Study in Science Advances finds Neanderthals at Neumark-Nord 2, Germany systematically crushed bones from 172+ large mammals to render bone grease 125,000 years ago.
Key Takeaways
Site dated to Last Interglacial (~125,000 BP); Neanderthals selected a lakeside location specifically for centralized, high-volume bone grease rendering.
Method: large mammal bones crushed into tens of thousands of fragments, then heated in water to extract calorie-dense fat.
Scale involved deer, horses, and aurochs; carcass parts were cached elsewhere and transported to the rendering site, implying multi-stage logistics.
Pushes complex, labour-intensive resource management back tens of thousands of years earlier than previously attributed to Neanderthals.
Same landscape shows task-specific zones: minimal deer butchering in one area, elephant processing in another, fat rendering centralized – evidence of deliberate spatial planning.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters noted the rendering technique detail (crush bones, heat in water) was buried in the article, and debated whether the bone grease was food or had industrial uses like adhesives, given known Neanderthal birch-bark glue production.
On extinction, the emerging consensus from discussion: Neanderthals had low fertility and likely diluted into Homo sapiens populations rather than going extinct outright, leaving ~2% Neanderthal DNA in Eurasians today.
The logistics framing resonated strongly – planning hunts, caching carcasses, bulk transport, centralized processing reads as supply chain thinking, not opportunistic scavenging.
Notable Comments
@amitbidlan: “Planning ahead, bulk processing, storing for later. Sounds less like primitive survival and more like logistics.”
@netcan: Raises open question of whether rendered bone grease was food or a functional material, given Neanderthal birch-bark gum evidence.
