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Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

archaeologymag.com

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Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#141

Post by umeshunni »

qoez wrote: post #53

This is the first time in the wild I've seen an image credited to an artist that is clearly AI made (with some minor detail like smoke added to the foreground). You can tell it's AI by the details of the bone and piles of wood.

Some other articles explicitly call out that the image is AI generated:

e.g. it's labeled with An AI generated impression of activities at the “Fat Factory” site. The image was generated with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT (version 4o, 2025), and subsequent modification and retouching by a graphic designer | Quelle: F. Scherjon | Copyright: F. Scherjon, LEIZA-Monrepos

at

https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/07/02/neanderthals-ra...

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#142

Post by FrustratedMonky »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #122
thfuran wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does. And "any homo something before or after" includes us today. While it might be reasonable to say there are things we don't fully understand about the way fat affects the body, we do understand the nutritional value of fat.

What more did they know about dietary fat than that it was edible and it would help them survive, the same as any animal? This just sounds like romanticizing.

You guys are getting to wrapped up in "They were Food Blogger Influencers".

The key here is the mechanics "systematically stripping fat from the bones of large animals using water and heat"

The ability to organize to use multiple coordinated steps.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#143

Post by pests »

morkalork wrote: post #137
lawlessone wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also be the case that in reading the map you realize you're too far in any direction for help...

Or your poor map reading skills are how you got lost in the first place

Even if you had a map, a compass, knew where you are on the map, and had a target destination on the map… it would still be hard to navigate, again a skill all by itself.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#144

Post by pbmonster »

JohnMakin wrote: post #115
pbmonster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always confusing how those DNA comparisons are worded. We share almost 99% of our DNA with chimps, for example. But this just means that if you go down the genome, we have 99% of the same types of genes. And that's true even though we don't even have the same number of chromosomes as chimps! (We also share 50% of DNA with bananas - which just shows how incredibly complex basic stuff like cell respiration is.) Th…

When stated this way, 3% seems like quite a lot.

Yes! You have 32 great^3-grandparents, 3% DNA is equivalent to one of them being purebred neanderthal.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#145

Post by t-3 »

nyeah wrote: post #139
t-3 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that paleo-anthropologists didn't know about using leather or bark pots when those are extensively documented and presumably well-known to recent-ish-history-anthropologists. Is there just very little overlap and communication between the groups?

Who says they didn't know?

The paper linked by the grandparent claims that archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists believed that it was impossible for humans to boil until the invention of stone-carving and pottery because they thought the containers would burn.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#146

Post by dustincoates »

Youden wrote: post #22
jbotz wrote: post #6

When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because t…

In high school science class we boiled water using standard printer paper: fold a sheet into a box, put it on a stand over a bunsen burner, fill it with water, turn up the bunsen burner. Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.

We used to do this on the camp fire in Boy Scouts with paper cups. The older boys would learn it in science class and would use it to wow the younger ones.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#148

Post by xorcist »

jbotz wrote: post #6

When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because t…

> the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery

Is that really true? That sounds unlikely when there are so many contemporary counterexamples. If you have an interest in cooking, there are several traditional meals where cooking is done in other ways. Especially so for indigenous people who have little access to metals or clay. For example on Borneo the traditional way to cook rice over fire is inside bamboo stalks. As long as the water doesn't boil off, you can cook in almost any vessel.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#149

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

sfn42 wrote: post #102
williamdclt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities! Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's n…

It's a common mistake. Just this weekend I followed a recipe from a well known cooking website for beef stroganoff that said to brown the beef in batches together with batches of onion. That's not a good idea, the onion will release liquid which prevents the beef from browning and once that cooks off the heat required to brown the meat will burn the onion. So I cooked the beef and onion separately instead. The onion…

I watched a cook (America’s Test Kitchen?) where they explored different ways of thinking of heat management in pasta. The unbelievable one that worked: boil water, add pasta, turn off heat. The water retains the heat and will still penetrate the pasta. I have never actually tried it myself, but it makes sense.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#150

Post by b800h »

timschmidt wrote: post #113
b800h wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the chances that we discover that in some ways they were more advanced than early homo sapiens (I'm not saying "us" here, as I have a lot of Neanderthal DNA)?

Well they hard larger brains, more muscle mass, larger sinuses which aid in breathing in cold weather and possibly smell, denser bone structure, and a number of other possible advantages. It has been proposed that the advantage we wield which led to out-competing / interbreeding with them may have been a superior ability to starve - i.e. use fewer calories - during periods like the last ice age.

"Neanderthals appear to have matured faster physically but had a slower reproductive tempo overall, with longer spacing between births. That suggests fewer offspring over a female's reproductive lifetime."

So my theory is that they could well have been more sophisticated in a lot of ways, but were just outbred.

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