[HN Gopher] Neanderthals operated prehistoric "fat factory" on G...
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Neanderthals operated prehistoric "fat factory" on German lakeshore
Author : hilux
Score : 217 points
Date : 2025-07-04 01:45 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archaeologymag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (archaeologymag.com)
| baxtr wrote:
| _> The production of bone grease, which required huge quantities
| of bone to be worthwhile, was previously considered to be
| something limited to Upper Paleolithic modern humans. This find
| pushes back the timeline by thousands of years and represents a
| fundamental shift in our knowledge of Neanderthal diet and
| adaptation._
|
| If I had to guess I'd say we learned it from them.
| ricksunny wrote:
| I still struggle with the repeated assertions from the
| scicommss set that the 'neanderthals died out' or 'humans
| outcompeted neanderthals who went extinct', while at the same
| time acknowledging that 3% of DNA of everyone outside the
| African content is neanderthal. With that being the limit of
| 'the data' generally cited at hadn't, wouldn't a gradual,
| passively amicable merging (e.g. absorption) be just as
| explanatory as that Neanderthal's 'went extince' or 'were
| outcompeted'?
| Nursie wrote:
| It's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's
| more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens)
| neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case
| it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when
| there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here.
|
| However they are still extinct!
|
| It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about
| Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think
| of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an
| alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest
| britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just
| faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the
| Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's
| clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the
| saxons are 'us'.
|
| Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people
| settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and
| religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a
| political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule
| of the northern part of England, but it's not like they
| suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of
| settling.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| Also the Normans were vikings!
| clarionbell wrote:
| French speaking descendants of vikings yes. But they
| didn't have that much in common with Norwegians at the
| time.
| kergonath wrote:
| They had been vikings. They integrated very quickly on
| the continent, inter-married with locals and absorbed the
| culture within a couple of generations. It was nothing
| like the power structure that was put in place in
| England.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It doesn't seem that much of a coincidence that some of the
| history's foremost boat-based pillagers and raiders were
| the descendants of Vikings, right?
| pbmonster wrote:
| I think it's because that 3% number is so small, it actually
| comes down to "outcompeted". A merger of two equally fit sub-
| species would result in more DNA persisting.
| josefx wrote:
| Isn't there already an overlap in the upper 90% between
| humans and apes? I don't know how much the neanderthal DNA
| differed back then, but it couldn't be more than that,
| could it? So wouldn't 3% of the total be at least a third
| of the parts that did differ?
| pbmonster wrote:
| 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.)
|
| This is different than the statement that you share 50%
| of your DNA with your siblings, of course. Because in
| that case, you actually have the exact identical alleles
| as your siblings in 50% of your DNA.
|
| The 3% neanderthal DNA is the second type of comparison.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| When stated this way, 3% seems like quite a lot.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Yes! You have 32 great^3-grandparents, 3% DNA is
| equivalent to one of them being purebred neanderthal.
| hammock wrote:
| There are a number of ethnic groups (not species or
| subspecies, I realize) that are less than 3% of the gene
| pool today (and happened over a much shorter timespan I
| would suppose) such as Irish, Jewish, Armenian, etc. Would
| they be considered having been outcompeted at this point?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| No. There are still 100% individuals of all those groups,
| and the timescale of recorded history is too small for
| the same kind of competition as between neanderthals and
| sapiens anyway.
| ricksunny wrote:
| I think that's the crux of the cognitive dissonance we all
| experience when described the trope for the first time. 3%
| of group B's genes persisting eons later in the combined
| genome A+B isn't necessarily reflective of the original
| relative size of the population of B vs. A. Evolution only
| countenances which genes conferred a survival benefit edge
| to persist. Suppose population A was one million
| individuals, and population B was only one hundred (a
| 10000X disparity). Assume complete absorption of B into A
| over an instantaneous period of time. The proportional
| genetic representation argument, if it were operative,
| would imply that eons later, only 0.01% of the combined
| genome is from population B. Only that's not how genetics
| works - what matters is how much of a survival benefit did
| population B's genes confer on the inheriting offspring? To
| put up a concrete example, if population B had a gene
| conferring immunity to a regionally endemic pathogen, then
| that pop. B immunity gene is going to quickly saturate
| representation in the offspring populations as pathogen-
| vulnerable population members die off from disease.
