I’ve taught human physiology, so I already knew about the limits of protein consumption: if you rely too much on consuming lean protein, you reach a point where your body can’t cope with all the nitrogen. Here’s a good, succinct explanation of the phenomenon of “rabbit starvation.”
Fat, especially within-bone lipids, is a crucial resource for hunter-gatherers in most environments, becoming increasingly vital among foragers whose diet is based heavily on animal foods, whether seasonally or throughout the year. When subsisting largely on animal foods, a forager’s total daily protein intake is limited to not more than about 5 g/kg of body weight by the capacity of liver enzymes to deaminize the protein and excrete the excess nitrogen. For hunter-gatherers (including Neanderthals), with body weights typically falling between 50 and 80 kg, the upper dietary protein limit is about 300 g/day or just 1200 kcal, a food intake far short of a forager’s daily energy needs. The remaining calories must come from a nonprotein source, either fat or carbohydrate. Sustained protein intakes above ~300 g can lead to a debilitating, even lethal, condition known to early explorers as “rabbit starvation.” For mobile foragers, obtaining fat can become a life-sustaining necessity during periods when carbohydrates are scarce or unavailable, such as during the winter and spring.
I’d never thought about that, outside of an academic consideration, since a) I don’t live lifestyle that requires such an energy rich diet, and b) I’m a vegetarian, so I’m not going to sit down to consume over 1200 kcal of meat (I feel queasy even imagining such a feast). But when I stop to think about it, yeah, my hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been well aware of this limitation, which makes the “gatherer” part of the lifestyle even more important, and must have greatly affected their preferred choices from the kill.
There is very little fat in most ungulate muscle tissues, especially the “steaks” and “roasts” of the thighs and shoulders, regardless of season, or an animal’s age, sex, or reproductive state. Mid- and northern-latitude foragers commonly fed these meat cuts to their dogs or abandoned them at the kill. The most critical fat deposits are concentrated in the brain, tongue, brisket, and rib cage; in the adipose tissue; around the intestines and internal organs; in the marrow; and in the cancellous (spongy) tissue of the bones (i.e., bone grease). With the notable exception of the brain, tongue, and very likely the cancellous tissue of bones, the other fat deposits often become mobilized and depleted when an animal is undernourished, pregnant, nursing, or in rut.
So a steak is dog food; the favored cuts are ribs and brisket and organ meats. This article, though is mainly focused on bone grease and its production by Neandertal hunters. I didn’t even know what bone grease is until the article explained it to me. Oh boy, it’s my first Neandertal recipe!
Exploitation of fat-rich marrow from the hollow cavities of skeletal elements, especially the long bones, is fairly easy and well documented in the archaeological record of Neanderthals. On the basis of ethnohistoric accounts, as well as on experimental studies, the production of bone grease, an activity commonly carried out by women, requires considerable time, effort, and fuel. Bones, especially long-bone epiphyses (joints) and vertebrae, are broken into small fragments with a stone hammer and then boiled for several hours to extract the grease, which floats to the surface and is skimmed off upon cooling. For foragers heavily dependent on animal foods, bone grease provides a calorie-dense nonprotein food source that can play a critical role in staving off rabbit starvation.
Skimming off boiled fats does not sound at all appetizing…but then I thought of pho, which is made with a stock created by boiling bones for hours, or my grandmother’s stew, which had bones boiled in the mix, which you wouldn’t eat, but made an essential contribution to the flavor. Those we don’t cool to extract the congealed fats, but they were there. Then there’s pemmican, made by pounding nuts, grains, and berries in an animal fat matrix, which now sounds like the perfect food for someone hunting for game for long hours in the cold. It’s one of those things which seems superfluous when you’re living in a world filled with easy-to-reach calories, but it makes sense. I’m going to have to think about that when I’m prepping for the Trump-induced apocalypse.
Examples of hammerstone-induced impact damage on long bones from NN2/2B.
(A) B. primigenius, Tibia dex., impacts from posteromedial (no. 4892). (B) B. primigenius, Humerus sin., impacts from posteromedial (no. 4283). (C) B. primigenius, Tibia dex., impact from anterolateral (no. 8437). (D) Equus sp., Humerus sin., impacts from posterolateral (no. 21758).
The main point of the article, though, is that they’re finding evidence of cooperative behavior in Neandertals. It analyzes a site where Neandertals had set up a bone grease processing ‘factory’ where hunters brought in their prey to be cut up, the bones broken apart, and then everything was boiled for hours along a lakeside. The place was strewn with shattered bone fragments! They also found bits of charcoal, vestiges of ancient fires. There was no evidence of anything like pottery, but they speculate that “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”.
Not only do I have a recipe, I have a description of the technology used to produce the food. Anyone want to get together and make Bone Grease ala Neandertal? I’ll have to beg off on actually tasting it — vegetarian, you know — so y’all can eat it for yourselves.
