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Archaeologists Just Found Out What Neanderthal Kids Did When They Were Bored

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25.04.2026

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Archaeologists Just Found Out What Neanderthal Kids Did When They Were Bored

Bicycles and video games hadn’t been invented yet, after all.

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It’s sometimes difficult to imagine what childhood was like for someone in another country who lived within a completely different cultural context from your own. It can be even more difficult to, say, imagine what Neanderthal children did with their spare time. Luckily, according to research recently published in Scientific Reports, we now know that little Neanderthal kids liked hunting turtles.

The discovery comes from Neumark-Nord, an archaeological site in Germany that’s giving researchers a glimpse into what day-to-day Neanderthal life was like around 125,000 years ago. The researchers found dozens of remains of European pond turtles, a lot of them clearly showing signs that they........

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