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].
In high school science class we boiled water using standard printer paper: fold a sheet into a box, put it on a stand over a bunsen burner, fill it with water, turn up the bunsen burner.
Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.
When was this - are we saying that high school science teachers were aware of a fact that was not acknowledged by historians and anthropologists? Quite interesting!
We used to do this on the camp fire in Boy Scouts with paper cups. The older boys would learn it in science class and would use it to wow the younger ones.
With direct flame on it? I guess it was removing water molecules slower than it was absorbing water. As long as it was saturated it would be fine. Great experiment.
I'm very confused how you make a watertight box with a sheet of standard printer paper - would seem like either it would very quickly be a wet mess, or you'd have to fold it so many times to have any durability that it would be too small to contain a meaningful amount of water.
> 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.
Ya, I don't believe ```paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery```, it doesn't pass 'the laugh test'. There are many survivalist youtube channels that demo multiple methods to boil water without pottery [1][2]. If I were an anthropologist, I would be looking at modern survivalist methods to get inspiration for 'ancient' habits. Surely the folks that have studied their whole lives have even better sources of inspiration to investigate. Unless we have some source to back it up, I can't see how this remarkable claim should be trusted.
yeah I remember learning in school that with sufficiently good heat conduction you could boil water in a paper cup, because the burning point of paper was higher than the boiling point of water.
Heh, wanted to make a comment saying this isn't 'super' recent knowlegde because I vividly remember Jean M. Auel using it in her first novels written in the 80's, and basically all the technical stuff she wrote was researched, ony to find out [1] indeed opens with a quote from said novels.
I loved those books when I was younger, was randomly thinking about them the other day and couldn’t remember the name for the first book and got lost in Wikipedia
Yes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in a wooden container if done right.
But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me.
Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and building a fire by it. Then you place some hot burning pieces on top of the log. Keep adding them and burning on top of the log until it burns a bowl sized indentation. Then you take a rock or stick and scrape the hole and get it clean sort of. Then you put water into that and if no container to carry water is shows soaking a shirt and carrying it that way. After the large bowl sized hole is filled with water you take a few rocks that were sitting in the fire and drop them in. You will be amazed how fast it will boil the water. This is done to allow you to drink from a potentially unsafe water source.
I guess what I am thinking is that there are probably dozens of ways they could have achieved it. Ways that with our knowledge of today escapes us but to them it was common knowledge. If I had to take a guess they would have used rocks and use a large flat rock and encircle that rock with rocks making a pit or rocks then covered the sides with dirt. Then dug a hole under part of the large flat rock and made fire under it. This primitive pot would not work well at first but my guess is that as fat melted and oozed into the cracks it would eventually seal and then would work very well to boil things. Anyways just fun to think about I know very little about the time period.
IIUC the easiest way to boil stuff without ceramics is usually in an animal's stomach or intestines. I believe you can also do it in a lined wicker basket.
I'm not sure exactly how these things are done but both of them seem much easier to figure out than how to fire a pot! (Requires very high temperature and a good understanding of the material to stop it cracking)
Notice that all of your proposed pots will biodegrade in a few decades (centuries in the best case) thus leaving no evidence behind. There are many options, and we can easily test to show many of them work. However there is no way to know which method(s) they used.
Stone boiling (dropping heated rocks into water-filled containers) was also a widespread pre-pottery technique that Neanderthals likely employed alongside the hide/bark methods you mentioned.
Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities!
Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.
> Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.
Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.
It's a common mistake. Just this weekend I followed a recipe from a well known cooking website for beef stroganoff that said to brown the beef in batches together with batches of onion. That's not a good idea, the onion will release liquid which prevents the beef from browning and once that cooks off the heat required to brown the meat will burn the onion. So I cooked the beef and onion separately instead. The onion can easily be cooked in one big batch, and if you take care not to burn the fond built up by the beef you can deglaze it with the onion. It's a good way to add extra flavor to the finished dish.
I also had a discussion with a roommate once, he criticized my way of cooking pasta. I keep it just barely boiling, but he insisted I should crank it up to max. I explained that it doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me so I got a thermometer and proved it.
If you want liquid water to go above 100C you need a pressure cooker.
this is also why cooking advice shifted from "don't wash mushrooms" to "wash mushrooms". If you're cooking your mushrooms properly you'll boil off all the water anyways, so it doesn't matter. It's only if you *don't* cook your mushrooms properly that washing mushrooms makes everything more watery than you'd like.
Is it me or is it odd that that first paper doesn't seem to cite any source for the misconception they're trying to argue against? I don't see any cites for people who believed that boiling could not happen in fragile containers.
So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it ever was?
It’s common knowledge, less so now because we never need to do it. But go back in time and it’s common frontier knowledge, you can do this in a pinch. And in Medieval times, you can boil something in a pouch.
It’s just less reliable, the upper part hanging the bag could burn and you could lose everything. It’s just less durable. So anthropologists are likely to argue about how prevalent it was. Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible?
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.
> experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged
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.
