alt.hn

5/2/2026 at 8:42:20 PM

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

 https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025/07/neanderthals-ran-fat-factories-125000-years-ago

by andsoitis

5/2/2026 at 9:29:33 PM

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...).

by irdc

5/3/2026 at 6:37:42 PM

The real reason why now, every two weeks, you are bombarded with articles about how great Neanderthals were... - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM

by tcp_handshaker

5/3/2026 at 7:04:09 PM

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.

by dijit

5/3/2026 at 7:20:02 PM

[dead]

by dijit

5/2/2026 at 11:14:43 PM

[flagged]

by nullorempty

5/3/2026 at 1:07:04 AM

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).

by throwaway27448

5/3/2026 at 1:31:24 AM

So we got smarter in the last 20+ years.

Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.

by nullorempty

5/3/2026 at 10:51:15 AM

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.

by gucci-on-fleek

5/3/2026 at 1:12:38 PM

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.

by wildzzz

5/4/2026 at 10:16:05 AM

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...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_bag#Canada

by gucci-on-fleek

5/3/2026 at 10:30:31 AM

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

by monkpit

5/3/2026 at 3:40:33 AM

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.

by cosmic_cheese

5/3/2026 at 4:32:15 AM

[dead]

by Romanulus

5/3/2026 at 11:04:02 AM

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.

by scott01

5/3/2026 at 1:59:39 PM

Going fat-free will ruin your health and energy, going sugar-free will only improve it.

by pixel_popping

5/3/2026 at 10:35:27 AM

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.

by captainbland

5/2/2026 at 10:10:20 PM

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

by sokoloff

5/2/2026 at 10:16:40 PM

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.

by Epa095

5/3/2026 at 1:54:44 PM

the 'IQ' people conveniently ignore how the IQ test is such a poor measure for intelligence & resourcefulness

by dzonga

5/3/2026 at 3:33:38 PM

I learned a long time ago that people who talk about IQ don't usually have anything intelligent to say.

by leviathant

5/3/2026 at 7:11:39 PM

I also tend to find people who score well on those tests don't put much stock into them.

by dijit

5/2/2026 at 11:25:04 PM

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.

by cluckindan

5/2/2026 at 11:37:44 PM

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.

by anamexis

5/3/2026 at 2:39:50 AM

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.

by jibal

5/3/2026 at 9:26:35 AM

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.

by roysting

5/3/2026 at 12:32:29 PM

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.)

by retsibsi

5/3/2026 at 1:23:49 PM

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).

by mapt

5/4/2026 at 1:46:52 AM

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.

by jibal

5/4/2026 at 10:54:32 AM

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.

by mapt

5/4/2026 at 1:43:41 AM

Nothing you wrote here is remotely correct, it contributes nothing on the topic, and it commits the exact sins it accuses me of.

by jibal

5/2/2026 at 11:39:37 PM

True, but irrelevant.

Or, false and irrelevant.

People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.

by readthenotes1

5/3/2026 at 4:16:59 PM

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.

by ordu

5/3/2026 at 10:20:27 AM

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.

by ZeroGravitas

5/3/2026 at 11:10:59 AM

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.

by sokoloff

5/3/2026 at 1:12:11 PM

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.

by wizzwizz4

5/3/2026 at 1:58:13 PM

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.

by djaro

5/3/2026 at 5:13:38 PM

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...

by wizzwizz4

5/3/2026 at 11:58:01 AM

> 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.

by Qem

5/3/2026 at 12:05:57 PM

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.

by sokoloff

5/3/2026 at 7:01:23 AM

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.

by behringer

5/3/2026 at 9:25:07 AM

Better food.

by thesz

5/3/2026 at 9:15:28 AM

I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.

by nephihaha

5/3/2026 at 3:56:14 PM

As King Thamus said to Theuth.

by BigTTYGothGF

5/3/2026 at 3:47:26 PM

This was Socrates' own warning about writing over 2000 years ago

by imbnwa

5/3/2026 at 6:30:54 PM

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.

by nephihaha

5/3/2026 at 3:58:23 AM

Precisely why is this hard to square away?

by cwnyth

5/3/2026 at 10:52:28 AM

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.)

by sokoloff

5/3/2026 at 3:57:53 PM

> 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.

by BigTTYGothGF

5/3/2026 at 12:46:07 PM

For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.

by bonzini

5/3/2026 at 4:22:53 PM

Literacy.

Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.

Global food surplus.

