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?
Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
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Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#42This 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... ).
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
Precisely why is this hard to square away?
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#43Question: 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?
Fat is also very very important for soap.
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#44I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#45I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.
Link?
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#46Fascinating. 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.
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#47Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#48[flagged]
Any basis for this theory, or just your imagination?
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#49[deleted]
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#50> 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…
Neanderthals were homo sapiens.