Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago

(universiteitleiden.nl)

36 points | by andsoitis 1 hour ago

2 comments

  • kioleanu 13 minutes ago
    If I enable reader mode on this article on my iPhone, I get an AI summary instead of the article text. I’d it the sure doing that or my phone? I hate it either way as there’s no way to read the article in reader mode
    • rogerrogerr 8 minutes ago
      I assume you're seeing the text starting with "The authors emphasise the sheer quantity of herbivores"? I see that too in reader mode, both on my iPhone and Mac.

      The text is in the article, second paragraph under "survival strategies". I don't see any obvious reason in the HTML why reader mode is skipping everything else.

    • Aardwolf 6 minutes ago
      Firefox reader view on PC shows the exact same text as is in the article
  • irdc 56 minutes ago
    This pairs nicely with the recent publications around Neanderthal cognitive abilities and how there likely similar to ours (https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-m...).
    • sokoloff 15 minutes ago
      I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
      • Epa095 9 minutes ago
        Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
      • echelon 7 minutes ago
        Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning.

        If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time.

        Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.