The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...

by ijk

5/3/2026 at 3:36:49 PM

>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.

by pixl97

5/2/2026 at 10:19:03 PM

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.

by echelon

5/3/2026 at 1:43:00 AM

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.

by card_zero

5/3/2026 at 9:44:52 AM

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.

by otherme123

5/3/2026 at 3:22:31 AM

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.

by geysersam

5/2/2026 at 10:53:09 PM

> 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.

by dismalaf

5/3/2026 at 12:17:24 AM

What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?

by hrimfaxi

5/3/2026 at 1:17:36 AM

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.

by dismalaf

5/3/2026 at 3:50:21 AM

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.

by peyton

5/3/2026 at 6:51:50 AM

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.

by opan

5/3/2026 at 12:33:59 PM

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?

by nobodyandproud

5/3/2026 at 5:29:40 AM

> 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.

by dismalaf

5/3/2026 at 11:00:53 AM

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"?

by card_zero

5/3/2026 at 4:16:47 PM

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...

by dismalaf

5/3/2026 at 3:05:16 PM

...or "Neanderthal males were huge, thus charismatic" :)

by pegasus

5/3/2026 at 12:28:00 AM

Ants won over humans? Worms?

by tsunamifury

5/3/2026 at 12:32:20 AM

When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.

by hrimfaxi

5/3/2026 at 7:09:13 AM

But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.

by dyauspitr

5/3/2026 at 12:55:59 PM

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.

by wazoox

5/3/2026 at 4:32:12 AM

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.

by askos

5/3/2026 at 5:28:23 AM

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.

by jbotz

5/3/2026 at 8:24:59 AM

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?

by askos

5/3/2026 at 10:12:47 AM

You might enjoy Hominids by Robert Sawyer

by alanbernstein

5/3/2026 at 2:22:59 PM

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.

by user_7832

5/3/2026 at 3:41:19 PM

I just randomly watched that a month or two ago. A really interesting idea.

by lanstin

5/3/2026 at 3:42:23 PM

Seconding this recommendation; the entire trilogy of books is great.

by pavel_lishin

5/3/2026 at 12:04:09 PM

I thought even after the merge the Neanderthal genes continued to get rarer, indicating natural selection against them

by namenotrequired

5/3/2026 at 12:55:56 PM

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.

by bonzini

5/3/2026 at 5:18:33 AM

I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?

by beezlewax

5/3/2026 at 5:42:19 AM

Common misconception, more likely outcompeted

by peacebeard

5/3/2026 at 6:04:40 AM

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?

by egeozcan

5/3/2026 at 12:15:51 PM

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?]

by bonesss

5/3/2026 at 7:07:35 AM

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.

by peacebeard

5/3/2026 at 5:20:18 PM

Usually with humans though it isn’t these factors that are important. It is the violence factor. Seems you can get by on inferior technology for hundreds of generations, until some superior tech group shows up.

by kjkjadksj

5/3/2026 at 8:14:58 PM

This is accurate for post history but evidence doesn't support this for prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes.

by peacebeard

5/3/2026 at 1:29:07 PM

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.

by Cthulhu_

5/3/2026 at 6:40:50 AM

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

by MagicMoonlight

5/3/2026 at 6:56:56 PM

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.

by josefx

5/3/2026 at 1:30:36 PM

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.

by Cthulhu_

5/3/2026 at 7:53:26 AM

Lions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us

by peacebeard

5/3/2026 at 1:02:37 PM

Barely and only because some of use decided to protect them.

by prmoustache

5/3/2026 at 9:49:28 AM

Bears and wolves were indeed "removed" from parts of Europe by humans.

by bschwarz

5/3/2026 at 10:15:26 AM

There is a long list of Megafauna that did not.

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

by SideburnsOfDoom

5/3/2026 at 3:15:06 PM

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!

by peacebeard

5/3/2026 at 5:30:24 PM

Sure, we might have enslaved them. Just like we did to other humans we believed to be a little different by some metric (changes when you look in history what this metric is exactly for free license to demonize a fellow sapien)

by kjkjadksj

5/3/2026 at 3:30:15 AM

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.

by amitbidlan

5/3/2026 at 7:56:27 PM

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?

by m3047

5/3/2026 at 2:32:40 PM

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.

by tastyfreeze

5/3/2026 at 3:08:33 PM

To be fair, squirrels store things for later.

by suddenlybananas

5/3/2026 at 1:38:35 AM

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.)

