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 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
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!— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
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.— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
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. 🥹— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
This is just the beginning of a long and fascinating thread!
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.— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
===
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.— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
===
Meanwhile ancient humans & their real life "paleo diet" was all about carbs & required an industrial-scale fat rendering facility
also they were hoarding art supplies
don't let the haters slow u down, Neanderthals— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Virginia, Here We Come!
Chief Oshkosh
Austerity is what rich people want poor people to think is normal and necessary.
Eat the rich.
Suzanne
One of the ideas I see flying around the Manosphere a great deal right now is this fantasy that younger women routinely were into older men. It’s been good to see historians push back that, in most cultures, partners have been of similar age and that it’s often abusive when that is not the case.
Three guesses why men would want to tell themselves — and women — this lie.
Omnes Omnibus
If you think about some Native American foods like pemmican and jerky, they were doing the same sort of thing.
schrodingers_cat
There is nothing new under the sun. We just figure out new means to do the same things.
Suzanne
Carbs and art supplies….. sounds like I did not evolve.
SiubhanDuinne
This is one of the coolest posts I’ve ever read. Fascinating, and so obvious when you think about it for more than a second. Thank you!
Baud
Science is cool.
trollhattan
New theory which is mine: ICE rounded up these Neanderthal food processing workers and exported them to Siberia, explaining their sudden disappearance from Europe. Finally, we know it was not skyrocketing cave rents.
XeckyGilchrist
Thank you! This is fascinating for its own sake and also nice for showing that, underneath it all, obsession with “traditional” or “evolutionary” stuff always means “things were best in [1890-1950].”
Doc Sardonic
They found a food processing plant, now somewhere waiting to be found is a Neanderthal distillery, church, pawn shop and bawdy house.
JaySinWa
@Suzanne: But is your fat saturated?
Mark Field
For more on this study you can read P.G. Myers’ summation here. A key point he discusses is that the fat rendering was essential to survival. The reason is that there’s only so much protein the body can absorb, so humans must eat carbs or fat to balance out the protein. For substantial parts of the year, carbs would have been unavailable in northern latitudes. Thus, access to fat was essential.
By the way, this is not at all inconsistent with the Paleo diet. This fact has been recognized for many years. I’m wondering if Sarah Taber is perhaps thinking of the carnivore diet.
bjacques
Smart. They had snacks to take when camping outside Agra II at Wave-Gothik-Treffen in nearby Leipzig.
Suzanne
@XeckyGilchrist:
When everyone within eyeshot was white and their wife couldn’t leave.
trollhattan
@Doc Sardonic:
I’m down for visiting this new theme resort.
RevRick
@Suzanne: DNA analysis says that the average person alive today has twice as many female ancestors as male.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: It totally is. Physics is the coolest, obviously.
RSA
Shelf-stable food may predate the invention of shelves.
Suzanne
@RevRick: That is…. something to cringe about. Oi.
Aziz, light!
Neanderthals survived as a species for 400,000 years. The jury is still out for homo sap.
bjacques
More seriously, there’s an excellent BBC series on now called Humans.
SeattlePsyclist
I haven’t looked at the literature in 20 years, but as I recall Hunter-Gatherers spend about 4 hours per day obtaining the necessities of life. Agriculture allowed more people to live to an old age, but the upper bound to that age became lower as doubled work hours wore out their bodies. Technology advances have now extended life expectancy to the point that the average wage-slave or salaryman in the US will have almost as much lifetime leisure as a hunter-gatherer, albeit distributed so that the bulk of it is when we are old and decrepit. Progress.
Archon
@RevRick: There is DNA evidence to suggest that during the stone age there was a bottleneck where very, very few men had children. Some suggests that it was as low as one man for every 17 woman who had children.
They Call Me Noni
Many years ago I read the Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel. They were fascinating and she did a lot of research to write them. Every once in a while I’ll run across and article like this one and it just confirms to me how spot on she was all those years ago.
Jeffro
AND render their boooooooones, in honor of our Neanderthal ancestors!!
LOLOLOL
Anne Laurie
When I showed the original thread to Spousal Unit, he immediately pointed out that ‘primitive’ New Zealand natives had an extremely nice technique to preserve chunks of moa using fat-wraps and seaweed.
