02 July 2025
Neanderthals were cracking open bones to extract fatty marrow 125,000 years ago, a new study reveals, showing they mastered this survival skill tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought.
Previous studies show our earliest ancestors in Africa cracked started to open bones to extract the fatty marrow from bone cavities more than 1,5 million years ago.. A study published today (Wednesday, 2 July) in Science Advances demonstrates that our distant cousins, the Neanderthals, pushed fat extraction from bones quite a bit further.
The evidence comes from the Neumark-Nord 2 site in central Germany, dating back to an interglacial period when temperatures were similar to those of today. At this location, researchers found that Neanderthals not only broke bones to extract marrow but also crushed large mammal bones from at least 172 individuals into tens of thousands of fragments to render calorie-rich bone grease through heating them in water.
Dr Geoff Smith, co-author from the 色狗导航, said: “This discovery shows that Neanderthals at Neumark-Nord 2 conducted sophisticated resource management tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. These weren't simple hunter-gatherers just getting by day to day—they were master planners who could look ahead, organise complex tasks, and squeeze every last calorie from their environment.”
Neanderthals ran ‘fat factory’
The findings, led by archaeologists from MONREPOS (Leibniz Zentrum Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in cooperation and with support of the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany), and Dr Geoff Smith from the 色狗导航, indicate that Neanderthals operated what can be described as a prehistoric “fat factory,” carefully selecting a lakeside location to systematically process bones from at least 172 large mammals, including deer, horses and aurochs. These activities, previously believed to be limited to later human groups who lived around 75,000 years later, now appear to have been part of Neanderthal behavior as early as 125,000 years ago.
Dr Lutz Kindler, who led the study from Leibniz Zentrum Archaeology, said: “This was intensive, organised, and strategic. Neanderthals were clearly managing resources with precision—planning hunts, transporting carcasses, and rendering fat in a task-specific area. They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently - most likely involving caching carcass parts at places in the landscape for later transport to and use at the grease rendering site”.
The archaeological finds are extraordinarily well-preserved, with most of the 120,000 small bone fragments and 16,000flint tools recovered from a tightly clustered 50-square-meter area. These were found alongside signs of fire use, indicating a sophisticated and purposeful operation that requires careful planning of activities and resources. The authors write that over the course of the year Neanderthals repeatedly hunted in the Neumark-Nord region, and whenever they succeeded in killing animals beyond their immediate food needs, they may have cached the surplus, including lipid-rich bones. Subsequently, over a comparatively brief period at some undetermined time of year, the caches were emptied and stored carcass parts were brought to the Neumark-Nord 2 location for marrow and grease processing.
Top image: An AI generated impression of activities at the “Fat Factory” site. The image was generated with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT by Leibniz Zentrum Archaeology.
Bottom image: The Neumark-Nord 2/2B site was excavated through year-round campaigns by a core team from 2004 to 2009
URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv1257
We are in the process of finalising our postgraduate taught courses for 2026/27 entry. In the meantime, you can view our 2025/26 courses.