| atoav wrote:
| I am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your
| assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides
| complexity.
|
| Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement
| can be useful tho. I teach media technology -- and a useful
| simplification is to have students think about inputs and
| outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about
| signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality
| a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more
| complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't
| useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to
| get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I
| use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism
| did.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I've long assumed it's typical patriarchal historical/anthro
| bullshit. History is memorizing kings and wars; there have to
| be winners and losers; etc.
| 14 wrote:
| I am convinced that early humans were a lot smarter then given
| credit for. My guess is the same as yours and that they were
| part of a long chain of steps of learning and development that
| went back much farther then we have evidence for.
| Gupie wrote:
| Possibly however homo erectus used the same design for their
| hand axes for over a million years. This implies the design
| was hardwired in their brains, in the same way the design of
| nests are hardwired in bird brains, as opposed to a
| rationally thought out design.
| hoseja wrote:
| Neanderthals especially were probably kinda autistic.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Um, cite?
| jbotz wrote:
| 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 then the container material will never get hotter than
| 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think
| about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever
| considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-
| anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the
| invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting
| and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad
| assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the
| perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad
| assumptions.
|
| Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].
|
| [1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf
|
| [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z
| 14 wrote:
| Yes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to
| boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in
| survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in
| a wooden container if done right.
|
| But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I
| know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise
| me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a
| fallen tree and building a fire by it. Then you place some hot
| burning pieces on top of the log. Keep adding them and burning
| on top of the log until it burns a bowl sized indentation. Then
| you take a rock or stick and scrape the hole and get it clean
| sort of. Then you put water into that and if no container to
| carry water is shows soaking a shirt and carrying it that way.
| After the large bowl sized hole is filled with water you take a
| few rocks that were sitting in the fire and drop them in. You
| will be amazed how fast it will boil the water. This is done to
| allow you to drink from a potentially unsafe water source.
|
| I guess what I am thinking is that there are probably dozens of
| ways they could have achieved it. Ways that with our knowledge
| of today escapes us but to them it was common knowledge. If I
| had to take a guess they would have used rocks and use a large
| flat rock and encircle that rock with rocks making a pit or
| rocks then covered the sides with dirt. Then dug a hole under
| part of the large flat rock and made fire under it. This
| primitive pot would not work well at first but my guess is that
| as fat melted and oozed into the cracks it would eventually
| seal and then would work very well to boil things. Anyways just
| fun to think about I know very little about the time period.
| netcan wrote:
| >But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots?
|
| "Pottery" tends to assume ceramics. In Neolithic and later
| sites that had pottery, ceramic remains typically represent
| 99% of the total artifacts.
|
| Bronze age tel sites are littered with ceramic pebbles. Every
| pot eventually becomes a bunch of shards and pebbles that
| last forever.
|
| That said... a material culture that only uses ceramics
| occasionally wouldn't leave such signs.
|
| Also.. you could call a wood or hide bucket "pottery," I
| think.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| No archaeologist would call hide or wood pottery and
| ceramics don't turn into pebbles. Occasional ceramic use
| can be very visible archaeologically if the pottery
| preserves. It's an inert material in the absence of water,
| after all. In the presence of water though, it turns into
| dust rather than pebbles.
| netcan wrote:
| >ceramics don't turn into pebbles.
|
| Much of the middle east, Greece, etc have many large
| sites with weathered pottery shards in the shape of
| pebbles, because pottery shards are flat-ish. Millions of
| ceramic rocks.
|
| In the presence of water... you will find the round, flat
| ones with a perfect "pebbles shape."
|
| This is extremely common where I live. I have an aquarium
| full of them.
|
| The "thing about pottery" is that many cultures made (and
| broke) a _lot_ of it.
|
| Its very obvious in the stratography when a pottery
| making culture moves in. There will be shards in every
| handful of earth.
|
| Occasional pottery use, like figurines or beads.. are not
| like that. They're only really found "in situ," graves or
| something.
| bjackman wrote:
| IIUC the easiest way to boil stuff without ceramics is
| usually in an animal's stomach or intestines. I believe you
| can also do it in a lined wicker basket.
|
| I'm not sure exactly how these things are done but both of
| them seem much easier to figure out than how to fire a pot!
