Neanderthals ran organized bone-grease 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago

Excavations at Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany have uncovered evidence that Neanderthals systematically processed bones from at least 172 large mammals — deer, horses, and aurochs — at a dedicated lakeside site during a warm interglacial period 125,000 years ago. Rather than simply cracking marrow from bone cavities, they crushed bones into tens of thousands of fragments and heated them in water to render calorie-dense bone grease, a labor-intensive technique previously attributed only to much later human groups.

The scale and specialization point to deliberate planning: carcass parts were likely cached across the landscape and transported to a single processing zone where the volume of bones made the rendering worthwhile. Combined with earlier findings at the same complex — straight-tusked elephant butchery, fire-managed vegetation, and minimal-processing deer kills in separate zones — the picture is one of task-specific land use and resource management across an entire preserved landscape.

The finding pushes the timeline for complex Neanderthal subsistence behavior back by tens of thousands of years and suggests their ecological footprint on slowly reproducing herbivore populations during the Last Interglacial may have been substantially larger than previously assumed.