> The production of bone grease, which required huge quantities of bone to be worthwhile, was previously considered to be something limited to Upper Paleolithic modern humans. This find pushes back the timeline by thousands of years and represents a fundamental shift in our knowledge of Neanderthal diet and adaptation.
If I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.
When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery?
This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions.
Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].
What would speak against carving a cooking pot from stone? One thing I could find is that they might explode but I guess that would also depend on the type of rock.
I find it fascinating that paleo-anthropologists didn't know about using leather or bark pots when those are extensively documented and presumably well-known to recent-ish-history-anthropologists. Is there just very little overlap and communication between the groups?
Reminds me of the anecdote of an early fisherman who cast his net, looked at that catch, and concluded that fishes have scales and fins, and are always at least 5cm long.
> the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery
Is that really true? That sounds unlikely when there are so many contemporary counterexamples. If you have an interest in cooking, there are several traditional meals where cooking is done in other ways. Especially so for indigenous people who have little access to metals or clay. For example on Borneo the traditional way to cook rice over fire is inside bamboo stalks. As long as the water doesn't boil off, you can cook in almost any vessel.
Your first source does not support your argument that paleo-anthropology believed pottery was required for boiling. Reading just the abstract it's clear that the source is auguring for the appearance of boiling earlier than the common view that fire cracked rocks (that would have been used for boiling by placing in any water container) marked the earliest point of boiling. The Upper Paleolithic mentioned as the first appearance of fire cracked rocks, and thus assumed initial boiling, is ~5,000+ years before the appearance of pottery.
Ignoring the reference to pottery the assumption that boiling must require heated rocks is probably incorrect. I think this is a common failure mode of archeology, where evidence is preserved (cracked rocks) is favored despite obvious selection biases.
>The study indicates that Neanderthals, in addition to smashing bones to access the marrow—a behavior shared by their earliest African ancestors—also crushed them into fragments and boiled them to obtain bone grease, a nutrient-rich resource.
I wish the article went into more details about how they boiled the bones. My first thought was that smashing bones and boiling them is not all that impressive. And then I thought about how I would boil bones without a pot to boil them in... and actually that does sound like it would be a challenge and require a lot of collaboration and planning.
And how could they've done this without language? I've heard this statement that neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language and they did not (something about the way their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds). I call BS on that now. You can't do this kind of stuff without ability to communicate your intentions, future plans, rewards for other people and so on.
Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their wheel axles with...
While the discovery is great, there are quotes that are very clickbaity like "They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently.”
No they didn't understand the nutritional value better than any other homo something before or after, or even any carnivorous animals. It's just that evolution engineered them to look for food everywhere. For example the bearded vulture diet is based on bone and bone marrow, it's not because it understands the nutritional value of bone marrow better than the other birds but because all carnivorous animals evolved to eat fat, and evolution provided a way for this bird to get the marrow more easily than the others.
This is the first time in the wild I've seen an image credited to an artist that is clearly AI made (with some minor detail like smoke added to the foreground). You can tell it's AI by the details of the bone and piles of wood.
Some other articles explicitly call out that the image is AI generated:
e.g. it's labeled with An AI generated impression of activities at the “Fat Factory” site. The image was generated with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT (version 4o, 2025), and subsequent modification and retouching by a graphic designer | Quelle: F. Scherjon | Copyright: F. Scherjon, LEIZA-Monrepos
It looks to me more like bad Photoshop, not AI. Like a real photo with a bunch of elements comped in on top, like you'd see in historical edutainment content back in the 2010s or earlier.
As I'm understanding it, it was primarily for grease, not soup itself. They certainly could have been making soup as well, but grease itself is a much more valuable product. It has utility for waterproofing, warmth (if you smear it on your body) lubricant, and is also highly calorically dense. You can also use it to preserve food (see "Potted meat") and on it's own, stays edible at room temp for a long time.
Interesting find. As mentioned by other comments, there are other ways you can boil things and render fat than with ceramic containers. However, there are even easier ways. For example, you could simply dig a hole in the ground, fill it with your fat, tendons, sinews, etc, top it with water, and toss in rocks that have been heated in a fire. That will boil the water and render the grease out; you just need to wait for the whole thing to solidify/cool.
Also, you can dig a hole, add your un-rendered fat, then pour boiling water on top of it, then skim off the fat once it cools. Native Americans did that for a long time to get grease from candlefish [0]
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 73.2 ms ] threadIf I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.
This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions.
Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].
[1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z
Is that really true? That sounds unlikely when there are so many contemporary counterexamples. If you have an interest in cooking, there are several traditional meals where cooking is done in other ways. Especially so for indigenous people who have little access to metals or clay. For example on Borneo the traditional way to cook rice over fire is inside bamboo stalks. As long as the water doesn't boil off, you can cook in almost any vessel.
It was a remote hunting trip in the Yukon and my buddy forgot the camp stove & pots.
My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.
Ignoring the reference to pottery the assumption that boiling must require heated rocks is probably incorrect. I think this is a common failure mode of archeology, where evidence is preserved (cracked rocks) is favored despite obvious selection biases.
I wish the article went into more details about how they boiled the bones. My first thought was that smashing bones and boiling them is not all that impressive. And then I thought about how I would boil bones without a pot to boil them in... and actually that does sound like it would be a challenge and require a lot of collaboration and planning.
Remarkable how different the previous interglacial periods were. Herds of elephants and rhinos in today's Berlin, at 51° north!
Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their wheel axles with...
No they didn't understand the nutritional value better than any other homo something before or after, or even any carnivorous animals. It's just that evolution engineered them to look for food everywhere. For example the bearded vulture diet is based on bone and bone marrow, it's not because it understands the nutritional value of bone marrow better than the other birds but because all carnivorous animals evolved to eat fat, and evolution provided a way for this bird to get the marrow more easily than the others.
e.g. it's labeled with An AI generated impression of activities at the “Fat Factory” site. The image was generated with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT (version 4o, 2025), and subsequent modification and retouching by a graphic designer | Quelle: F. Scherjon | Copyright: F. Scherjon, LEIZA-Monrepos
at
https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/07/02/neanderthals-ra...
(The only image I could readily find was on Reddit :-)
Soup. They were making soup.
I would like to know what seasonings they used.
Also, you can dig a hole, add your un-rendered fat, then pour boiling water on top of it, then skim off the fat once it cools. Native Americans did that for a long time to get grease from candlefish [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulachon#Economics_and_trade