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
Epa095 13 hours ago [-]
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.
cluckindan 12 hours ago [-]
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.
anamexis 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jibal 8 hours ago [-]
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.
roysting 2 hours ago [-]
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.
readthenotes1 11 hours ago [-]
True, but irrelevant.
Or, false and irrelevant.
People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
ZeroGravitas 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
behringer 4 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
Better food.
nephihaha 2 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
Precisely why is this hard to square away?
sokoloff 13 minutes ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
otherme123 1 hours ago [-]
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.
geysersam 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dyauspitr 4 hours ago [-]
But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.
dismalaf 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hrimfaxi 11 hours ago [-]
What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
dismalaf 10 hours ago [-]
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.
peyton 7 hours ago [-]
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.
opan 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dismalaf 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
> 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"?
tsunamifury 11 hours ago [-]
Ants won over humans? Worms?
hrimfaxi 11 hours ago [-]
When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.
Neah, can't be. We are meticulously excluding fat from our diet. Fat-free milk, fat-free yogurt, fat-free brain. I bet they had better cognitive abilities for they understood the importance of fat better than we do apparently.
scott01 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
captainbland 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
So we got smarter in the last 20+ years.
Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
gucci-on-fleek 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
monkpit 35 minutes ago [-]
3.25% is whole milk, they absolutely sell it in Canada.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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 6 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 52 minutes ago [-]
You might enjoy Hominids by Robert Sawyer
beezlewax 6 hours ago [-]
I thought it was mostly because our ancestors murdered them?
peacebeard 5 hours ago [-]
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
egeozcan 5 hours ago [-]
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?
peacebeard 4 hours ago [-]
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.
MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago [-]
You really think we would have let a competing species exist?
peacebeard 3 hours ago [-]
Lions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us
bschwarz 1 hours ago [-]
Bears and wolves were indeed "removed" from parts of Europe by humans.
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.)
andrekandre 7 hours ago [-]
> 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!!
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 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
netcan 5 hours ago [-]
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.
amitbidlan 8 hours ago [-]
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.
nntwozz 9 hours ago [-]
And that's how Toyota eventually got to lean manufacturing, impressive!
5 hours ago [-]
shevy-java 1 hours ago [-]
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).
myspeed 7 hours ago [-]
I like the explanation of Neil Tyson on Neanderthal's research.
thehappypm 7 hours ago [-]
Link?
nephihaha 2 hours ago [-]
Some would argue they still do. ;)
ewy1 12 hours ago [-]
university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!
paulgerhardt 8 hours ago [-]
Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.
multjoy 3 hours ago [-]
They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.
SideburnsOfDoom 52 minutes ago [-]
"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.
deafpolygon 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe when megafauna disappeared, so too the Neanderthals because their survival strategy was too dependent on them.
sandworm101 7 hours ago [-]
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?
fnordpiglet 7 hours ago [-]
Fat is also very very important for soap.
beezlewax 6 hours ago [-]
Soup
xp84 8 hours ago [-]
> 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 4 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
Neanderthals were homo sapiens.
6 hours ago [-]
JackFr 11 hours ago [-]
“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
nntwozz 9 hours ago [-]
Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!
ncr100 4 hours ago [-]
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.
aix1 3 hours ago [-]
Your comment reminded me of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (I won't spoil the punchline):
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.
biztos 3 hours ago [-]
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!
comandillos 2 hours ago [-]
Same, and I also read Netherlands instead of Neanderthals.
>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]
card_zero 3 hours ago [-]
I keep reading Neanderthal rat factories too! HP Lovecraft would be pleased with us.
9 hours ago [-]
dr_dshiv 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
advisedwang 6 hours ago [-]
Any basis for this theory, or just your imagination?
kioleanu 13 hours ago [-]
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
Tagbert 13 hours ago [-]
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>
rogerrogerr 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Aardwolf 13 hours ago [-]
Firefox reader view on PC shows the exact same text as is in the article
If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.
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.
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.
Or, false and irrelevant.
People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect
Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.
https://www.realcanadiansuperstore.ca/en/3-25-homogenized-mi...
If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions
Feels like the most interesting part of the article was omitted!
> 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.
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."
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...
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.)
Look into pre-Colombian grease trails, which we have much better logistical records for.
I wonder if this bone grease was an edible product or something else. Oils have many uses.
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.
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…
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
Probably that (the one I heard) derived from this one.
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!
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]
<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>
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.
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257 [PDF]