Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
Comments
russellbeattie
andrekandre
> The word "dollar" is derived from "thal".
herodoturtle
> Here's something random about "Neanderthal"
If you'll permit me to throw in some fun (and arguably related) trivia:
Niander Wallace is the main antagonist in Blade Runner 2049. He's a genius industrialist that manufacturers high-tech human "replicants" for profit, and in pursuit of his ultimate goal to "storm Eden and retake her". An yet the thing that holds him back is his inability to get his replicants to procreate.
xp84
If you have a substack, I would subscribe to it
alanbernstein
As they say, history rhymes
ant6n
Isn’t that what George Lukas said about Star Wars?
newsy-combi
Wait till you find out we live in a Von Neumann Universe
irdc
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...).
tcp_handshaker
The real reason why now, every two weeks, you are bombarded with articles about how great Neanderthals were... - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM
dijit
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.
giardini
Finally, an explanation for rugby!
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=nea...
dijit
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-bou...
[1] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anatomy-and-physiolo...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34350666/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S295047592...
tcp_handshaker
>> After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies.
You are approaching this from the scientific angle. The reality is even worst that the video implies.
As soon as Neanderthals became genetic relatives of many living non-Africans ,-) Western portrayals became more willing to imagine them as human like, and even ...white.
"How Neanderthals Became White: The Introgression of Race into Contemporary Human Evolutionary Genetics" - https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/720130
"‘Race’ and the Changing Representations of Neanderthals" - https://scholar.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/publications/race-and-the-ch...
"Making the Neanderthals White: Historicizing Ancestry, Race, and Hominin Heritage" - https://philpapers.org/rec/KERMTN
dijit
Fair point, and those papers are interesting (particularly the first one, which directly talks about this..).
I think we might be talking about two different things though. The scientific evidence for Neanderthal sophistication was there from the late 1950s; Straus and Cave reexamined the La Chapelle skeleton I spoke about earlier and basically said "this fella could ride the subway in new york and nobody would look twice", the Shanidar burials showed care for the sick, and there were decades of tool and burial evidence piling up after that. So the science was there, it just wasn't penetrating into popular culture.
And I think that's where your sources make a good point, the DNA discovery in 2010 probably did act as the catalyst for the popular rehabilitation. It gave journalists and TV producers a reason to care about something archaeologists had been saying for decades. Whether that reason worked because of racial identification specifically or because "you have caveman DNA" is just a more compelling headline is probably where we'd disagree; I suspect it's both, honestly.
Where I'd still push back a little is on the framing that this was purely a "white people found out they're related, so rebrand" phenomenon. The racial hierarchy framework that created the original caricature was already academically dead well before 2010, the correction was happening regardless, it maybe just wasn't getting airtime.
IAmBroom
The reality is that it's far more complicated than you make it seem.
Archaeology has not been taken over by WYT racist plotting. Neanderthalis did get an undeserved reputation for being thick and dumb. We're correcting that.
And, some people are grabbing onto bits and pieces, and trying to reconstruct that into some racist BS. Similarly, certain things from Norse history are being coopted, but that doesn't mean every new discovery or article about viking exploits is inherently part of a racist conspiracy.
nullorempty
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throwaway27448
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
So we got smarter in the last 20+ years.
Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
gucci-on-fleek
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.
wildzzz
Whole refers to the fat content and homogenized refers to a process used to better suspend the fat in the milk to prevent separation. Almost all milk you buy is probably homogenized. They don't technically mean the same thing but if the only thing you see is homogenized on the container, it's probably whole milk.
gucci-on-fleek
You are correct that all milk undergoes a homogenization process, but for whatever reason, only 3.25% milk is labelled as "homogenized" in Canada. Even the ingredients/fine-print are like this too, so it's not just a marketing thing [0] [1].
This could be a regional thing though: out east milk typically comes in bags [2], but I'm in the west and have only ever seen milk in bottles, so it wouldn't surprise me if the term for 3.25% milk was different in the east too.
[0]: https://www.obviouslygoodmilk.ca/en/products/milks/lucerne-3...
[1]: https://www.obviouslygoodmilk.ca/en/products/milks/lucerne-2...
phatskat
Dating someone in eastern Canada and seeing bagged milk was wild to my American brain - who puts milk in a _bag???_
monkpit
3.25% is whole milk, they absolutely sell it in Canada.
cosmic_cheese
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
[dead]
lunatuna
It’s called homo for homo sapien milk.
https://www.realcanadiansuperstore.ca/en/3-25-homogenized-mi...
perdenie
homo sapiens milk is not naturally homogenized
scott01
It’s convenient to buy fat-free products to lower caloric density of everyday food. Given mostly sedentary lifestyle, maintaining healthy caloric intake is pretty hard, and limiting fats (not only fat-free dairy, but also lean meats) and sugars really helps. Note limiting, not excluding — going extreme fat-free is definitely bad for health, and it also takes huge effort compared to just limiting.