When I was a kid, me and friends used plastic bags to boil water for cooking when out in the forest or at a beach on the nearby river. As long as you had enough water in the bag, it worked great (though there were probably some fun chemicals being released from the bag...)
I wonder if attempts to prevent charring of such a design could be what led to pottery. One can imagine smearing mud or clay on the underside of bark or animal hide pots to increase their longevity. Long enough exposure to high heat and ?
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?
I would think you would not even have to expose it directly to fire, you could put it on a rock above or near the fire. Also you can of course heat rocks in a fire and put them into water to boil it.
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.
>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...
Yeah I think it's pretty inconceivable at this point that Sapiens were the first ones to have language.
I think it's still reasonable to argue that Neandertals lacked certain capacities that we have, based on differences in the evidence from tools and art that's attributed to them vs Sapiens.
But IMO this would clearly have been a difference of degree, not at atomic shift. They were obviously _people_.
At the moment, your comment is being heavily down-voted for what seems to be a totally reasonable point of view.
In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were pretty advanced artists".
The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.
So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we discover that they were different to us by a difference of degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being radically and binarily different.
In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.
There's plenty of ways to communicate complex ideas without using complex language, as long as you have sufficient time to interact. Skills can be taught using demonstration, imitation, and correction; ideas can be drawn or acted out.
What language enables, in my view, is accurate communication through intermediaries. It makes a lot of difference whether you need to supervise someone through all the ways that cooking on leather can go wrong versus richly explaining those same failure modes and how to avoid them. The former pretty much prescribes that most complex knowledge will stay within a tribe or a close community, whereas a rich vocabulary allows knowledge to spread readily among trade routes.
Right, it’s not like people born deaf are just completely useless as humans. Just like we have sign language and there is a whole concept of body language alone is enough to show it would be possible for them. We have people like Helen Keller who existed.
In Jean M Auel’s Earths Children books the Neanderthals communicated via hand gestures and vocalizations.
It seems weird to think there needs to be a major biological distinction to explain the idea of being outcompeted. Modern humans outcompete each other at various things all the time, right now (peacefully and non-peacefully) and it’s not because of any differences as drastic as having language vs not having language.
>neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language
I think any small groups of humans were just one virus away from extinction. Even we almost disappeared. A species that has a very low population for the entire species then all get sick that is bad even if all do not die. Your species loses genetic diversity and then another virus or even a large natural disaster strikes the group wiping it out. Maybe we just were lucky and survived not due to any skill better than other species.
Both of those things can be true. Just because they didn't have language, doesn't mean they couldn't communicate, it just means they could likely only communicate primarily by showing instead of telling. And it's also clear why being able to communicate with language would indeed offer quite the competitive edge over that system.
During a period of high trust, I've watched crows training their young via showing.
While crows have "crafty" intelligence, neanderthals would be more apt at this.
But really, the logical first language would be gesture, an extension of already existing body
language. And such language is employed by humans when hunting, at war, whenever quiet is preferred.
Even a gesture language of a few dozen concepts is almost automatic, pointing, waving, directional motions, hushing motions, pointing at your head, clapping, etc.
This being extended as full language in beings incapable of complex sound, seems viable.
As far as I know the current evidence points towards neanderthal ability to make sounds not being that much different than early homo sapiens. The are assumed to have had less complex language and thinking, e.g. couldn't abstract or symbolize things, unlike homo sapiens. But that doesn't mean no language or no ability to communicate at all.
That doesn't mean it was used for speech and language: evolution frequently finds a new purpose for a gene, and the previous purpose does not have to be human-comprehensible.
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.
Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does. And "any homo something before or after" includes us today. While it might be reasonable to say there are things we don't fully understand about the way fat affects the body, we do understand the nutritional value of fat.
> Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does.
Understanding the nutritional value of a food goes beyond than working to get the food. You need to have a theory of nutrition (true or false), and there is nothing that can suggest this. Saying that they ate fat because fat is good for them is tautologic
> And "any homo something before or after" includes us today.
It is obvious that I include our specy only until the first research and experiments on the topic
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]
> 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.
I still struggle with the repeated assertions from the scicommss set that the 'neanderthals died out' or 'humans outcompeted neanderthals who went extinct', while at the same time acknowledging that 3% of DNA of everyone outside the African content is neanderthal. With that being the limit of 'the data' generally cited at hadn't, wouldn't a gradual, passively amicable merging (e.g. absorption) be just as explanatory as that Neanderthal's 'went extince' or 'were outcompeted'?
It's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here.
However they are still extinct!
It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'.
Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.
I think it's because that 3% number is so small, it actually comes down to "outcompeted". A merger of two equally fit sub-species would result in more DNA persisting.
I am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides complexity.
Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.
I am convinced that early humans were a lot smarter then given credit for. My guess is the same as yours and that they were part of a long chain of steps of learning and development that went back much farther then we have evidence for.
Possibly however homo erectus used the same design for their hand axes for over a million years. This implies the design was hardwired in their brains, in the same way the design of nests are hardwired in bird brains, as opposed to a rationally thought out design.
