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   John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:15:34 JST John Carlos Baez

   • Sarah Taber

   Today I learned about 'rabbit starvation' and how Neanderthals avoided it.

   When you're a hunter-gatherer and it's winter, you may try to survive by eating only meat - like rabbits, but also deer and other game. But this gives you too much protein and not enough carbohydrates and fat: most of this meat is very lean. If you eat enough lean meat to get all the calories you need, you can die from an overdose of protein! It's called 'protein toxicity'.

   Hunter-gatherers in this situation sometimes throw away the 'steaks' and 'roasts' - the thighs and shoulders of the animals they kill - or feed them to their dogs. They need FAT to survive! So they focus on eating the fatty parts, including bone marrow.

   So, in some cultures, while the men are out hunting, the women spend time making bone grease. This takes a lot of work. They take bones and break them into small pieces with a stone hammer. They boil them for several hours. The fat floats to the top. Then they let the water cool and skim off the fat.

   There's been evidence for people doing this as far back as 28,000 BC. But now some scientists have found a Neanderthal 'bone grease factory' that's 125,000 years old!

   This was during the last interglacial, in Germany. In a site near a lake, called Neumark-Nord, Neanderthals killed a lot of bison, horses and deer and crushed their bones, leaving behind tens of thousands of small bone fragments.

   • Lutz Kindler et al, Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257

   Thanks to @sarahtaber for spotting this!

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:16:02 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     Now I better understand how humans domesticated wolves. In winter we weren't just giving them scraps. We were giving them steaks and roasts.

     RamenCatholic 🐢 🌈 repeated this.
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     Colin the Mathmo (colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:16:25 JST Colin the Mathmo

     in reply to

     @johncarlosbaez My first academic paper, despite being a Pure Mathematician, was in archaeology.

     We applied Linear Programming to solve The Diet Problem for hominids in the late upper paleolithic in the South West of France. Having computed the "Optimal Diet" from first principles, we then predicted what should appear in middens, and achieved very good agreement.

     The limiting factor in the diet was, indeed, fat, so despite the wealth of rabbits and roe deer, there was an unexpectedly large amount of nut debris, and this was explained by the calculations.

     I should try to find copies of the papers ... I think there were two.

     CC: @sarahtaber

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Colin the Mathmo (colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:17:04 JST Colin the Mathmo

     in reply to

     • Sarah Taber

     @johncarlosbaez Ah, here we are:

     Conceptual issues in environmental archaeology (1988)

     "K V Boyle & C D Wright (283-90) write on 'Foraging theory: mathematical modelling of socio-ecological change', advocating the use of Linear Programming to predict the optimal allocation of scarce resources."

     -- https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1005775&recordType=Monograph

     CC: @sarahtaber

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Colin the Mathmo (colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:17:11 JST Colin the Mathmo

     in reply to

     • Sarah Taber
     • Pozorvlak

     @pozorvlak The archaeologists were scathing. They particularly hammered us on including nutrients and food sources that they knew weren't in the middens.

     "Why include these things in your analysis when we know they won't be relevant?"

     In hindsight should we have anticipated that? Don't know ... it's nearly 40 years ago now.

     Times have changed, the nature of archaeological research has changed.

     CC: @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

   • Embed this notice
     Pozorvlak (pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:17:13 JST Pozorvlak

     in reply to

     • Colin the Mathmo
     • Sarah Taber

     @ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber what a cool result!

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     &2i (pneumaculturist@hcommons.social)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:17:22 JST &2i

     in reply to

     • Sarah Taber

     @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber
     I'm wondering how they knew to approach things this way? Did they do a good job of listening to their bodies? Did they observe and deduce about protein toxicity? Both? Or maybe some other means of learning ... ?

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:17:29 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     • &2i

     @pneumaculturist - it's believed that Neanderthals had language. So once someone, somewhere, somehow, figured out that it was not good to only eat lean meat, this knowledge would get passed down. And natural selection is a powerful force too.

     But it would be really cool to be there and watch how they figured this stuff out.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Colin the Mathmo (colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:17:57 JST Colin the Mathmo

     in reply to

     • Sarah Taber

     @johncarlosbaez Also:

     Mathematics in archaeology: return to basics. Science and Archaeology 28: 32-7 (1986)

     I should see if I can find copies of these on-line. Or indeed, IRL.

     CC: @sarahtaber

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     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 17:18:20 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     • &2i

     @pneumaculturist - I'm reading a bit more about it:

     “My friend, the way it is with us Bushmen,” he [Tomazo, a Kalahari San] began, “is that we love meat. And even more than that, we love fat. When we hunt we always search for the fat ones, the ones dripping with layers of white fat: fat that turns into a clear, thick oil in the cooking pot, fat that slides down your gullet, fills your stomach and gives you a roaring diarrhea."

     “If the Ihalmiut [Inuit, NW Canada] hunter shoots a deer for food when he is on a trip far from the camps, he seldom bothers to go to the trouble of building a fire. Usually his first act is to cut off the lower legs of the deer, strip away the meat, and crack the bones for marrow. Marrow is fat, and an eternal craving for fat is part of the price of living on an all-meat diet."

     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416520300544

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     ma𝕏pool (maxpool@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 12-Jul-2025 14:39:47 JST ma𝕏pool

     in reply to

     @johncarlosbaez

     The open question is, did humans do all the work, or how much did wolfs self-domesticate under evolutionary pressure of snack dispensaries.

     "the prevailing domestication hypotheses posit that humans selectively bred wolves that were more docile. However, a competing hypothesis states that wolves that were less hostile towards humans would essentially domesticate themselves by naturally selecting for tamer wolves since that would allow for easier access to food from human settlements."

     Rapid evolution of prehistoric dogs from wolves by natural and sexual selection emerges from an agent-based model
     12 February 2025 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2646

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication