Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago (2025)
universiteitleiden.nl191 points by andsoitis 14 hours ago
191 points by andsoitis 14 hours 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-m...).
Neah, can't be. We are meticulously excluding fat from our diet. Fat-free milk, fat-free yogurt, fat-free brain. I bet they had better cognitive abilities for they understood the importance of fat better than we do apparently.
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).
So we got smarter in the last 20+ years.
Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
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.
It’s called homo for homo sapien milk.
https://www.realcanadiansuperstore.ca/en/3-25-homogenized-mi...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True, but irrelevant.
Or, false and irrelevant.
People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
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.
I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
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.
Hmm, more smarter? 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.
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), being the most intelligent organism ever existed.
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.
But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.
> 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.
What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
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.
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.
Are there any good illustrations showing how much bigger their eyes were compared to modern humans? Is it really significant? I'm having trouble finding anything that makes it clear.
> 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.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.
Ants won over humans? Worms?
When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.
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.
The answer that seems to be emerging from several different lines of research is that a) they always had fairly low fertility and b) they didn't really go extinct as such, they just intermixed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and because the later had much higher fertility, Neanderthal genes got diluted down to the present ~2% in the Eurasian population.
Sounds plausible indeed. Anyways, neanderthals operating a large scale fat production 125 thousand years ago could be a good plot for another hollywood movie scenario. Any takers?
I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
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?
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.
You really think we would have let a competing species exist?
I am fat so?
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!
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.
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."
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-surpr...
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
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.)
> The word "dollar" is derived from "thal".
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).
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.
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
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.
And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!
Some would argue they still do. ;)
I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.
university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!
Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.
They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.
"rabbit starvation" refers to a diet of mostly lean protein, deficient in fat.
Eating nothing but rabbits is one way to get it, but is not really about "subsisting on small herbivores".
Maybe when megafauna disappeared, so too the Neanderthals because their survival strategy was too dependent on them.
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?
> 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…
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?
“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
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.
Your comment reminded me of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (I won't spoil the punchline):
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
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.
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!
Same, and I also read Netherlands instead of Neanderthals.
Yeah me to!
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]
I keep reading Neanderthal rat factories too! HP Lovecraft would be pleased with us.
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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
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.
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p><span><span><span><span><span><span>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.’</span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
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.