Comment by nomilk
7 hours ago
The article mentions "rendering fat (from bones)" many times, but doesn't say how neanderthals actually did it? My best guess is they broke the bones into many little pieces, threw them in a fire, and waited for the fire to extinguish and cool, thus producing hardened (rendered) fat.
Feels like the most interesting part of the article was omitted!
It's in there.
> At this location, researchers found that Neanderthals not only broke bones to extract marrow but also crushed large mammal bones into tens of thousands of fragments to render calorie-rich bone grease through heating them in water.
AFAIK Neanderthals didn't have clay pots - how would they hold the water to heat it and put the bone pieces in?
EDIT: I asked claude and it doesn't know for sure but guessed "stone boiling into an organic container — animal stomach, hide, or a bark vessel — remains the most plausible explanation for how they heated the water."
One point here is that you can boil water over a fire in a flammable container.
Here, this isn't about boiling, but similar: "Because the Neanderthals had no pots, we presume that they soaked their seeds in a fold of an animal skin," says Chris Hunt, a genuine (checks) expert in cultural paleoecology.
https://archaeologymag.com/2022/11/neanderthals-cooked-surpr...
They can use skulls of animals, shells of tortoises in direct heat (though not in direct flame). If they were harvesting megafauna like elephants, presumably their skulls are large. It's not implausible to assume that they were capable of controlling heat to the point where they can get the amount of heat needed to boil just water/heating up water to get marrow out.
Animal stomach, bladder can be heated to boil water indirectly (fire to heat stone, stone to heat said vessel).