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irdc
tcp_handshaker
The real reason why now, every two weeks, you are bombarded with articles about how great Neanderthals were... - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UUsisXvwoM
nullorempty
[flagged]
throwaway27448
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).
nullorempty
So we got smarter in the last 20+ years.
Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
scott01
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.
pixel_popping
Going fat-free will ruin your health and energy, going sugar-free will only improve it.
captainbland
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.
sokoloff
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
ordu
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.
Epa095
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.
dzonga
the 'IQ' people conveniently ignore how the IQ test is such a poor measure for intelligence & resourcefulness
cluckindan
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.
ZeroGravitas
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.
sokoloff
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.
Qem
> 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.
behringer
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.
thesz
Better food.
nephihaha
I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
cwnyth
Precisely why is this hard to square away?
sokoloff
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.)
echelon
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.
card_zero
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.
geysersam
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.
dismalaf
> 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.
dyauspitr
But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.
MrBuddyCasino
The Flynn effect isn’t real.
askos
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.
jbotz
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.
askos
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?
alanbernstein
You might enjoy Hominids by Robert Sawyer
namenotrequired
I thought even after the merge the Neanderthal genes continued to get rarer, indicating natural selection against them
bonzini
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.
beezlewax
I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?
peacebeard
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
egeozcan
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?
MagicMoonlight
You really think we would have let a competing species exist?
nomilk
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!
deafpolygon
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.
nomilk
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."
card_zero
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...
deafpolygon
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).
andrewl
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.
russellbeattie
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.)
herodoturtle
> 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.
andrekandre
> The word "dollar" is derived from "thal".
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xp84
If you have a substack, I would subscribe to it
newsy-combi
Wait till you find out we live in a Von Neumann Universe
Neywiny
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
washadjeffmad
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.
amitbidlan
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.
tastyfreeze
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.
suddenlybananas
To be fair, squirrels store things for later.
ozgung
What is the modern version of this process/product?
nntwozz
And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!
netcan
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.
xp84
> 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…
snthpy
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?
devilbunny
Neanderthals were homo sapiens.
ewy1
university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!
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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...).