More Like Us Every Day

Once again I am talking about Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, more commonly known as Neanderthals, have increasingly been found to have sophisticated capabilities that rivaled those of modern humans.  (H. Sapiens Sapiens)

Case in point, anthropologists have found a fat processing factory that was patronized by Neanderthals from hundreds of miles around.

This is not just a sophisticated process, this is a specialized and sophisticated facility by the standards of the time:

The Neanderthals are our closest extinct relatives, and they continue to fascinate as we peer back through tens of thousands of years of history.

In a new discovery about this mysterious yet often familiar species, researchers have found ancient evidence of a Neanderthal "fat factory" in what is now Germany.

Operational around 125,000 years ago, the factory would've been a place where Neanderthals broke and crushed the bones of large mammals to extract valuable bone marrow and grease, used as a valuable extra food source.

According to scientists, this is the earliest evidence yet for this type of sophisticated, large-scale bone processing, including both bone marrow and grease: the first confirmation Neanderthals were also doing this some 100,000 years before our species made it to Europe.

"This was intensive, organised, and strategic," says archaeologist Lutz Kindler from the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center in Germany.

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We can add this to the long list of studies that have revealed Neanderthals were much smarter than they're often made out to be. Thanks to recent research we know they were adept swimmers, capable brewers, and abstract thinkers – who raised their kids and used speech patterns in a similar way to humans.

 It does make one wonder why modern humans survived and Neanderthals did now.  

My completely uninformed opinion is that it might have been differences in fecundity, which led to modern humans out-breeding Neanderthals, and eventually lead to modern humans being forced to adopt pastoralism and eventually agriculture because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle cannot accommodate too many people in one area.