Neanderthals had a ‘fats manufacturing facility’ the place they processed bones for grease

Neanderthals had been processing animal bones to extract fats from them 125,000 years in the past, practically 100,000 years earlier than trendy people had been identified to do something comparable.

The proof comes from a rare lakeside web site at Neumark-Nord in jap Germany, the place over 100,000 fragments of bones from not less than 172 particular person animals have been discovered. The stays embrace horses, bovids, deer, foxes, massive cats and an extinct two-horned rhinoceros.

The bones had clear indicators of being smashed into small items and heated to liberate the grease from the spongy tissue inside them. This fats would have supplied a less-perishable, simply transportable, high-calorie meals that might have been extremely prized by hunter-gatherer teams.

Wil Roebroeks at Leiden College within the Netherlands and his colleagues, who carried out the examine, describe the placement as a “fats manufacturing facility” that appears to have been used intensively for less than a brief interval. “The fragmentation of the bones is clearly anthropogenic, not the results of carnivores or geological processes,” he says.

Whereas there is no such thing as a direct proof that Neanderthals had been accountable for the butchery, they had been the one identified people in Europe at the moment, says Roebroeks.

Beforehand, the oldest web site the place grease rendering had been confirmed was in Portugal 28,000 years in the past.

Breaking the bones of huge mammals into such an enormous quantity of small fragments is labour-intensive and time-consuming. “This solely is sensible if the fragmentation served a function,” says Roebroeks.

Though the group doesn’t have direct proof of boiling, it’s clear that the bones had been heated. “Judging from the presence of clearly heated bones, heated flint artifacts and stones, fires burnt on the web site,” he says.

The earliest identified pottery dates from round 20,000 years in the past, so the Neanderthals will need to have used other forms of vessels to boil the bones. Latest experiments have proven that containers made out of perishable supplies corresponding to deer pores and skin or birch bark, positioned straight on a hearth, are able to heating water sufficiently to course of meals, says Roebroeks.

“It’s one other addition to the cultural repertoire of those distant cousins and underlines the likelihood that these hunter-gatherers did have interaction in some type of meals storage,” he says.