Fat is a very valuable food component, packed with calories, especially important when other resources might be scarce. Our earliest ancestors in Africa already cracked open bones to extract the fatty marrow from bone cavities. But now a new study published in Science Advances demonstrates that our distant cousins, the Neanderthals, pushed fat extraction from bones quite a bit further. From complete bones to tiny fragments. Photo: Kindler, LEIZA-Monrepos Neanderthal food strategies The evidence comes from the Neumark-Nord 2 site in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years to an interglacial period when temperatures were similar to those of today. The site was situated in a lake landscape. 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.…