| (Requires very high temperature and a good understanding of
| the material to stop it cracking)
| prometheus76 wrote:
| You can also use a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking
| cup.
| toast0 wrote:
| Neanderthals were practically swimming in those.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| You have to invent a whole lot more to have a plastic
| bottle or even a paper drinking cup, at that point, it'd
| be simpler to just invent pottery, instead.
| mapt wrote:
| Or a big leaf of the right plant, trussed up into a sack
| with grass.
| bluGill wrote:
| Notice that all of your proposed pots will biodegrade in a
| few decades (centuries in the best case) thus leaving no
| evidence behind. There are many options, and we can easily
| test to show many of them work. However there is no way to
| know which method(s) they used.
| Youden wrote:
| 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.
| p00dles wrote:
| that is so cool - I mean the fact that this example stuck
| with you so long is a single of good teaching to me
| boringg wrote:
| With direct flame on it? I guess it was removing water
| molecules slower than it was absorbing water. As long as it
| was saturated it would be fine. Great experiment.
| cenamus wrote:
| There's also a great experiment with a normal baloon, keep
| a tiny bit of water in it and the you can hold the inflated
| balloon over a flame as long as the water doesn't boil away
| recursive wrote:
| In Boy Scouts, we used to boil water with direct flame on
| paper cups. It would burn the paper "lip" on the bottom,
| but not leak.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| In Boy Scouts we did it with plastic cups. Not the healthiest
| material in retrospect :-)
| b800h wrote:
| When was this - are we saying that high school science
| teachers were aware of a fact that was not acknowledged by
| historians and anthropologists? Quite interesting!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You might be entertained to learn that this happens _all
| the time_. The spearpoint of application is often a _long
| way_ from the theory. So much so that they can miss obvious
| things.
|
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscove
| r...
|
| (Dont' skip the comments)
|
| Sometimes to hilarious results:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's a classic survival tip when lost in the wild:
|
| Fold your map into a box and cook whatever food-like things
| you've found before eating.
|
| Why you're lost when you have a map is a different question.
| pests wrote:
| Just because you have a map doesn't mean you know where you
| are in said map. Reading the landscape and elevation
| changes around you and matching that to a map is a skill
| into itself. Even harder without a compass.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Could also be the case that in reading the map you
| realize you're too far in any direction for help...
| morkalork wrote:
| Or your poor map reading skills are how you got lost in
| the first place
| pests wrote:
| 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.
| dustincoates wrote:
| 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.
| JackFr wrote:
| My middle school science teacher did it, and the big caveat
| he gave us was not to use wax or plastic-coated cups if we
| wanted to try at home.
| kadoban wrote:
| Is it me or is it odd that that first paper doesn't seem to
| cite any source for the misconception they're trying to argue
| against? I don't see any cites for people who believed that
| boiling could not happen in fragile containers.
|
| So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed
| that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it
| ever was?
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Honestly just ask people around you if you can boil water in
| a plastic or paper bag
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| The people around me aren't anthropologists claiming to
| understand ancient societies.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > I don't see any cites for people who believed that
| boiling could not happen in fragile containers.
|
| > The people around me aren't anthropologists claiming to
| understand ancient societies.
|
| Are they people or not? It's a simple and quick
| experiment to have an idea of what current people think
| about this fact. You'll not be able to write a scientific
| paper about it but it will good enough to for a
| reasonable opinion on the topic.
| kadoban wrote:
| The people around me are people, they're not a
| representative sample of anthropologists though (now or
| decades ago). That logic just doesn't work.
| Isamu wrote:
| It's common knowledge, less so now because we never need to
| do it. But go back in time and it's common frontier
| knowledge, you can do this in a pinch. And in Medieval times,
| you can boil something in a pouch.
|
| It's just less reliable, the upper part hanging the bag could
| burn and you could lose everything. It's just less durable.
| So anthropologists are likely to argue about how prevalent it
| was. Wouldn't you want to transition to a more durable way as
| quickly as possible?
| bluGill wrote:
| > Wouldn't you want to transition to a more durable way as
| quickly as possible?
