neumann Universe

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

nntwozz 6mo ago

And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!

dr_dshiv 6mo ago

[flagged]

advisedwang 6mo ago
Any basis for this theory, or just your imagination?

paulgerhardt 6mo ago

Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.

multjoy 6mo ago
They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6mo ago
  "rabbit starvation" refers to a diet of mostly lean protein, deficient in fat. So much so that it results in malnutrition. Eating nothing but rabbits is one way to get it, but is not really about "subsisting on small herbivores". It's the fact that the meat is very lean, not fatty. Apparently "mal de caribou" is the same thing, and Caribou / Reindeer are not small.
  - prepend 6mo ago
    This is why the wolves also eat whole mice.

xp84 6mo ago

> the tip of the proverbial ice-berg of Neanderthal impact on herbivore populations, especially on slowly-reproducing taxa, could have been substantial during the Last Interglacial.’ translation: the Neanderthals probably completely wiped out a ton of the species of big animals that once existed in these regions. Homo sapiens isn’t the only hominid to do that…

devilbunny 6mo ago
Neanderthals were homo sapiens.
- IAmBroom 6mo ago
  No, they were literally Homo neanderthalensis.
snthpy 6mo ago
Yeah like the rhinos and elephants that I didn't know you used to get in that area. Maybe they were too efficient and that's what limited their proliferation when they hit resource limits?

amitbidlan 6mo ago

Planning ahead, bulk processing, storing for later. Sounds less like primitive survival and more like logistics. Every time we dig deeper the gap between them and us gets smaller.

tastyfreeze 6mo ago
Primitive survival in places with winter requires storing rations for the winter months. Dried meat, fruit, seeds, and rendered fat are what it takes to survive winter.
suddenlybananas 6mo ago
To be fair, squirrels store things for later.
m3047 6mo ago
It's possible to make potted meats which will store for a time at room temperature (for extra credit, ferment it like sausage) by covering them in fat. But they didn't have ceramics apparently, I don't know offhand if you could do it in something like an animal stomach. Of course, we put sausage into intestine casings... I dunno make sausages and dip them in fat?

sandworm101 6mo ago

Question: why do we know this was about food? Bones are boiled for other reasons. Boiling down bones is how you make basic glue. Could this have been something more industrial, the creation of a useful ingredient for weapon making?

fnordpiglet 6mo ago
Fat is also very very important for soap.
beezlewax 6mo ago
Soup
- ant6n 6mo ago
  Soap, soup, goop

myspeed 6mo ago

I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.

thehappypm 6mo ago
Link?
- myspeed 6mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM

askos 6mo ago

Fascinating. Considering the industrial scale fat production that the neanderthals managed to operate according to this article, it makes me wonder even more whether we still understand why exactly they went extinct in 80 thousand years later.

beezlewax 6mo ago
I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?
- peacebeard 6mo ago
  Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
  - egeozcan 6mo ago
    Doesn't outcompete include murder? We are a very tribal species, and the history is full of genocides and mass murders, so from a very uneducated viewpoint, this sounds reasonable. If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?
    - peacebeard 6mo ago
      Great question. When people say outcompete it can certainly include violence but we’re talking about populations spread over continents over thousands of years. Factors like technology, fertility, adaptability, etc. are more what people mean when they said outcompete.
      - kjkjadksj 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        peacebeard 6mo ago
        This is accurate for post history but evidence doesn't support this for prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

netcan 6mo ago

There is evidence for neanderthals making gum/glue from birch bark. It's useful for hating stone onto wood for tool making. I wonder if this bone grease was an edible product or something else. Oils have many uses.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ncr100 6mo ago

I read this as 'RAT factories' - like Neanderthal decided to breed thousands of rats presumably for food. Assuming rats were meaty and not taboo then, as they are now.

