There’s an interesting item on cooking in fire pits here:

http://bbq.about.com/od/barbecuehelp/a/aa061006a.htm

I don’t know how far back such fire pits might have been used, but it seems a very good alternative to cooking entire animals over an open fire.

One can imagine scraps of meat drying or freeze-drying around butchering sites very early in hominid history. It wouldn’t be much of a jump for hominid minds well before Neanderthal to have noticed this and the non-perishing nature if the resultant dried meat. Experiments inducing this result on a larger scale would have seemed forthcoming sooner or later.

I forgot to mention one solution to the question of boiling meat that may well have been used even in Neanderthal’s time or before hand. Plains Indians were said to sometimes boil stew made from their quarry in its own skin, hung from a tripod, with water inside the skin. Iv’e never tried this, but the principle is such that the lower temperature of the boiling water inside, keeps the skin from burning through. Presumably internal organs such as stomach pouches may well have been used also, and were no doubt used at times as storage vessels too. Simply hanging unskinned quarry over a fire to singe and roast crudely may have led to further modifications of this particularly cooking method, culminating in using skins as boiling vessels, especially if it was noted that unskinned and cooked game contained boiled stomach contents of an interesting flavor and texture.

Caribou stomach contents were said to be a particular delicacy with some northern peoples.
Pehaps skin cooking could have led to the use of hot rocks to boil food in containers separate from the fire as an elaboration. As tedius as this method seems, it was widely used by tribal people without pottery in much later times.

Good point about the Schöningen spears, they completely slipped my mind, so I’ll look into that – although the H. erectus people who made them may have been more suited to throwing a spear than. I’ve looked at a few H. erectus skeletons online to try and determine if their arms were asymmetrical like ours, but couldn’t tell from my brief search.

I think the idea that Mousterian spear points were considered too heavy to be used as thrown projectiles over any appreciable distance, with or without accuracy, first gave rise to the idea that modern humans would have had a competitive edge in the Upper Palaeolithic – plus I suppose even a straight-armed throwing – or bowling – action might have been possible for Neanderthals. I’m not sure if they used bolas or slingshots either, but not as far as I know.

I think too that the massive amount of broken bones Neanderthals displayed further indicated that Neanderthals engaged their prey face to face – maybe that was their preferred method of hunting, but if they could have thrown effectively from distance, it seems more likely they would have done so, if only to avoid the horrific injuries and searing pain inflicted in the course of their struggles.

But it would seem surprising if no Neanderthal ever launched a spear in anger, either at human or beast.

The discover of the Schoninger spears refute this notion, as the only people around to have made and used these “throwing spears” at the time (well before Neanderthal), were almost certainly his ancestors and they were also physiologically very similar in shoulder anatomy as far as we know.

A simple test showing just how absurd this notion that a robust human cannot throw a spear due to shoulder blade anatomy or motion limitation therein can be performed in five minutes. If I strap my shoulders to my body, limiting all motion to arm movement from the elbow down, I can still throw a spear with considerable force clear across a room or an opening by simply combining the lower arm’s foward (or sideways) swing with a quick high-torque twist of the body. Try it.

If my puny body can still throw a spear with enough force to penetrate an object while my entire upper arms are strapped motionless, certainly brawny Neanderthals could have generated a lot more force of a very lethal nature. This test situation eliminates all motion generated by the upper arm and shoulder. In reality, we can assume that, whatever unproven limitions there may have been from Neanderthal’s shoulder anatomy, his upper arms and shoulder would still have been partly in motion and thus at least somewhat involved torque-wise. This would therefore have produced considerably more force than the conditions of my test allow.

Simple tests such as this should always be conducted before silly pronouncments such as “Neanderthals couldn’t throw spears” become accepted as known facts.

I also noticed some references to Neanderthals “frying” meat. I would suspect that the author actually meant “roasting”, as frying would require a pan of some sort to hold the oil and allow the meat to actually fry.

My only contention would be about Neanderthals having lost all their body hair (fur) like us. IMO, Neanderthals evolved from a separate branch of H. erectus (eventually known as H. antecessor/heidelbergensis) in Europe itself (or elsewhere in West Eurasia), living here for almost one million years in their different evolutive stages. They did develop other adaptations to cold weather, like their stocky bodies, so I have no particular reason not to believe they had lost all fur and had not even re-evolved it. Even if furry, they may still have needed good clothes anyhow for extra protection (much like we use hats and sky masks on top of head hair and beards).