pixel_popping
Going fat-free will ruin your health and energy, going sugar-free will only improve it.
captainbland
Probably the difference is that extracting as many calories as possible from food was a guarantor of survival for the neanderthals whereas that's not so true with the level of calorie abundance we have in the western world, partly because of analogous fat refining processes we also use.
sokoloff
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
Epa095
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.
dzonga
the 'IQ' people conveniently ignore how the IQ test is such a poor measure for intelligence & resourcefulness
leviathant
I learned a long time ago that people who talk about IQ don't usually have anything intelligent to say.
dijit
I also tend to find people who score well on those tests don't put much stock into them.
cluckindan
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
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.
jibal
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
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.
retsibsi
Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.
It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."
This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)
mapt
On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.
Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.
Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).
jibal
This is another non sequitur ... it doesn't address retsibsi's point or their question. It has nothing to do with cluckindan's comment, which is what this subthread was about.
mapt
It's because there are multiple levels of misconceptions as well as "violent agreements".
retsibsi is correct. You can't draw (meaningful) conclusions about IQ before 1950, because extrapolating from the data after 1950 is dumber the farther back you reach, just for reasons related to the concept of extrapolation.
This has nothing to do with the fact that IQ is a statistical distribution that we keep re-norming, which "should always average 100"; The Flynn Effect is not in serious dispute, it's just an effect that pertains to nonstandardized results.
jibal
Nothing you wrote here is remotely correct, it contributes nothing on the topic, and it commits the exact sins it accuses me of.
readthenotes1
True, but irrelevant.
Or, false and irrelevant.
People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
ordu
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.
behringer
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
I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
BigTTYGothGF
As King Thamus said to Theuth.
imbnwa
This was Socrates' own warning about writing over 2000 years ago
nephihaha
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.
thesz
Better food.
echelon
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.
card_zero
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.
otherme123
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.
geysersam
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.
dismalaf
> 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
What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
dismalaf
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.
peyton
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
> 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.
card_zero
There is however a suggestion here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Interbreeding
> According to Svante Pääbo, it is not clear that modern humans were socially dominant over Neanderthals, which may explain why the interbreeding occurred primarily between Neanderthal males and modern human females.
Unless read as suggesting "Neanderthal males were hugely charismatic"?
dismalaf
In current-day interracial dating dynamics there are preferred race and gender combos and this is shown through lots of statistics.
The answer isn't necessarily rape...
pegasus
...or "Neanderthal males were huge, thus charismatic" :)
opan
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.
nobodyandproud
I kind of agree. Though the old, brutish yet stupid was also likely wrong and more for self-comfort as a species.
Tangent and thought experiment: If we could re-engineer a viable population of neanderthals, should we?
If we further gave them the full gamut of modern knowledge and tools, and even a nation-state suitable for them what would be the outcome?
tsunamifury
Ants won over humans? Worms?
hrimfaxi
When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.
dyauspitr
But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.
wazoox
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.
ZeroGravitas
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
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
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
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.
wizzwizz4
IQ tests are useful for measuring features of populations, but they're a very noisy measure of an individual's "general intelligence" (if such a thing even exists), with several confounders: whether you've trained to pass IQ tests, TDTPSATDIBCA [1], how well-rested you are, how stressed you are, how hungry you are, whether environmental conditions are distracting you… Many of these are also a factor in group averages, although in the context of measuring children's educational attainment, this is a feature rather than a bug: in that setting, IQ tests are a good measure (to the extent that educational attainment is something we want to be optimising for, which is another question entirely).
However, in this thread, we were discussing "the typical racist's use of IQs". Nobody was "arguing that IQ isn't real": you brought that up, unprompted. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
[1]: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan...
Qem
> Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?
The ban on leaded petrol probably also helped.
sokoloff
The timeline doesn't match.
The Flynn Effect covers from around 1930s to 1980s and the phase out of leaded gasoline happened during the very end of that timeline, meaning adolescent IQ measurements during the time the Flynn Effect covers would have all been raised in an environment where leaded fuel was either dominant or at least common.
cwnyth
Precisely why is this hard to square away?
sokoloff
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.)
BigTTYGothGF
> 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.
bonzini
For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.
ijk
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
>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.
MrBuddyCasino
The Flynn effect isn’t real.
askos
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.
jbotz
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.
askos
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?
alanbernstein
You might enjoy Hominids by Robert Sawyer
user_7832
Tangentially related, The Man from Earth is really good as well.