For your second Neanderthal recipe: the maggot garnish.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/25/neanderthals-feasted-maggots-science-nutrition
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt7466
I was wondering how they were going to boil water 40,000 years ago.
I do that every day without thinking about it.
Using mundane things like steel, aluminum, or glass cooking vessels.
I’m sure they didn’t have steel cooking pots back then.
Well OK.
I still find it hard to see how that works though.
My guess is that they aren’t placing deer hide or birch bark containers directly on open flames. They could suspend them above glowing coals and get an even heat without direct contact with fire flames.
This is what Google has to say.
They used water tight baskets filled with water, and dropped hot rocks, heated in a fire, into the water plus food.
Hide, wood, or bark baskets would probably work as well.
This is easier to imagine any way.
I’m guessing it takes a lot of skill to do this.
It’s amazing that something we take for granted today like steel cooking pots would have been like magic to our recent ancestors.
[anecdote]
Rabbits are full of rubbit-eatings; their stomach, their bowels. Roughage, plant matter.
Back in the day, I had a Ridgeback pup and lived in the Adelaide Hills; one morning, after his brekky, we came across a young bunny that he cornered and harmed. Then he ate it. Started at the head, crunch crunch crunch. Ate it all.
Every bit of fur, every tooth, every nail. Everything.
(Nature is like that, no?)
Isn’t bone grease just another word for bone marrow, which is still regularly consumed by humans (and bearded vultures)?
osso buco
Yummmm!
It’s hard for people in 2025 to remember the world before the 1950s, when some people hypothesized that animal fat contributed to heart issues. After Eisenhower had his heart attacks, the whole world started on a low fat crusade, which we are still living in. Now, nobody can imagine choosing to eat bone marrow or other fat for flavor. But for hundreds of thousands of years before then, it was natural and common to choose to eat the delicious fat of the land animals. Our great great grandparents would not understand our habits of eating meat with the fat trimmed off by the butcher. Let alone any vegetarians, unless they were Hindu or something.
Around 1911, an arctic explorer came back and told about living with the Eskimo when he didn’t get his resupply western foods. He said he ate only meat for a year and was healthy. People didn’t believe him, so he agreed to eat only meat for another year locked with a friend in a metabolic ward in a hospital. The doctors first gave him lean cuts, but he complained that he meant natural meat with lots of fat. They switched to that, and he recovered and felt fine for the rest of the year.
So people CAN live on meat if it is with fat. Only carbohydrates are unnecessary to eat, because if needed, the liver makes them automatically through gluconeogenesis.
Stefansson’s story is summarized here.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/all-meat-diet
The book:
Kak, the Copper Eskimo by Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Violet Irwin
is a free download from Project Gutenberg. He wrote it in 1924, so I bet it likely also illustrates the Inuit lifestyle of eating.
My wife and I raised our own rabbits for food for some years, so–yes–I was aware of rabbit starvation.
As for cooking… With turkeys, and even more ducks and geese, you want to drain away the fat, or get it absorbed by something (hence the sort of stuffing recipes most people are familiar with). With rabbit, it’s the other way around. The meat tends to go dry. So there are three general solutions. One, if you’re cooking a whole rabbit, is to stuff it with a force meat to supply fats that will seep into the rabbit meat. The second, for relatively large pieces is to use a larding needle. The third is to wrap the rabbit pieces in a relatively fatty meat, such as bacon.
So people CAN live on meat if it is with fat. Only carbohydrates are unnecessary to eat, because if needed, the liver makes them
What, Inuit diet? Bah.
A very misleading claim.
I put that to the Bubblebot:
“While it’s biochemically possible to survive on meat and fat alone (via gluconeogenesis), it’s not nutritionally complete over the long term.
Missing key nutrients: fiber, vitamin C, magnesium, phytonutrients.
Gluconeogenesis is energy-intensive and can stress liver/kidneys.
Long-term low-carb diets may impair thyroid, metabolism, and exercise capacity.
Carbs aren’t strictly essential for survival—but they support optimal health, especially for gut, hormones, and metabolic flexibility.”
It’s an old “survival skills” trick, that you can boil water in containers not traditionally considered to be heat-safe.
Like, a folded paper cup, a plastic bag, a leaf bowl, a segment of bamboo, etc. As long as the heat of combustion/melting is higher than the temp of boiling water. Any excess container above the water line will possibly burn/melt off, but you could still bring water to boiling temp in a container like that.
Isn’t it also possible they used carved wooden vessels, or dug holes in the ground, lined with clay, and brought up to boiling temp with fire-heated rocks.
@2 You can boil water over an open flame in a plastic bag or cup or even a paper cup, because the heat is conducted away by the water fast enough to prevent combustion of the container. Maybe they did the same thing with animal stomachs or skins or the like.
Pre-contact Australian cooks used pit ovens or wrapped meat in moist paperbark before laying it on a fire. You really don’t need metal or ceramic to cook.