Leftovers, they’re a crucial survival skill!
RevRick
@RSA: Maybe we need to shelve that idea.
RevRick
@Archon: Closer to our timeline, there’s a significant percentage of people in Central Asia who have Genghis Khan’s DNA. It was definitely not consensual.
Melancholy Jaques
@XeckyGilchrist:
It usually means an imaginary past that they have drenched in nostalgia. It isn’t that hard to show that, for almost everybody, things were pretty shitty during that time period.
Melancholy Jaques
@RevRick:
Because we’ve always had incels.
Anne Laurie
Here’s a Guardian review — it will come to the USA on PBS come September.
Baud
@Archon:
That he knew of.
Archon
@RevRick: A woman actually choosing her partner is a very modern concept but I still think it’s worth pondering that as a woman living in a hardscrabble place like 13th century central Asia wouldn’t it make more survival and evolutionally biological sense to be the 100th wife of Genghis Khan over the 1st and only wife of a poor farmer or sheepherder?
scav
Spend all that time & effort to bring down a large beast, stands to reason you’d want to take advantage of every bit possible. Besides the mere meat and fat (and presumably blood), think of all the handy raw materials on offer: skin, sinew, bone, possibly horn.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
My favorite too. Although I enjoy PBS Eons on YouTube for evolutionary history.
Omnes Omnibus
@Archon: I am pretty sure a lot of them weren’t “wives”. I mean, rape and pillage are used together quite a bit wrt invaders.
Lobo
Then they were done in by homo sapiens who brought Walmart to their area.
Gin & Tonic
@RevRick: I know several more-or-less full-blooded Ukrainian-heritage people (including myself) who do not look Nordic at all, but definitely have some characteristics more associated with Asia. The Mongols’ ride westward in the mid 1200’s left more than just horse shit.
dc
We could have had Sarah Taber as our Ag. Commissioner in NC. Instead we got the same Republican asshole (redundant at this point).
Archon
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure but the question still stands. Would it have been better to be the 500th concubine of Genghis Khan or the first and only wife of a poor goatherder?
trollhattan
@Lobo:
I’ll start shopping Walmart if they promise I’ll be greeted and handed my cart by a Neanderthal. “Come for Ogg, stay for bargains, have nice day.”
Melancholy Jaques
@Archon:
Also have to include the wives, concubines, casual girlfriends, and rape victims of Genghis Kahn’s descendants.
Anne Laurie
According to contemporary accounts, Genghis Khan had pale grey eyes… and what 20th century anthropologists would call ‘Nordic fold’ (hooded) eyelids. Many modern Scandinavians, and (speaking of rape & pillage) Irish / Irish-Americans like myself, have ‘Asiatic’ eyelids!
Gin & Tonic
@Archon: They were not wives or concubines, they were rape victims as the “Golden Horde” passed through town. Once the boys left, you were still stuck with the goat-herder, except with an extra kid to feed.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chief Oshkosh:
I hear the rich are especially rich in fat content.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Archon: I got the impression the concubines of the Khan were typically noble women of the territory conquered.
As for the hypothetical shepherdess. Most likely the Mongols killed her family and the rest of her community before one them decided to make her comfort girl for him and his squaddies. I suppose it beats starving to death. But that’s more of the cold hand of nature making her pretty so even a group of utter a-holes want to her keep alive than anything else.
scav
@Archon: Don’t forget to factor in the within-household competition and in-fighting to get attention & sperm from the Khan, plus the risks in being taken out as a side-product of larger-scale political violence. That’ll go for her and any of her children (the latter being the real point from a strictly evolutionary standpoint). And is it right to assume the concubine will necessarily have more children that survive to adulthood than the wife? Might be a bit complicated is all I’m suggesting.
Omnes Omnibus
@Archon: That’s not really the question. Both of them were having Genghis’s babies. Relatedly why do you think that Judaism is traced through the mother. And it’s not that it was a particularly female empowering religion.
Archon
@Gin & Tonic: I’m talking about Genghis Khan not your average Mongol soldier who just sacked Kiev.
Giving your daughter to be part of the Great Khans harem was likely considered a good strategy for a local chieftain or warlord.
