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

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

#91

Post by alanbernstein »

askos wrote: post #77
jbotz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You might enjoy Hominids by Robert Sawyer

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

#92

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

multjoy wrote: post #78
paulgerhardt wrote: post #32

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. 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.

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

#93

Post by alanbernstein »

russellbeattie wrote: post #25

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 (…

As they say, history rhymes

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

#94

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

peacebeard wrote: post #72
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think we would have let a competing species exist?

Lions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us

There is a long list of Megafauna that did not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions

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

#95

Post by ZeroGravitas »

sokoloff wrote: post #3
irdc wrote: post #2

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... ).

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

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.

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

#96

Post by washadjeffmad »

Neywiny wrote: post #20

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

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.

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

#98

Post by monkpit »

nullorempty wrote: post #24
throwaway27448 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3.25% is whole milk, they absolutely sell it in Canada.

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

#99

Post by captainbland »

nullorempty wrote: post #13
irdc wrote: post #2

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... ).

[flagged]

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.

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

#100

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

nullorempty wrote: post #24
throwaway27448 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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