125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany
The Neumark-Nord 2 site in central Germany, dates back to 125,000 years ago. During an interglacial period with temperatures similar to those today, Neanderthals where doing something we previously thought happened only tens of thousands of years later.
The discovery, published in Science Advances, was led by a team from the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology and Leiden University. Neanderthals were not only breaking bones to extract the marrow inside, but they smashed large mammal bones into thousands of fragments in order to create a calorie-rich bone grease by heating them in water.
“This attitude that Neanderthals were dumb — this is another data point that proves otherwise,” said Wil Roebroeks, study coauthor and professor of Paleolithic archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
In 2023, the team published evidence that Neanderthals hunted and butchered straight-tusked elephants — up to 13-ton animals that could provide over 2,000 adult daily food portions. The discoveries at Neumark-Nord continue to reshape our view of Neanderthal adaptability and their survival strategies.
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