|
| But what is durable? Pottery is fragile itself, and can
| break if you heat it too fast. I have not used either
| pottery or baskets on a fire so I can't comment myself, but
| I see no reason to think pottery is better. It probably
| depends partially on the society, if you are nomad hunter-
| gathers, pottery is heavy and breaks too easily, while
| farmers can just leave the pottery by where they cook and
| so it may be better.
| detaro wrote:
| I think mobility is a good shout. Especially large
| pottery is relatively hard to transport before you have
| pack-animals or carts.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| You can boil things in bamboo too
| clarionbell wrote:
| From the original paper:
|
| > experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable
| containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed
| directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently
| to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning
| at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Yep, leather works.
| sumitkumar wrote:
| Even thin single use plastic works. The first time I saw it
| it was surreal.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Stone boiling (dropping heated rocks into water-filled
| containers) was also a widespread pre-pottery technique that
| Neanderthals likely employed alongside the hide/bark methods
| you mentioned.
| slow_typist wrote:
| +1 You can even dig a hole into ground and seal it with clay.
| It's a well known survival technique.
| dh2022 wrote:
| That is like cooking inside a really big pot :)
| stinos wrote:
| Heh, wanted to make a comment saying this isn't 'super' recent
| knowlegde because I vividly remember Jean M. Auel using it in
| her first novels written in the 80's, and basically all the
| technical stuff she wrote was researched, ony to find out [1]
| indeed opens with a quote from said novels.
| pests wrote:
| I loved those books when I was younger, was randomly thinking
| about them the other day and couldn't remember the name for
| the first book and got lost in Wikipedia
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| I read that the native american peoples that lives in the San
| Francisco area never invented pottery. They boiled water in
| tightly woven baskets.
|
| Sure you have a 100C heatsink within millimeters, but I still
| find it surprising that the outside layer of the basket
| wouldn't burn away slowly.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > Sure you have a 100C heatsink within millimeters, but I
| still find it surprising that the outside layer of the basket
| wouldn't burn away slowly.
|
| Probably because the water slowly permeates through the
| outside layer of the basket and evaporates there. A lot of
| energy can be absorbed that way.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's the mechanism at work because I have
| boiled eggs using plastic cups and also waxed paper cups
| many times. I don't think any water is boiling through. The
| cup itself is staying at 100C, which is below its ignition
| point.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The cup isn't exactly 100C, it's being heated by the
| flame. But it's only a few hundred microns thick, and the
| back is in direct contact with the 100C water. One side
| is exposed to an air/methane flame at around 2000C/3500F,
| which (while very hot) is a poor thermal conductor, and
| the other side is in contact with the water. The
| temperature at the interface is somewhere in the middle.
|
| Also, you do you, but it's probably not a great idea to
| boil food in plastic cups or "waxed" (often coated in a
| styrene compound, not real "wax") paper cups...
| agumonkey wrote:
| So the heat transfer through the material to the water "fast"
| enough so that it doesn't char at all ? Makes sense but still
| surprising.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Yep. Lots of examples on YouTube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV2gsWHhDhY
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I wonder if attempts to prevent charring of such a design
| could be what led to pottery. One can imagine smearing mud or
| clay on the underside of bark or animal hide pots to increase
| their longevity. Long enough exposure to high heat and ?
| agumonkey wrote:
| yeah probably
|
| I also wonder if people tried to layer various material to
| cook them at different speed, a form of ad-hoc thermal
| control
| paulnpace wrote:
| I have wondered if this concept can be applied to some sort of
| DEW armor.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Well, as long as you're willing to wear (essentially)
| fishtanks into battle, it might work.
|
| One little layer of wet clothes isn't going to do much
| against Directed Energy Weapons - unless you were just really
| anxious about condensation.
| paulnpace wrote:
| It can't conduct heat to human skin. The concept, in this
| case, wouldn't be to merely prevent a material from
| catching fire, but to keep the person from being burned or
| steam-boiled.
|
| However, the general concept could also be applied to
| protecting things besides people, such as vehicles or
| buildings.
|
| I don't actually know very much about the wavelengths used
| by DEW, so I'm not clear if water, alone, is a practical as
| shielding, but could be used as a heat sink, especially
| when factoring in latent heat of vaporization.
| williamdclt wrote:
| 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 not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while
| there's a layer of water.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water
| faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while
| there's a layer of water.