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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
Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.
Fold your map into a box and cook whatever food-like things you've found before eating.
Why you're lost when you have a map is a different question.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_kUTBM6Qo
Or cooked something in a natural hot spring or natural outlet where boiling/near-boiling water forces its way to the surface.
But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and building a fire by it. Then you place some hot burning pieces on top of the log. Keep adding them and burning on top of the log until it burns a bowl sized indentation. Then you take a rock or stick and scrape the hole and get it clean sort of. Then you put water into that and if no container to carry water is shows soaking a shirt and carrying it that way. After the large bowl sized hole is filled with water you take a few rocks that were sitting in the fire and drop them in. You will be amazed how fast it will boil the water. This is done to allow you to drink from a potentially unsafe water source.
I guess what I am thinking is that there are probably dozens of ways they could have achieved it. Ways that with our knowledge of today escapes us but to them it was common knowledge. If I had to take a guess they would have used rocks and use a large flat rock and encircle that rock with rocks making a pit or rocks then covered the sides with dirt. Then dug a hole under part of the large flat rock and made fire under it. This primitive pot would not work well at first but my guess is that as fat melted and oozed into the cracks it would eventually seal and then would work very well to boil things. Anyways just fun to think about I know very little about the time period.
I'm not sure exactly how these things are done but both of them seem much easier to figure out than how to fire a pot! (Requires very high temperature and a good understanding of the material to stop it cracking)
"Pottery" tends to assume ceramics. In Neolithic and later sites that had pottery, ceramic remains typically represent 99% of the total artifacts.
Bronze age tel sites are littered with ceramic pebbles. Every pot eventually becomes a bunch of shards and pebbles that last forever.
That said... a material culture that only uses ceramics occasionally wouldn't leave such signs.
Also.. you could call a wood or hide bucket "pottery," I think.
Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.
Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.
I also had a discussion with a roommate once, he criticized my way of cooking pasta. I keep it just barely boiling, but he insisted I should crank it up to max. I explained that it doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me so I got a thermometer and proved it.
If you want liquid water to go above 100C you need a pressure cooker.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h7dt0bG8XU
So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it ever was?
It’s just less reliable, the upper part hanging the bag could burn and you could lose everything. It’s just less durable. So anthropologists are likely to argue about how prevalent it was. Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible?
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.
Sure you have a 100C heatsink within millimeters, but I still find it surprising that the outside layer of the basket wouldn't burn away slowly.
Probably because the water slowly permeates through the outside layer of the basket and evaporates there. A lot of energy can be absorbed that way.
> experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged
It was a remote hunting trip in the Yukon and my buddy forgot the camp stove & pots.
Deleted Comment
My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.
One little layer of wet clothes isn't going to do much against Directed Energy Weapons - unless you were just really anxious about condensation.
Remarkable how different the previous interglacial periods were. Herds of elephants and rhinos in today's Berlin, at 51° north!
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.
The breakthrough is the claim that they were doing this.
Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their wheel axles with...
I think it's still reasonable to argue that Neandertals lacked certain capacities that we have, based on differences in the evidence from tools and art that's attributed to them vs Sapiens.
But IMO this would clearly have been a difference of degree, not at atomic shift. They were obviously _people_.
In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were pretty advanced artists".
The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.
So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we discover that they were different to us by a difference of degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being radically and binarily different.
In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.
What language enables, in my view, is accurate communication through intermediaries. It makes a lot of difference whether you need to supervise someone through all the ways that cooking on leather can go wrong versus richly explaining those same failure modes and how to avoid them. The former pretty much prescribes that most complex knowledge will stay within a tribe or a close community, whereas a rich vocabulary allows knowledge to spread readily among trade routes.
In Jean M Auel’s Earths Children books the Neanderthals communicated via hand gestures and vocalizations.
I think any small groups of humans were just one virus away from extinction. Even we almost disappeared. A species that has a very low population for the entire species then all get sick that is bad even if all do not die. Your species loses genetic diversity and then another virus or even a large natural disaster strikes the group wiping it out. Maybe we just were lucky and survived not due to any skill better than other species.
While crows have "crafty" intelligence, neanderthals would be more apt at this.
But really, the logical first language would be gesture, an extension of already existing body language. And such language is employed by humans when hunting, at war, whenever quiet is preferred.
Even a gesture language of a few dozen concepts is almost automatic, pointing, waving, directional motions, hushing motions, pointing at your head, clapping, etc.
This being extended as full language in beings incapable of complex sound, seems viable.
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.
Understanding the nutritional value of a food goes beyond than working to get the food. You need to have a theory of nutrition (true or false), and there is nothing that can suggest this. Saying that they ate fat because fat is good for them is tautologic
> And "any homo something before or after" includes us today.
It is obvious that I include our specy only until the first research and experiments on the topic
This just sounds like romanticizing.
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
Deleted Comment
If I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.
However they are still extinct!
It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'.
Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.
Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.