Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore
archaeologymag.com
archaeologymag.com
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
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.
"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.
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.
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)
Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...
(Dont' skip the comments)
Sometimes to hilarious results:
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.
Personally, destroying my only map (or risking it) would be the last desperate method that I would consider trying.
Survival tip number one is btw not bother much with foraging or trying to boil potential poisonous plants to mess up your stomach, but find the best direction and focus on walking, if no help will come.
(One can go without food for days, but not without water)
eg: https://www.google.com/search?q=origami+water+bomb
returns maker videos, text instructions, etc.
So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it ever was?
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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
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.
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...
I also wonder if people tried to layer various material to cook them at different speed, a form of ad-hoc thermal control
One little layer of wet clothes isn't going to do much against Directed Energy Weapons - unless you were just really anxious about condensation.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-clean-and-chop-mushrooms
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.
I also hadn't thought to boil pasta that way though.
I now want to give this a try, but am pretty skeptical of the outcome.
I think we had the same roommate. I used to call him Captain Humidity because he filled the kitchen with steam.
I tried buying a carbon steel pan for her thinking it can take the heat but after a month it was rusty and caked with carbonized food that she never took the time to scrub off. In hindsight a stainless steel pan would probably have been better but I'm sure she would have found a way to destroy that too.
"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."
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.
There is often a knowledge gap between different fields of expertise, someone else already cited medical doctors and psychologists reinventing well known mathematics badly. Also youtube attracts copy cats that use modern tools out of frame, so it isn't a reliable source of information. I can already see the discoveries "Great wall of china most likely build by single man with a stick, just ignore the excavator tracks".
Or cooked something in a natural hot spring or natural outlet where boiling/near-boiling water forces its way to the surface.
It was a remote hunting trip in the Yukon and my buddy forgot the camp stove & pots.
My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.
Ignoring the reference to pottery the assumption that boiling must require heated rocks is probably incorrect. I think this is a common failure mode of archeology, where evidence is preserved (cracked rocks) is favored despite obvious selection biases.
Remarkable how different the previous interglacial periods were. Herds of elephants and rhinos in today's Berlin, at 51° north!
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.
The breakthrough is the claim that they were doing this.
Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their wheel axles with...
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.
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.
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_.
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.
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.
So my theory is that they could well have been more sophisticated in a lot of ways, but were just outbred.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02593-7
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06440-4
It's far from conclusive, not representative of the majority of folks with autism diagnoses, and needs more replication and investigation. But it could be a thing. Speaking as a spectrum-y red-haired middle-european.
Their DNA is up online, but you can also see these variants here: https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/36/3/734/6071469
They were highly inbred and they were carriers for this form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) due to 21-Hydroxylase Deficiency. Even in its nonclassic form, this would have contributed to the low population numbers as any classic form would have been non-viable as well as resulted in evolutionary pressure to select for the genetic variants to compensate for the altered HPA-Axis. Neanderthals are most known for contributing to human specific DNA sets such as improved immune system, but if you go digging you will notice the larger pattern.
NCAH specifically results in higher neurogenesis. They were smarter. They also now had a bigger glucose preference and started to shift calories to grain. At some point between 130-70KYA there was enough excess calories from grain to not need to eat the dead. (see their teeth between this time) Admixture with modern humans occurs around 50-43KYA. These adaptations would have contributed to the loss of the mitochondrial DNA due to low female reproductive success compared to the higher male Neanderthal with female human success. The 2-4% that is found together is found together for a reason. They are incredibly valuable together.
This support for reduced HPA-Axis would have allowed for many other variants on the HPA axis and while not a single genetic variant, atypical HPA axis phenotype is associated with intelligence due to the enhancement in ability to detect unexpected events.
The glucose/grain preference with higher caloric density supported the higher population densities that occurred rapidly due to the Younger Dryas (last glacial period) and resulting agricultural and villages transition in Mesopotamia. These agricultural populations outcompeted other human groups while spreading the Neanderthal derived genetic variation.
Because humans can develop a zona reticularis in their adrenals (unlike marmoset which has partially solved this with an adaptation) the way HPA axis variants interact with steroidogenesis influences sexual differentiation and reproduction in homo sapiens there is constant push and pull.
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.
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.
In Jean M Auel’s Earths Children books the Neanderthals communicated via hand gestures and vocalizations.
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.
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
This just sounds like romanticizing.
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.
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
If I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.
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.
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.
The fact that it has been used without qualification has a lot to do with the fact that most of our genome was assumed to be junk, which we know today is not the case, per the ENCODE project for example.
Thus, the 99% number needs to stop being perpetuated.
Today we know that the alignable parts (parts that are similar enough that they can be aligned with each other) are down in the 80s percents between humans and chimps, which can be digged out from e.g. this recent big study (some numbers are in the paper, and some needs to be digged out of the supplementary material):
Yoo, D. et. al. (2025). Complete sequencing of ape genomes. Nature, 1-18. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08816-3
Then remember that a 15%-ish difference with chimps means hundreds of millions of base pairs of difference.
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.
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.
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...
(The only image I could readily find was on Reddit :-)
Soup. They were making soup.
I would like to know what seasonings they used.