|
| Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat
| can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the
| outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the
| mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an
| exercise to the reader.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I've heard it said by a very science oriented chef that 'all
| cooking is moisture management'.
| morsch wrote:
| Dave Arnold?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Can't find it now - but might have been!
| jghn wrote:
| this is also why cooking advice shifted from "don't wash
| mushrooms" to "wash mushrooms". If you're cooking your
| mushrooms properly you'll boil off all the water anyways, so
| it doesn't matter. It's only if you *don't* cook your
| mushrooms properly that washing mushrooms makes everything
| more watery than you'd like.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I don't wash mushroom because that makes them slimy, making
| them much more annoying to cut (and also it takes more time
| than not doing it). I can take a little dirt!
| collingreen wrote:
| Hopefully it's just dirt!
| jghn wrote:
| I was an avid non-washer until experts like Kenji [1]
| started weighing in. You definitely have to hold off
| washing them until the last moment to avoid sliminess.
| Although I don't find the time added to be all that
| consequential in the grand scheme of things. Obviously
| you're correct that it'd be *more* time, however.
|
| [1] https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-clean-and-chop-
| mushrooms
| sfn42 wrote:
| 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 can
| easily be cooked in one big batch, and if you take care not
| to burn the fond built up by the beef you can deglaze it with
| the onion. It's a good way to add extra flavor to the
| finished dish.
|
| I also had a discussion with a roommate once, he criticized
| my way of cooking pasta. I keep it just barely boiling, but
| he insisted I should crank it up to max. I explained that it
| doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just
| waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me so I got
| a thermometer and proved it.
|
| If you want liquid water to go above 100C you need a pressure
| cooker.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I cook pasta at a rolling boil not because it cooks faster
| but the agitation of the boiling makes it less likely to
| form sticky clumps.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I've thought about that but it's not a problem for me. I
| throw the pasta in, give it a stir, then leave it until
| the timer rings. Never have any sticky clumps.
| pests wrote:
| I've always used the rolling boil for stirring when
| making macaroni or other noodles. Maybe a minute of
| agitation in the beginning to get it going but it lets me
| set and forget. Maybe add a teaspoon or two of an oil to
| knock any bubbles out to avoid spill over / foam.
| williamdclt wrote:
| A single good stir at 1-2min of cooking is enough to
| avoid all sticking (although I still do it a couple more
| time just in case tbh, the stirring feel tells me how
| close to cooked they are anyway)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| sfn42 wrote:
| It's not really that unbelievable. The pasta just has to
| be in hot water, whether it's 99.9C or 95C doesn't make
| much of a difference. I use this technique to boil eggs -
| boil water, turn off heat, add eggs. It seems to help
| avoid cracked eggs.
|
| I also hadn't thought to boil pasta that way though.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| eggs in cold water, bring to boil, boil for 3 mins,
| remove from heat. never cracks, eggs never overcook no
| matter how long until you remove them from the water.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Or some salt
| mr_toad wrote:
| [delayed]
| somenameforme wrote:
| Speaking of layer of water, the liedenfrost effect creates
| some rather spectacular demonstrations, to say the least. [1]
| That video is real.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h7dt0bG8XU
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| That was upsetting. Huge difference between theory and
| practice when it comes to keeping a usable hand.
| chrismcb wrote:
| Every camper knows you can boil water in a paper cup.
| seiferteric wrote:
| I would think you would not even have to expose it directly to
| fire, you could put it on a rock above or near the fire. Also
| you can of course heat rocks in a fire and put them into water
| to boil it.
| evilsetg wrote:
| What would speak against carving a cooking pot from stone? One
| thing I could find is that they might explode but I guess that
| would also depend on the type of rock.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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?
| nyeah wrote:
| Who says they didn't know?
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| nyeah wrote:
| Thanks, but I don't think that's exactly what it says. It
| says "Most archaeologists assume that boiling in
| perishable containers cannot pre-date the appearance of
| fire-cracked rock (FCR)"
|
| "This paper has two principal goals. The first is to
| alert archaeologists and others to the fact that one can
| easily and effectively boil in perishable containers made
| of bark, hide, leaves, even paper and plastic, placed
| directly on the fire and without using heated stones."
