Primitive people did not eat the dead out of necessity
Ancient people ate their dead — and not because they needed it. According to a new study, cannibalism was a common funerary practice in Europe around 15,000 years ago, when people ate their dead not out of necessity, but rather as part of their culture.
While researchers have previously found gnawed bones and human skulls that were made into cups at Gough Cave in England, a study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews suggests this was not an isolated incident.
How notes CNN, the scientists' research focused on the Magdalenian (Magdalenian) period of the late Upper Paleolithic era. The bearers of the Magdalenian culture, named after the La Madeleine grotto in the Dordogne department, lived approximately 11,000-17,000 years ago.
Experts at London's National History Museum examined the literature to identify 59 Magdalenian sites that contain human remains. Most of them were in France, but also in Germany, Spain, Russia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
They were able to interpret the behavior of ancient people at funerals in 25 places. Fifteen of them contained human remains with chewing marks, skull bones with cut marks, and bones deliberately broken in a pattern related to the extraction of bone marrow for nutrients, indicating that cannibalism was practiced.
There was also evidence that in some cases human remains were mixed with animal remains.
According to the researchers, the ritual manipulation of human remains and their frequent appearance at burial sites throughout northern and western Europe suggest that cannibalism was a burial practice rather than an addition to the diet widespread in Magdalenian culture.
< “It cannot be denied that the incidence of cannibalism among Magdalenian settlements exceeds any prevalence of such behavior among earlier or later hominin groups, and suggests that mortuary cannibalism was a method that the Magdalenian inhabitants used to dispose of their dead,” the paper states. research.
“Rather than burying their dead, these people ate them,” said study co-author Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist and chief scientist at the National History Museum, in a press release.
She added that cannibalism “was not practiced simply out of necessity.”
“This in itself is interesting because it is the oldest known evidence of cannibalism as a funerary practice,” adds Silvia Bello.
The researchers were also able to obtain genetic information from eight excavation sites and combine it with archaeological data to reveal the relationship between burial behavior and genetic ancestry.
The scientists found that two distinct ancestral groups were present in the region during this period — one from the Magdalenian culture and another called Epigravettian, another European and geographically distinct human culture.
The researchers found that people from the Magdalenian culture in northwestern Europe preferred to eat their dead, while people from the Epigravettian culture preferred to bury their dead without cannibalism.
“There has been a shift towards people burying their dead, — a behavior widespread in south-central Europe and attributed to a second distinct culture known as Epigravettian,” says a press release from the Natural History Museum.
According to the study, the presence of regular burials during the Upper Madeleine was explained by the migration of people with Epigravettian ancestry into areas previously inhabited by people with Magdalenian ancestry, who practiced funerary cannibalism.
“We believe that the changes in funeral behavior identified here are an example of demographic diffusion, where, essentially, one population comes in and replaces another population, and this leads to a change in behavior,” comments William Marsh, a research fellow at the museum.
According to the study authors, these are preliminary results , and further analysis of the results on a larger scale is needed to fully understand the findings.
Thomas Booth, a senior scientist at the Francis Crick Institute lab who was not involved in the study, told CNN on Thursday: “We don't have enough remains of most people who lived in Europe during the Paleolithic, and so it can always be difficult to be sure what people did with their dead. However, this study provides fairly convincing evidence that ritual funerary cannibalism was practiced by people throughout Europe 20,000-14,000 years ago.