So they found a 125,000 yr old Neanderthal fat rendering plant & I have thoughts.

Knowing that they loved saturated fat SO MUCH that they industrialized to get as much of it as humanly possible?

Makes me feel seen, heard, supported, etc

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257

Jokes aside, this place tells us:

-Large-scale food processing is ~100K+ yrs older than farming.

-So is shelf-stable, high-calorie convenience food.

-So is "thinking about labor & logistics."

-Romanticizing "cavemen" as tough & austere is really funny.

I love this because when we think of "how ancient people got their food," we like to think about the big game hunting part.

But getting a carcass is just step 1!

We don't think as much about what comes next! But we should!

If you're hunting large animals to stay alive, instead of just for recreation,

"turning them into shelf-stable food you can keep & eat for more than 3 days afterward" is the name of the game.

So Neanderthals brought bones from their kills to this spot by a lake, pounded them to bits, & melted out the fat.

Not just any bones! They brought mostly jaws, skulls, ribs, & the *ends* of leg bones w red marrow. These bones have lots of fat inside- but you have to break them apart to get it.

Smashing bones is lots of work! So why do it?

I'm not an archaeologist, but I do lots of food handling logistics.

So my money's on 3 things:

-it's free real estate (more food from game already killed)

-people who aren't able-bodied adults can do it

-RENDERED FAT IS SHELF-STABLE & TASTES AWESOME

We have this idea that tasty, calorie-dense "convenience food" is modern.

Nope!

It's not unheard of for hunter-gatherers to spend WAY more time processing food into shelf-stable, easy to eat, calorie-dense "convenience" foods than they do on the hunting & gathering part.

Fish & meat? Gotta smoke 'em.

Acorns? Pound them into powder, put them in a bag, & leach in a river for weeks or months so they're edible.

Maple sap? Boil it down into shelf-stable sugar cakes.

Rendering fat from bones is 100% in line with this.

Think about it: for hunter-gatherers, food availability was spotty.

And they were often on the move from place to place.

So processing food to make it store-able for a long time, and distilling it down so every gram was very rich in calories, is one of our oldest pursuits.

Maybe it's not weird that Neanderthals were breaking up bones to cook out the fat.

It's weird that we think it's weird. You know?

Now let's talk scale!

They found the remains of 172+ animals at this site. Unless I'm reading it wrong, it looks like they were all brought there over ~one year.

They also mapped out where the bone & stone shards are. So you can see exactly where the smashing & cooking workspaces were. 🥹

The bones here are skewed towards the fatty ones, so it doesn't look like they brought the whole animal here to butcher.

This spot was high volume & 100% just for rendering.

(They might have rendered fat from skin too. That wouldn't leave much archeological evidence. I like to imagine Neanderthals would have liked cracklins.)

Anyway, to do rendering you break bones down into bits. Slice up skin & other fatty gristly tissues. Then heat them in water.

The fat melts out & floats to the top. Then when it cools down & gets solid, you can scoop it out & store it.

The solid fat (think lard or tallow) can be stored long-term.

Neanderthals didn't do pottery (as far as we know so far). But you can heat water in birch bark baskets, or bags made from skin or organs like stomachs & bladders.

You don't have to get it boiling hot to melt the fat out. It just has to be nice & warm.

Rendering fat is a lot of work. Breaking down bones- but also tending fires, shooing critters away, hauling water from the lake, stowing finished fat batches, & making containers to store it.

But it's work that almost everyone can do at least one step of.

We've found a lot of Neanderthals who got serious injuries, healed because their people took care of them, & lived long disabled lives.

Check out Shanidar 1: a Neanderthal who had 1.5 arms, fractured vertebrae, a skull fracture that left him deaf & blind on one side, & leg issues with a painful limp.

One of the things people find remarkable about that is "Wow they must have loved people so much to take care of them even if they couldn't hunt."

Um oof there's a lot to unpack there

Morals aside, "taking care of people who got hurt" is basic How To Team 101.

How is somebody supposed to wanna go hunting if they know that as soon as they break an arm doing it, the whole crew's just gonna shrug & go "sorry you're useless now byeeeee"

literally the Neanderthals knew better than that

Someone who was pretty beat up like Shanidar I could probably still tend fires, chuck rocks to shoo scavengers, etc.

Also, from how Neanderthals took care of extremely hurt relatives who might not ever heal, it probably wasn't all about getting work out of them later. Just humanity etc.

To take it back to food logistics though, I think we just get really preoccupied w the idea that for "cavemen," getting food = hunting & gathering. We forget there's a lot of work after that.

Neanderthals knew better. They put a LOT of thought & effort into getting the most out of their kills.

I kinda disagree with one of the paper's big conclusions. "These Neanderthals mostly ate meat. So they needed extra fat, so they didn't get protein poisoning from eating nothing but meat."

Basically, these Neanderthals were grinding & melting fat out of bones out of pure need/desperation.

That doesn't sound right?

The paper describes the campsite as being surrounded by hazelnut forest. Hazelnuts are 50% fat. Melting down bones was NOT "the only way to get enough fat to live."

The campfires had hazelnut (oily) & acorn (carbs) shells in them. Lots of high-carb cattails & wild grains too.

Heck they were actively & successfully managing the landscape for food. Including carbs & fats to balance out game.

https://press.uni-mainz.de/neanderthals-changed-ecosystems-125000-years-ago/

There were also multiple stashes of mammoth ivory around the campsite.

Lots of food. Solid balanced diet once you count all the plants they seemed to have been actively managing. Stashes of ivory for art/tools/trade.

kinda sounds more like Fat City than desperation to me idk idk

So "pounding up bones to get fat" looks less like a survival thing. For the folks living at this particular site & time, it looks more like a "We have time to build up a nice pantry" thing to me.

Again, not an archaeologist. I just think it's REALLY WEIRD that the paper just glosses over "oh yeah they had hazelnuts & acorns & cattails but whatever" like they're not food.

I also really like to steer clear of "This ancient people did this thing with their food for [biochemical reason]!"

That's something we can see in hindsight, bc we do chemistry.

More often, people did things with their food because it made it last longer or TASTED GOOD.

It's kinda like saying "grizzly bears eat the eggs from salmon & leave the meat behind because they're trying to max out calories & get fat for the winter."

Pretty sure grizzly bears don't count calories y'all wtf

They're doing that because all the fat in the eggs TASTES GOOD.

Salmon are falling apart by the time they get that far upriver. Their meat's not very palatable anymore.

So why bother finishing the whole yucky fish when there's more tasty eggs in the river?

Craving fat, sugar, & salt are survival instincts. It motivates critters to put in extra effort to get foods that pay off.

I know it's very hip & chic or whatever to freak out about craving "bad foods."

But getting pleasure from high-calorie foods is. like. why our ancestors lived to make us

We're so afraid of food & pleasure that we can look at Neanderthals who, to me, were prob melting fat out of bones for Love of the Game. Their environment was rich enough that they didn't *have* to do that

& conclude "It must have been desperation. No other reason people would do this!"

whoops. food processing thread turned into philosophy again

Anyway, this is just a reminder that early humans were human. They took care of the sick and loved art & saturated fat.

Thinking that everything they did was a grim survival tactic?

That's usually us projecting our issues onto the past. Not what their own lives were actually about.

And that's a good thing to keep in mind right now!

Because we're getting bombarded with the idea that "modernity" is "degenerate" and we have to "return" to purer, more austere ways of life.