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Reminds me of the anecdote of an early fisherman who cast his
| net, looked at that catch, and concluded that fishes have
| scales and fins, and are always at least 5cm long.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Pits of grease, with hot rocks--could they have fried food in
| it?
| xorcist wrote:
| > 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.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Ya, I don't believe ```paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans
| couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery```, it
| doesn't pass 'the laugh test'. There are many survivalist
| youtube channels that demo multiple methods to boil water
| without pottery [1][2]. If I were an anthropologist, I would
| be looking at modern survivalist methods to get inspiration
| for 'ancient' habits. Surely the folks that have studied
| their whole lives have even better sources of inspiration to
| investigate. Unless we have some source to back it up, I
| can't see how this remarkable claim should be trusted.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_kUTBM6Qo
| zem wrote:
| yeah I remember learning in school that with sufficiently
| good heat conduction you could boil water in a paper cup,
| because the burning point of paper was higher than the
| boiling point of water.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I boiled water over a fire in a plastic jug once. I was
| skeptical, but it Worked great.
|
| It was a remote hunting trip in the Yukon and my buddy forgot
| the camp stove & pots.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| When I was a kid, me and friends used plastic bags to boil
| water for cooking when out in the forest or at a beach on the
| nearby river. As long as you had enough water in the bag, it
| worked great (though there were probably some fun chemicals
| being released from the bag...)
| JackFr wrote:
| > It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things
|
| My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.
| freetime2 wrote:
| >The study indicates that Neanderthals, in addition to smashing
| bones to access the marrow--a behavior shared by their earliest
| African ancestors--also crushed them into fragments and boiled
| them to obtain bone grease, a nutrient-rich resource.
|
| I wish the article went into more details about _how_ they boiled
| the bones. My first thought was that smashing bones and boiling
| them is not all that impressive. And then I thought about how I
| would boil bones without a pot to boil them in... and actually
| that does sound like it would be a challenge and require a lot of
| collaboration and planning.
| bluGill wrote:
| This is likely a case of we cannot know. There are many options
| that we know would work - that would biodegrade in just a few
| decades.
|
| The breakthrough is the claim that they were doing this.
| arrowleaf wrote:
| Frame or shape leather hide to hold water, add water and hold
| over flame or add hot rocks.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > cut-marked remains of 76 rhinos and 40 elephants were also
| discovered at nearby sites like Taubach.
|
| Remarkable how different the previous interglacial periods were.
| Herds of elephants and rhinos in today's Berlin, at 51deg north!
| Roark66 wrote:
| And how could they've done this without language? I've heard this
| statement that neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo
| sapiens had language and they did not (something about the way
| their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds). I call BS
| on that now. You can't do this kind of stuff without ability to
| communicate your intentions, future plans, rewards for other
| people and so on.
|
| Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their
| wheel axles with...
| cdrini wrote:
| Both of those things can be true. Just because they didn't have
| language, doesn't mean they couldn't communicate, it just means
| they could likely only communicate primarily by showing instead
| of telling. And it's also clear why being able to communicate
| with language would indeed offer quite the competitive edge
| over that system.
| bbarnett wrote:
| During a period of high trust, I've watched crows training
| their young via showing.
|
| While crows have "crafty" intelligence, neanderthals would be
| more apt at this.
|
| But really, the logical first language would be gesture, an
| extension of already existing body language. And such
| language is employed by humans when hunting, at war, whenever
| quiet is preferred.
|
| Even a gesture language of a few dozen concepts is almost
| automatic, pointing, waving, directional motions, hushing
| motions, pointing at your head, clapping, etc.
|
| This being extended as full language in beings incapable of
| complex sound, seems viable.
| cdrini wrote:
| Very cool anecdote! And agreed, I think we're being a bit
| "handwavy" about what we mean when we say "language"; it
| seems like more of a spectrum. I'm not sure where we draw
| the line between, say, language that animals use which, to
| the best of our knowledge, do not show complex/abstract
| communication, and human languages. And who knows where
| Neanderthal language/communication would fall on that
| spectrum!