by russellbeattie

5/3/2026 at 3:36:07 AM 

  > The word "dollar" is derived from "thal".
you are my hero; and this is why i love hn, cause this was something in the back of my mind that i wanted to find out about, and what do you know, a fellow hn'er just wrote it in a random comment. thanks!!

by andrekandre

5/3/2026 at 6:18:34 PM

> 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.

by herodoturtle

5/3/2026 at 3:05:25 AM

If you have a substack, I would subscribe to it

by xp84

5/3/2026 at 10:14:50 AM

As they say, history rhymes

by alanbernstein

5/3/2026 at 12:47:13 PM

Isn’t that what George Lukas said about Star Wars?

by ant6n

5/3/2026 at 12:09:27 PM

Wait till you find out we live in a Von Neumann Universe

by newsy-combi

5/3/2026 at 12:29:03 AM

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

by Neywiny

5/3/2026 at 10:24:49 AM

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.

by washadjeffmad

5/3/2026 at 7:34:04 AM

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!

by nomilk

5/3/2026 at 7:35:28 AM

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.

by deafpolygon

5/3/2026 at 7:36:46 AM

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."

by nomilk

5/3/2026 at 7:53:24 AM

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...

by card_zero

5/3/2026 at 2:07:11 PM

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).

by deafpolygon

5/3/2026 at 5:41:53 AM

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.

by netcan

5/3/2026 at 2:17:58 AM

And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!

by nntwozz

5/3/2026 at 3:01:28 AM

> 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…

by xp84

5/3/2026 at 7:30:38 AM

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?

by snthpy

5/3/2026 at 5:16:32 AM

Neanderthals were homo sapiens.

by devilbunny

5/3/2026 at 3:02:50 PM

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.

by andrewl

5/2/2026 at 10:58:42 PM

university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!

by ewy1

5/3/2026 at 2:52:37 AM

Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.

by paulgerhardt

5/3/2026 at 8:28:48 AM

They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.

by multjoy

5/3/2026 at 10:13:05 AM

"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.

by SideburnsOfDoom

5/3/2026 at 4:44:16 PM

This is why the wolves also eat whole mice.

by prepend

5/3/2026 at 3:55:16 AM

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?

by sandworm101

5/3/2026 at 3:59:18 AM

Fat is also very very important for soap.

by fnordpiglet

5/3/2026 at 5:20:56 AM

Soup

by beezlewax

5/3/2026 at 12:52:25 PM

Soap, soup, goop

by ant6n

5/3/2026 at 4:12:09 AM

I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.

by myspeed

5/3/2026 at 4:13:12 AM

Link?

by thehappypm

5/3/2026 at 7:34:39 AM

Maybe when megafauna disappeared, so too the Neanderthals because their survival strategy was too dependent on them.

by deafpolygon

5/3/2026 at 10:05:42 AM

I am fat so?

by hashlock_p2p

5/3/2026 at 12:53:37 PM

…so you were produced in Neanderthal fat factory?

by ant6n

5/3/2026 at 9:48:30 AM

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).

by shevy-java

5/3/2026 at 2:09:33 PM

Most likely scenario is a more aggressive, bloodthirsty, violent species of comparable intelligence came along ...

by contubernio

5/3/2026 at 9:12:35 AM

Some would argue they still do. ;)

by nephihaha

5/2/2026 at 11:41:20 PM

“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

by JackFr

5/3/2026 at 2:12:26 AM

Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!

by nntwozz

5/4/2026 at 10:56:39 AM

[dead]

by alexreysa

5/3/2026 at 7:07:17 AM

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.

by ncr100

5/3/2026 at 8:06:36 AM

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...

by aix1

5/3/2026 at 8:32:18 AM

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.

by el_io

5/3/2026 at 8:02:10 AM

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!

by biztos

5/3/2026 at 8:08:47 AM

I keep reading Neanderthal rat factories too! HP Lovecraft would be pleased with us.

by card_zero

5/3/2026 at 9:03:25 AM

Same, and I also read Netherlands instead of Neanderthals.

by comandillos

5/3/2026 at 9:55:56 AM

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]

by DonHopkins

5/3/2026 at 2:59:26 AM

[flagged]

by dr_dshiv

5/3/2026 at 4:43:21 AM

Any basis for this theory, or just your imagination?

by advisedwang

5/2/2026 at 10:12:41 PM

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

by kioleanu

5/2/2026 at 10:26:51 PM

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>

by Tagbert

5/2/2026 at 10:18:09 PM

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.

by rogerrogerr

5/2/2026 at 10:19:19 PM

Firefox reader view on PC shows the exact same text as is in the article

by Aardwolf