As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Neanderthal “fat factories” date back 125,000 years ago, a study suggests.
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The study found that the settlement’s residents strategically chose the location of the factory near the lake and harvested the marrow through a process of breaking bones and crushing and heating them.
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Fat factories show that Neanderthals mastered their subsistence diet and that they were able to understand their environment and plan ahead for hunting and resource gathering.
Although assembly line Thanks largely to Henry Ford in 1913, humanity understood the practice of mass production very early. A study published in the journal scientific progress Research shows that as early as 125,000 years ago, Neanderthals (our distant cousins) operated “fat factories” extracting bone marrow for their diet.
The recent research from Leiden University adds to decades of research at the Neumark-Nord archaeological site near Leipzig, Germany.
About 125,000 years ago, Earth went through an interglacial period with weather very similar to today’s climate. Previous research from Neumark-Nord has shown that Neanderthals hunted and slaughtered straight-tusked elephants in the area. according to Press release Research from Leiden University shows that there is also evidence of plant use in the area, but little has been preserved. Additionally, previous research has found evidence that residents use fire to manage vegetation. Needless to say, Neanderthals have long been underestimated, and this new study does nothing to stop that view.
Archaeologists have found in recent excavations that Neanderthals deliberately chose lakeside sites to process the bones of at least 172 mammal species, including deer, horses and bison (a now-extinct bovine species). According to the study, residents of the site not only cracked open the bones of large mammals to extract the marrow, but also ground the bones into thousands of fragments and heated them in water to extract the calorie-rich psoralen. The findings provide an estimate of advanced resource collection thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
“It was intensive, organized and strategic,” Lutz Kindler, the study’s lead author, said in the press release. “Neanderthals were clearly able to manage resources with precision—planning hunts, transporting carcasses, and rendering fats in specific mission areas. They understood the nutritional value of fat and how to obtain it efficiently—which likely involved caching carcass parts somewhere in the landscape for later transport to oil-refining sites and use.”
Experts believe Neanderthals understood they had to meet a certain “fat quota” to make the (literal) bone-crushing process worthwhile. The authors of the paper highlight the apparent abundance of herbivores hunted by Neanderthals in the Neumark-Nord region, explaining that our “cousins” were likely able to plan ahead and exploit their environment efficiently.
The study’s authors said the extensive research was possible because it wasn’t just one site that was preserved, but an entire landscape.
“The vast scope and remarkable preservation of the Neumark-Nord site complex provide us with a unique opportunity to investigate how Neanderthals impacted their environment – the flora and fauna,” Fulco Scherjon, a researcher on the project, said in a press release. “This is extremely rare for such an ancient site and opens up exciting prospects for future research.”
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