Move over, caveman clichés; Neanderthals weren’t just club-wielding hunters. New research reveals that they were culinary strategists, operating what can only be described as prehistoric “fat factories” nearly 125,000 years ago.
At the heart of this discovery is the Neumark-Nord site in central Germany, where archaeologists uncovered the remains of at least 172 large animals, including deer, horses, and aurochs, which were processed not just for meat but also for their fat. These early humans didn’t just crack bones for marrow; they crushed them into thousands of fragments and boiled them in water to extract every last drop of rich, calorie-dense bone grease.
This labor-intensive process, known as resource intensification, was once thought to be exclusive to much later human groups. But the new study, published in Science Advances and led by researchers from MONREPOS and Leiden University, pushes that timeline way back. It proves Neanderthals were far more resourceful than we ever imagined.
Prof. Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University said, “We see Neanderthals hunting and minimally butchering deer in one area, processing elephants intensively in another, and—as this study shows—rendering fat from hundreds of mammal skeletons in a centralized location. There’s even some evidence of plant use, which is rarely preserved. This broad range of behaviors in the same landscape gives us a much richer picture of their culture.”
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And what a landscape it is. Spanning 30 hectares, Neumark-Nord has been under excavation since the 1980s. From 2004 to 2009, teams trained over 175 students while uncovering evidence of large-scale hunting, the use of fire to manage vegetation, and even rare signs of plant use.
In 2023, the same team revealed that Neanderthals hunted straight-tusked elephants: 13-ton giants that could feed a community for weeks. At nearby sites, such as Taubach, they found cut-marked bones from 76 rhinos and 40 elephants, indicating that large-scale hunting was the norm, not the exception.
The big takeaway?
Neanderthals weren’t just meat-eaters; they were fat-finders, landscape managers, and survival strategists as well. Their ability to extract maximum energy from every animal they hunted reveals a level of planning and ecological smarts that rewrite the story of our ancient cousins.
Culinary evolution in the Late Neolithic Fertile Crescent
Dr. Lutz Kindler, the study’s first author, said, “This was intensive, organized, and strategic. Neanderthals were clearly managing resources with precision—planning hunts, transporting carcasses, and rendering fat in a task-specific area. They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently—most likely involving caching carcass parts at places in the landscape for later transport to and use at the grease rendering site.”
Journal Reference
- Lutz Kindler, Sabine Gaudzinski, et al. Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv1257