aix1 6mo ago
Your comment reminded me of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (I won't spoil the punchline): https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
- el_io 6mo ago
  I've heard exactly the same story about snakes, but that took place in British India. Probably that (the one I heard) derived from this one.
- IAmBroom 6mo ago
  That's amazing, thank you!
biztos 6mo ago
They’re still meaty and they aren’t taboo everywhere! Whenever I go to the family farm I check to see if there are any fat juicy grilled rats at the local market. Alas, I’m still too squeamish to eat them, but I’m working up to it!
card_zero 6mo ago
I keep reading Neanderthal rat factories too! HP Lovecraft would be pleased with us.
comandillos 6mo ago
Same, and I also read Netherlands instead of Neanderthals.
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  Yeah me to! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rat%2C_IJlst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rat%2C_IJlst >De Rat (English: The Rat) is a smock mill in IJlst, Friesland, Netherlands, which was originally built in the seventeenth century at Zaanstreek, North Holland. In 1828 it was moved to IJlst, where it worked using wind power until 1920 and then by electric motor until 1950. The mill was bought by the town of IJlst in 1956 and restored in the mid-1960s. Further restoration in the mid-1970s returned the mill to full working order. De Rat is working for trade and is used as a training mill. The mill is listed as a Rijksmonument (No. 39880).[1]

nomilk 6mo ago

The article mentions "rendering fat (from bones)" many times, but doesn't say how neanderthals actually did it? My best guess is they broke the bones into many little pieces, threw them in a fire, and waited for the fire to extinguish and cool, thus producing hardened (rendered) fat. Feels like the most interesting part of the article was omitted!

deafpolygon 6mo ago
It's in there. > At this location, researchers found that Neanderthals not only broke bones to extract marrow but also crushed large mammal bones into tens of thousands of fragments to render calorie-rich bone grease through heating them in water.
- nomilk 6mo ago
  AFAIK Neanderthals didn't have clay pots - how would they hold the water to heat it and put the bone pieces in? EDIT: I asked claude and it doesn't know for sure but guessed "stone boiling into an organic container — animal stomach, hide, or a bark vessel — remains the most plausible explanation for how they heated the water."
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    One point here is that you can boil water over a fire in a flammable container. Here, this isn't about boiling, but similar: "Because the Neanderthals had no pots, we presume that they soaked their seeds in a fold of an animal skin," says Chris Hunt, a genuine (checks) expert in cultural paleoecology. https://archaeologymag.com/2022/11/neanderthals-cooked-surprisingly-tasty-dishes/ https://archaeologymag.com/2022/11/neanderthals-cooked-surpr...
  - deafpolygon 6mo ago
    They can use skulls of animals, shells of tortoises in direct heat (though not in direct flame). If they were harvesting megafauna like elephants, presumably their skulls are large. It's not implausible to assume that they were capable of controlling heat to the point where they can get the amount of heat needed to boil just water/heating up water to get marrow out. Animal stomach, bladder can be heated to boil water indirectly (fire to heat stone, stone to heat said vessel).

deafpolygon 6mo ago

Maybe when megafauna disappeared, so too the Neanderthals because their survival strategy was too dependent on them.

lkm0 6mo ago

Reminds me of the Barbegal mills, built in ancient Rome. The site produced 4.5 tons of flour per day, according to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills

nephihaha 6mo ago

Some would argue they still do. ;)

shevy-java 6mo ago

That also must mean that Neanderthals must have been very clever, early on. We already knew they were clever, but 125.000 years ago is really pushing that further. Now the main question is still why and how they went extinct. We have some pieces of the puzzles (mitochondrial DNA found in human mitochondrial DNA) but not a complete picture yet (or, somewhat more complete; we can obviously never reconstruct all pieces of the puzzle).

Qem 6mo ago
Perhaps they were very smart, but also they were all autistic[1], so they had poor social skills and had a hard time coordinating large groups against encroaching H. Sapiens Sapiens tribes. [1] https://communities.springernature.com/posts/neanderthal-dna-implicated-in-autism-susceptibility https://communities.springernature.com/posts/neanderthal-dna...
contubernio 6mo ago
Most likely scenario is a more aggressive, bloodthirsty, violent species of comparable intelligence came along ...

hashlock_p2p 6mo ago

I am fat so?

ant6n 6mo ago
…so you were produced in Neanderthal fat factory?

ozgung 6mo ago

What is the modern version of this process/product?

Mistletoe 6mo ago
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bone-marrow https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bone-marrow A dish like that picture or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products)

andrewl 6mo ago

This is the first I’ve heard of straight-tusked elephants, which are almost twice the mass of modern day elephants. You’d need a lot of cooperation and coordination to kill one of them.

alexreysa 6mo ago

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