Neanderthals were processing animal bones to extract fat 125,000 years ago, nearly 100,000 years before modern humans were known to do anything similar, according to a new study. The discovery at the Neumark-Nord site in Germany demonstrates that Neanderthal culinary skills were sophisticated.
According to New Scientist, the site features more than 100,000 fragments of bones from at least 172 individual animals, including horses and deer. The bones were intensively processed into calorie-rich grease, with clear signs of being smashed into small pieces and heated to release the grease from the spongy tissue inside them.
"They pounded grease-rich bones into very small fragments, which must have been quite an investment in terms of time and effort, and then probably heated these in water to skim off the fat after a few hours," said Wil Roebroeks, a study author from Leiden University, according to New Scientist.
The main evidence for the grease factory at Neumark-Nord is the combination of enormous quantities of human-broken bone fragments, hammerstones, and many remains of fire over a small area of 50 square meters near one of the former lakes. The fragmentation of the bones is clearly anthropogenic, not the result of carnivores or geological processes.
"This only makes sense if the fragmentation served a purpose," Roebroeks said. "It is another addition to the cultural repertoire of these distant cousins and underlines the possibility that these hunter-gatherers did engage in some form of food storage."
Experiments showed that containers made out of perishable materials such as deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food. The Neanderthals may have boiled the bone fragments over a low fire, possibly in containers made of birch bark.
"The earliest known pottery dates from around 20,000 years ago, so the Neanderthals must have used other kinds of vessels to boil the bones," Roebroeks said.
While there is no direct evidence that Neanderthals were responsible for the butchery at Neumark-Nord, they were the only known humans in Europe at that time, according to the researchers. The remains found at Neumark-Nord include horses, bovids, deer, foxes, big cats, and an extinct two-horned rhinoceros.
Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens relied heavily on bone grease to supplement their steaks and maintain their caloric intake, providing a less-perishable, easily transportable, high-calorie food that would have been highly prized by hunter-gatherer groups. The Neanderthals' use of bone grease suggests forward planning and the capacity for delayed gratification.
"I think it opens up the possibility that they may have been involved in storage of food," Roebroeks said, according to IFLScience.
The study authors write, "The evidence constitutes the earliest clear case of intensive grease-rendering yet documented for the Paleolithic."
This finding aligns with our understanding of Neanderthals' cognitive abilities. Previous evidence showed that they were already producing birch bark pitch, a type of adhesive, 200,000 years ago.
"But the interesting thing is that it takes away a bit of that idea that these were immediate-return societies, which were focused on the here and now and didn't invest in any way in future activities," Roebroeks said.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.