Sister Golden Bear
@Anne Laurie:
There’s enjoyable YouTube channel I geek out to that focuses on recreating 18th century cooking (mostly Colonial America and British).
So many of the recipes were about preserving food. For example, meat pies kept the contents safe for a couple days without having to salt or smoke the meat. The crust wasn’t even intended to be eaten, it was primarily to form a (mostly) air tight container around the meat.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: On YouTube there’s a channel called Townsends, and he made pemmican in one episode.
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus: Genghis Khan hated urban areas and sacked many famous Central Asian cities, but he raped thousands of young women.
Princess
It makes sense. When you’re relying on wild game for most of your calories, it’s really hard to get enough fat because wild game is very lean. Too much protein without enough fact can kill you.
theprepared.com/blog/rabbit-starvation-why-you-can-die-even-with-a-stomach-full-of-lean-meat/
scav
@Archon: But now you’re talking about the political advantages accruing to the father and not the evolutionary success of the woman.
Searcher
@RSA: Keep in mind the reason we call it the Stone Age is because stones don’t decay over time, but woodworking almost certainly has a contemporary evolution to stone tools, if not predating them, because wood is way easier to work than stone.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You mean this group of humanitarians?
sab
@Gin & Tonic: James Fallows wrote an article years ago about having a DNA test. He turned out to be part neanderthal, from his mother’s Scottish side.
RevRick
@Sister Golden Bear: A lot of them are old and full of gristle. It would definitely take some French culinary skills.
Archon
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I don’t understand, do you think I was implying Genghis Khan and the Mongols were humanitarians?
My overall point is for most of human history life was very, very, VERY hard, especially for woman who were functionally the property of their father, husband or lord. In that world being a harem to someone who rules most of Asia might make more sense to being the wife of a poor farmer who is one bad winter or raid from a local tribe from dying with their children.
Ramona
@SeattlePsyclist: also agriculture lead to a much smaller adult physical frame from borderline malnutrition.
prostratedragon
@Anne Laurie:
I’ve often thought of this when watching the movie Chinatown.
Ramona
@Archon: I saw a YT (I do not know how much credibility I can assign its author) that said that there was a phase of violence where 90% of men were killed. It talked of archeological discoveries of bones of several individuals found together bearing grievous skull injuries. Would this account for the discrepancy in our genetic lineage between female and male lines?
sab
@Anne Laurie: Like Norwegian Warner Oland (Charlie Chan)?
catclub
carbs? where did it say that? Rich in calories, yes. That means fat.
so calories and art supplies.
RevRick
@Sister Golden Bear: Refrigeration is one of the great advances of the modern era. Before that, meat had to be salted or smoked, and even then there was no guarantee that it would not become rancid before consumption.
Samuel Pepys, in his diary, describes eating meat as well as gristle, cartilage and bone.
I once saw a clip which claimed the fixings of a ham and cheese sandwich powered Northern Europe’s success.
RevRick
@Searcher: Not to mention bone needles dating back some 75,000 years.
Omnes Omnibus
@Archon: Yes, sure, but a metric shit ton of the women we are talking about didn’t have that choice. Come on.
catclub
Yep.
Genghis Khan made significant changes to how captured town were treated, and also to how spoils were shared within his army.
Having a reputation for NOT slaughtering everyone in a town that surrenders peacefully goes a long way in reducing resistance.
I think those Kieven Nobles resisted.
RevRick
@Chief Oshkosh: Studies of Hunter-gatherer societies reveal that they have way more leisure time than we do. Agriculture enabled the support of many more people, but is far more demanding in terms of work, and the early Industrial Revolution was brutal for most who lived through it.
Archon
@Ramona: Yes there is genetic and archeological evidence to suggest there was an extremely violent period in Europe around 8000 years ago where 90 percent of the men were killed.
I don’t think it’s an undisputed theory though.
Omnes Omnibus
@RevRick: A good jambon beurre can work miracles.
Ramona
@Archon: Ooh, good to know. I did like the YT I mentioned. I just did not know to what extent I could believe it. I’m glad that its premise is not disputed.
Was there some environmental change that triggered this warfare or did the population increase to a point more than natural resources could support?