Very few films choose to shoot on a camcorder, and fewer still pull it off well.
lanstin
I just randomly watched that a month or two ago. A really interesting idea.
pavel_lishin
Seconding this recommendation; the entire trilogy of books is great.
namenotrequired
I thought even after the merge the Neanderthal genes continued to get rarer, indicating natural selection against them
bonzini
If it's 2% now after 2000-3000 generations, it must have stabilized because any number <.995 is basically zero when raised to the 2000th power. The neanderthal genes would have to be 1-10^-5 as fit as a the sapiens genes, which is basically noise.
beezlewax
I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?
peacebeard
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
egeozcan
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?
bonesss
Outcompeting includes murder, rape, war, and cannibalism. But we have population overlap for millennia, so that’s kinda factored into numbers.
All primates are resource competing, so outcompeting is also drinking up their milkshakes. But, again, that’s the baseline.
Non-conclusively, from my lay understanding, the tail end of falls into general bi-lateral competitive practices and breeding rates leading to ‘us’ not ‘them’. All columns all the time, not one crisp incident or behavioural change.
[And there’s no indication that ‘they’ geno-rapo-ate us any less than we them… if being slightly better at mass murder was the difference, then yay for our side?]
peacebeard
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
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peacebeard
This is accurate for post history but evidence doesn't support this for prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes.
kjkjadksj
Sure it does. We see cultural displacement in the archaeological record all over the world. Bones marred by marks of damage by weapons. Otzi the iceman was possibly hunted down and smote on the mountainside like the Balrog Gandalf did in.
peacebeard
I’m not saying violence didnt happen, of course it did! I’m saying the evidence is not that neanderthals were simply eradicated like animals that were hunted to extinction and that multiple factors led to their gradual decline over time.
Cthulhu_
Not necessarily, it could also mean that homo sapiens was just more successful - better fed, bigger population, etc. It's not likely that early sapiens was so organized that they intentionally genocided neanderthals, it's more like they were subsumed etc. A slow process across thousands of years.
MagicMoonlight
You really think we would have let a competing species exist?
josefx
Biological classifications are one gigantic mess. There are multiple ways to define what qualifies as a "species". One of them is procreation and viable offspring, going by modern human DNA and the Neanderthal fragments contained in it we where one big happy family all along.
Cthulhu_
Depends on whether they were considered competing, and whether "we" were as organized, single-minded and competitive as this statement seems to imply - "we" probably weren't, not until larger kingdoms and empires started forming ~4000 years ago.
peacebeard
Lions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us
SideburnsOfDoom
There is a long list of Megafauna that did not.
peacebeard
Ah yeah looks I wasn't on the mark here. The "outcompete" framing is more accurate for neanderthals but for many pleistocene extinctions "hunted to extinction" did happen in some cases so it was not a good comparison. Thanks!
prmoustache
Barely and only because some of use decided to protect them.
bschwarz
Bears and wolves were indeed "removed" from parts of Europe by humans.
kjkjadksj
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amitbidlan
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
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.
m3047
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?
suddenlybananas
To be fair, squirrels store things for later.
sandworm101
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
Fat is also very very important for soap.
beezlewax
Soup
ant6n
Soap, soup, goop
Neywiny
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
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.
nomilk
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
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
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
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...
deafpolygon
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).
ahazred8ta
You can make a wooden basin or waterproof pit. Fill it with water, drop in hot stones from a fire. This is common in preceramic cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_boiler -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_boiling
deafpolygon
Maybe when megafauna disappeared, so too the Neanderthals because their survival strategy was too dependent on them.
andrewl
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.
netcan
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.
xp84
> 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…
snthpy
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?
devilbunny
Neanderthals were homo sapiens.
IAmBroom
No, they were literally Homo neanderthalensis.
nntwozz
And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!
shevy-java
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
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...
contubernio
Most likely scenario is a more aggressive, bloodthirsty, violent species of comparable intelligence came along ...
ewy1
university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!
lkm0
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
ozgung
What is the modern version of this process/product?
paulgerhardt
Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.
multjoy
They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.
SideburnsOfDoom
"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
This is why the wolves also eat whole mice.
myspeed
I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.
thehappypm
Link?
nephihaha
Some would argue they still do. ;)
JackFr
“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
nntwozz
Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!
hashlock_p2p
I am fat so?
ant6n
…so you were produced in Neanderthal fat factory?
ncr100
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.
biztos
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!
aix1
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...
el_io
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
That's amazing, thank you!
comandillos
Same, and I also read Netherlands instead of Neanderthals.
DonHopkins
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]
card_zero
I keep reading Neanderthal rat factories too! HP Lovecraft would be pleased with us.
alexreysa
[dead]
dr_dshiv
[flagged]
advisedwang
Any basis for this theory, or just your imagination?
kioleanu
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
Tagbert
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>
rogerrogerr
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.
Aardwolf
Firefox reader view on PC shows the exact same text as is in the article
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.)