Oldest Evidence of Human Cannibalism as a Funerary Practice

upstart writes:

Oldest evidence of human cannibalism as a funerary practice:

The remains of human bones with cutmarks, breaks and human chewing marks found across northern Europe show that some human groups living around 15,000 years ago were eating their dead not out of necessity, but as part of their culture.

While in the modern day most people will either bury or cremate their dead, some of our ancestors did things a little differently.

Gough's Cave is a well-known paleolithic site in south-eastern England. Nestled in the Cheddar Gorge, the cave is perhaps best known for the discovery of 15,000 years old human skulls shaped into what are believed to have been cups and bones that had been gnawed by other humans.

But were the people living in Gough's Cave a gruesome outlier, or where they actually part of a wider cannibalistic culture of northern Europe? A new paper now suggests that they were not alone. Human remains dating to the same time period from across northern and western Europe and attributed to the same culture, known as the Magdalenian, also show evidence that they were cannibalized. This suggests that the eating of the dead was a shared behavior during the late Upper Paleolithic.

[...] "Instead of burying their dead, these people were eating them," explains Silvia. "We interpret the evidence that cannibalism was practiced on multiple occasions across north-western Europe over a short period of time, as this practice was part of a diffuse funerary behavior among Magdalenian groups."

"That in itself is interesting, because it is the oldest evidence of cannibalism as a funerary practice."

This cannibalistic behavior was seemingly fairly common among Magdalenian people of north-western Europe, but it didn't last particularly long. There was a shift towards people burying their dead, a behavior seen widely across south central Europe and attributed to a second distinct culture, known as the Epigravettian.

This then raises the question of whether the eventual relative ubiquity of burial culture towards the end of the Paleolithic was the result of Magdalenian people adopting primary burial as a funerary behavior, or if their population was replaced.

During the late Upper Paleolithic, between around 23,000 and 14,000 years ago, there were two dominate cultures in western Europe, largely distinguished by the stone and bone tools the crafted.

The Epigravettian culture was mainly found living in south and eastern Europe, and buried their dead with graves goods in a way that we would perhaps consider more usual by modern standards. The Magdalenian culture from the north-west of Europe, however, were doing things differently. They were processing the bodies of their dead, removing the flesh from the corpse, eating it, and in some cases modifying the remaining bones to create new objects.

One of the main questions was whether or not this cannibalism was driven by necessity, when perhaps food was scarce or the winter long and so the people responsible were in survival mode, or whether it was a cultural behavior.

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