Ramona
@RevRick: Anthropological studies lend credence to the notion that many women killed those of their offspring resulting from rape. I would think that many of Genghis Khan’s children were welcome offspring.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Genghis and the original Mongol invasions struck terror on a lot of levels, the initial one was simply their rate of advance and operational manueverability.
He didn’t hate cities. Any city that didn’t resist, survived and most quite nicely. Any city that didn’t? It was definitely a binary choice: surrender or die, no in-between. Again, it was a strategic choice he and many of his successors used to subdue populations.
Also too, Mongol history pedant note, they weren’t the “Golden Horde”. That’s the name for one of the successor kingdoms. Here’s the blurb from the historical notes in the army list books my tiny rules company has published:
Archon
@Ramona: I didn’t think the idea that many woman might find benefit to having children with Genghis Khan as particularly controversial but I guess it is.
schrodingers_cat
Genghis Khan and his descendants never made any headway in India and it was not for the lack of trying.
schrodingers_cat
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I saw an email from June in an account that I don’t check much that you wanted to get in touch. You can reach me at my blog mail [email protected]
Omnes Omnibus
@Archon: Remind me how, if you are the goatherd’s wife and Genghis rapes you and then moves on to rape others, she benefits by having his child? It escapes me.
Archon
@Omnes Omnibus: Not sure you are just replying with a strawman or you genuinely think that was my argument.
I was proffering the idea that being one of many in Genghis Khan’s harem was likely a better existence for them and their offspring then the vast majority of woman living in central Asia at that time. Don’t know why rape was bought into that argument, especially considering a woman could just as easily be raped and abused by that poor goatherder as she would be in Genghis Khan harem.
Omnes Omnibus
@Archon: Because, for most of the women bearing Genghis’s children, being a wife or concubine wasn’t an option. So it wasn’t a choice between marriage to the goatherd or marriage to Genghis. The choice they had was being raped. As we all know, that’s not actually a choice.
Archon
@Omnes Omnibus: If it makes life a bit less complicated and nuanced for you to believe that everyone Genghis Khan slept with was some unwilling sex slave than go ahead…
SteverinoCT
I read that about the Lewis and Clark expedition: shooting their meals as they went led to carb deficiency.
Ramona
@Archon: I imagine that subconsciously people bring our contemporary conceptions of morality to ancient times and have not considered that before abortion was available infanticide was common. Heck, a mother did not have to even kill or abandon the infant explicitly, she could have merely refused to nurse it. There wouldn’t have been any formula around in the thirteenth century.
Ramona
@schrodingers_cat: Himalayas! And, the Moghul Empire! Babar was descended from Genghis Khan on his mother’s side.
Ramona
@Omnes Omnibus: As I’ve said upthread, women in ancient times often killed those of their offspring resulting from rape. Peasant women in the thirteenth century would have had that freedom. I don’t know for how long pennyroyal was used as an abortificient but many herbs have been used for that purpose. Leviticus requires abortion if an unfaithful wife gets pregnant so there is documentation. So the high incidence of Genghis Khan’s DNA in extant populations would have been from children who were welcome regardless of the rapes perpetrated. Moreover, people preserved the knowledge of their lineage from the Khan for many centuries after which is further evidence that those of his surviving offspring were wanted by their mothers.
Jay
Pemmican. Dried meat, dried fruit, rendered fats and marrow, sealed airtight in a wooden box, keeps for hundreds of years.
Can make soups, stews, fry it, eat it “raw”.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Babar? The elephant? 😁
Ramona
@Omnes Omnibus: I see that you are saying that the raped wife of the goatherd would simply have the child and she and her husband would raise it as though it were the child sired by her husband. Okay, you’ve got a point there.
Ramona
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Babar the Elephant’s great grandfather after whom he was named ;-)
Kayla Rudbek
@scav: “use everything except the squeal” as some farmers would say
Kayla Rudbek
@SteverinoCT: I think that a diet high in rabbit can cause the protein/fat ratio to be skewed
Kayla Rudbek
@RevRick: wearing clothing dates back 170,000 years (we know this because that was when body lice split off from head lice, as the clothes were different habitat for the lice)
Barney
Also:
Neanderthals were not ‘hypercarnivores’ and feasted on maggots, scientists say | Science | The Guardian
Neanderthals, hypercarnivores, and maggots: Insights from stable nitrogen isotopes | Science Advances