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| there are plenty of imaginable levels of language.
| there's everything from ability to communicate danger
| (which even trees seem to have), having simple constructs
| like names/ a handful of nouns for specific types of
| danger (e.g. Bear!) which is roughly where we think
| dolphins and some apes are. above that likely we get some
| verbs for coordinating hunting. at some point in this
| process you start getting syntax, tense, declension,
| adjectives etc.
|
| If I had to guess basic sentence structure probably goes
| back to the beginning of homo. The differences between
| Sapiens and others is likely much more subtle. e.g.
| symbolism, myth making, abstraction or something like
| that.
| bjackman wrote:
| Yeah I think it's pretty inconceivable at this point that
| Sapiens were the first ones to have language.
|
| I think it's still reasonable to argue that Neandertals lacked
| certain capacities that we have, based on differences in the
| evidence from tools and art that's attributed to them vs
| Sapiens.
|
| But IMO this would clearly have been a difference of degree,
| not at atomic shift. They were obviously _people_.
| fransje26 wrote:
| At the moment, your comment is being heavily down-voted for
| what seems to be a totally reasonable point of view.
|
| In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and
| segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA
| with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in
| complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were
| pretty advanced artists".
|
| The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.
|
| So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the
| Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we
| discover that they were different to us by a difference of
| degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being
| radically and binarily different.
|
| In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were
| perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their
| ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.
| b800h wrote:
| 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)?
| timschmidt wrote:
| 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.
| b800h wrote:
| "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.
| amarait wrote:
| Ive also read some out of wack theories like some
| conditions like autism could come from them since its
| more prevalent on white people. This would explain that a
| group that engages more socially creating bonds and more
| complex societal tribes in number would outnumber and
| extinguish these weird less verbal humans
| bjackman wrote:
| Well, ask it the other way around: what are the chances
| that despite having no evolutionary advantage over
| Sapiens, Neandertals survived as a distinct population
| for hundreds of thousands of years? Seems vanishingly
| unlikely to me!
| jl6 wrote:
| It seems weird to think there needs to be a major biological
| distinction to explain the idea of being outcompeted. Modern
| humans outcompete each other at various things all the time,
| right now (peacefully and non-peacefully) and it's not because
| of any differences as drastic as having language vs not having
| language.
| slow_typist wrote:
| And neanderthalensis was not outcompeted, their genes
| survived in Homo sapiens until today.
| neanderthaul wrote:
| What if we are actually neanderthals with some homo sapien
| genes
| amarait wrote:
| Seems putting neanderthal on your username increases the
| percentage tenthfold
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| Do you think a community of deaf people wouldn't be able to do
| it? :)
| cyco130 wrote:
| Deaf homo sapiens sapienses do have perfectly good language
| skills.
| tremon wrote:
| The original argument was that neanderthals didn't have
| good language skills because "their anatomy didn't allow
| for making complex sounds". Pointing out that deaf or mute
| humans still have complex language skills seems like an
| adequate counterargument to me.
| cyco130 wrote:
| Fair enough. I fully agree.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That ignores the co-evolution between throat anatomy and
| brain structures related to language. There's no reason
| to select for language ability in the brain over
| evolutionary time if the throat can't use it. If mere
| ability to use sign language was enough to push language
| development, chimps would do much better with human-
| invented sign languages. Deaf and/or mute humans are, I
| presume, co-opting language skill "meant" (selected) for
| vocal language.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Do you think deaf people can't communicate?
| detaro wrote:
| As far as I know the current evidence points towards
| neanderthal ability to make sounds not being that much
| different than early homo sapiens. The are assumed to have had
| less complex language and thinking, e.g. couldn't abstract or
| symbolize things, unlike homo sapiens. But that doesn't mean no
| language or no ability to communicate at all.
| dghughes wrote:
| >neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had
| language
|
| I think any small groups of humans were just one virus away
| from extinction. Even we almost disappeared. A species that has
| a very low population for the entire species then all get sick
| that is bad even if all do not die. Your species loses genetic
| diversity and then another virus or even a large natural
| disaster strikes the group wiping it out. Maybe we just were
| lucky and survived not due to any skill better than other
| species.
| tremon wrote:
| There's plenty of ways to communicate complex ideas without
| using complex language, as long as you have sufficient time to
| interact. Skills can be taught using demonstration, imitation,
| and correction; ideas can be drawn or acted out.
|
| What language enables, in my view, is accurate communication
| through intermediaries. It makes a lot of difference whether
| you need to supervise someone through all the ways that cooking
| on leather can go wrong versus richly explaining those same
| failure modes and how to avoid them. The former pretty much
| prescribes that most complex knowledge will stay within a tribe
| or a close community, whereas a rich vocabulary allows
| knowledge to spread readily among trade routes.