@4 microraptor
No. Marrow is the tissue inside the hollows of long bones and some others. You can just crack the bone open and get it out. Bone grease is the fat within the bone structure itself. That one has to be boiled out of the bone, but can be any bone.
Bruce, that is a very one-sided report.
[1] Atlas Obscura is a fun site but hardly a resource for high scientific accuracy.
[2] The original paper on Stefansson’s diet experiment is here. Stefannson’s personal account is here. Stefansson and his companion Karten Andersen were not closely supervised in hospital for long. They were closely monitored for 3 weeks only. For the rest of the year, they visited the hospital periodically for examinations and blood tests but were otherwise left to their own devices. The paper even reports the difficulty the two men had dealing with the social awkwardness of refusing dishes at friend’s houses, and the difficulty of finding things to order in restaurants. That is, their diets were completely unsupervised.
[3] Stefannson’s research was funded by the Institute of American Meat Packers, with some very dubious ethics from Stefansson. “…we refused permission to reprint, but suggesting that they might get something much better worth publishing, and with right to publish it, if they gave a fund to a research institution…”
[4] Stefansson told two distinct misrepresentations about his experiment. The first was that it was a meat-only diet. This is not true. He added calf liver to help avoid scurvy. Now this is definitely an animal product, but it is not meat. He tries to justify this as a linguistic quirk of Americans, but since his funding was American and the research was done in America, this does not wash with me, especially as it would have been very easy for him to change the wording to avoid confusion.
[5] The second misrepresentation was worse because it is hard to see it as an honest mistake, and it has been perpetuated by dozens of followers trying to promote the “meat-only” diet. He claimed the reason he did so well in the Arctic is that he followed the Inuit diet by watching and replicating their activities. But the truth is that the Intuit diet is not meat-only and never has been. The vast majority of their calories come from hunting, but they collect arctic berries and store them for winter. So Stefansson either didn’t observe the Inuit or didn’t follow their example or followed their example but lied about not eating berries.
[6] Conversely, Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the Gallipoli campaign suffered huge rates of scurvy despite being well supplied with beef and bacon.
Cooking before teflon… Much later than the OP Neanderthal, but Skara Brea (neolithic 5000 years old) has still exisitng stone troughs used for cooking (using the Hot Stone technique) inside their dwellings. Some piccies here https://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/s12-water-trough/
Curiously enough I had heard of both ‘rabbit starvation’ and boiling stuff in unconventional vessels in Terry Pratchett. Rabbits in ‘Snuff’ and boiling in ‘A Hat Full of Sky’.
I watched an “Ask a Mortician” video a while ago that touched on this subject. It was about how shipwrecked people on lifeboats couldn’t survive through cannibalism for long because most body fat disappears through malnutrition before cannibalism becomes necessary. Macabre, but interesting.
raven@2: See cooking in baskets using hot rocks.
Lots more interesting stuff at exarc.net for those interested in experimental archeology, by the way.
I remember watching an episode of Les Stroud’s Survivorman where he boiled water in a plastic water bottle. I guess many things we assume would just melt or burn in flames can be used to boil water.
@2, 19, 20: actually you can use a paper cup to boil water in: as long as there’s water left (and the flames not too fierce) the temp will not rise above 100°C.
Admittedly our hirsute cousins lacked paper, but a hollowed stone should do as a sort-of-pot… some stones heat quite nicely and do not crack with the heat.
In some places in the Italian Alps it’s a traditional method of cooking, grill lots of stuff on a hot stone slab with a roaring fire under it, mmmm.
Probably some sort of tough hide or bark container would also work, with appropriate caution.
3% Neanderthal here. Maybe this explains why my grandmother cooked almost everything in a half inch of lard or Crisco. Eggs would barely poke up through the surface. She’d even fry bacon in grease. But, she also started her days with three fingers of rye whiskey and an unfiltered Pall Mall. She made it to 87. Go figure.
Sarah Taber (Crop scientist):
Rando 1:
Rando 2:
Maybe the experimental archaeologists only got round to testing this recently, but I can remember survivalist programs on the BBC et al showing examples of this two or three decades ago. You can cut out a rough circle of birch bark, for example, and then cut along a radius so that it can be folded into a cone with the overlapping top ends being held together with split-stick pegs or sown together with tree root or other cordage. As long as the tip of the cone is kept out of any flames it won’t catch fire directly and when kept topped up with water it won’t reach ignition temperature over time.
Well, I did wait…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type
There are lots of ways to cook things.
My mother’s family were Scottish immigrant farmers in Illinois.
My mother was born in 1916, so she had lived through the Depression before I was born in 1957.
I grew up being very familiar with cooking with bacon grease, as well as other Depression era dishes.
I truly loved “Hobo Gravy” – canned milk called Milnot stirred into bacon grease and poured over mashed potatoes.
To this day, I always have a jar of bacon grease in my refrigerator.
No, we are not overweight! I cook from scratch, and we eat anything and everything, but “all things in moderation”.
A tiny bit of bacon grease can add wonderful flavor to many foods.