| pests wrote:
| Right, it's not like people born deaf are just completely
| useless as humans. Just like we have sign language and there
| is a whole concept of body language alone is enough to show
| it would be possible for them. We have people like Helen
| Keller who existed.
|
| In Jean M Auel's Earths Children books the Neanderthals
| communicated via hand gestures and vocalizations.
| willhslade wrote:
| I thought the idea was that Homo Sapiens's shoulders were
| capable of ranged weapons like atl atls while Neanderthals were
| ambush hunters.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| There are many successful ambush hunters in nature. It is not
| such a bad strategy
| samuell wrote:
| Neanderthals were people. Even Nobel laurate Svante Paabo, who
| sequenced their DNA, admits it.
| codingwagie wrote:
| Yeah but theres also sorts of political implications for
| admitting that
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| ? Can you expand? What is the political implication?
| umeshunni wrote:
| What do you mean?
| meindnoch wrote:
| Disgusting.
| nyeah wrote:
| This is the only comment here that I'm 100% sure is accurate.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| While the discovery is great, there are quotes that are very
| clickbaity like "They understood both the nutritional value of
| fat and how to access it efficiently."
|
| No they didn't understand the nutritional value better than any
| other homo something before or after, or even any carnivorous
| animals. It's just that evolution engineered them to look for
| food everywhere. For example the bearded vulture diet is based on
| bone and bone marrow, it's not because it understands the
| nutritional value of bone marrow better than the other birds but
| because all carnivorous animals evolved to eat fat, and evolution
| provided a way for this bird to get the marrow more easily than
| the others.
| thfuran wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| My huskies and some of my neighbors have equivalent
| educations on nutritional science.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more
| understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does.
|
| Understanding the nutritional value of a food goes beyond
| than working to get the food. You need to have a theory of
| nutrition (true or false), and there is nothing that can
| suggest this. Saying that they ate fat because fat is good
| for them is tautologic
|
| > And "any homo something before or after" includes us today.
|
| It is obvious that I include our specy only until the first
| research and experiments on the topic
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| qoez wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| It doesn't make them not an artist.
|
| There are lots of VFX professionals on LinkedIn having a total
| field day with AI tools and posting mind-blowing stuff. Somehow
| it hasn't reached the rest of social media yet.
|
| On that last point: AI is going to propel individual artists
| ahead of big Hollywood studios. They won't need studio capital
| anymore, and they'll be able to retain all the upside
| themselves.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It doesn't make them _not_ an artist, but it might make them
| a _bad_ artist. That image gets more nonsensical the more you
| look at it. How big is that skull in the foreground supposed
| to be?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess the line is quite blurry, but they could have used some
| sort of AI-based fill-in for those areas, right
| umeshunni wrote:
| 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...
| tpoindex wrote:
| Gary Larson's take on fat farming:
| https://i.redd.it/697huclnulme1.jpeg
|
| (The only image I could readily find was on Reddit :-)
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| I clicked to learn what a "fat factory" is, then realized --
|
| Soup. They were making soup.
|
| I would like to know what seasonings they used.
| octaane wrote:
| As I'm understanding it, it was primarily for grease, not soup
| itself. They certainly could have been making soup as well, but
| grease itself is a much more valuable product. It has utility
| for waterproofing, warmth (if you smear it on your body)
| lubricant, and is also highly calorically dense. You can also
| use it to preserve food (see "Potted meat") and on it's own,
| stays edible at room temp for a long time.
| octaane wrote:
| Interesting find. As mentioned by other comments, there are other
| ways you can boil things and render fat than with ceramic
| containers. However, there are even easier ways. For example, you
| could simply dig a hole in the ground, fill it with your fat,
| tendons, sinews, etc, top it with water, and toss in rocks that
| have been heated in a fire. That will boil the water and render
| the grease out; you just need to wait for the whole thing to
| solidify/cool.
|
| Also, you can dig a hole, add your un-rendered fat, then pour
| boiling water on top of it, then skim off the fat once it cools.
| Native Americans did that for a long time to get grease from
| candlefish [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulachon#Economics_and_trade
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