Scientists explain cannibalism of ancient Europeans: “Common practice”

Ancient people ate their dead – and not because they needed it. 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, according to a new study.

While researchers have previously found gnawed bones and human skulls that were fashioned into cups at Gough Cave in England, the study, published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, suggests this was not an isolated incident.

As CNN notes, 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 associated with 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.

Ritual manipulation of human remains and their frequent appearance at burial sites across northern and western Europe suggest that cannibalism was a burial practice rather than a dietary supplement common in Magdalenian culture, the researchers said.

“It is undeniable 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 Magdalenian inhabitants used to dispose of their dead,” the study says.

“Rather than burying their dead, these people ate them,” study co-author Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist and chief scientist at the National History Museum, said in a press release.

She added that cannibalism was “not simply practiced out of necessity.”

“This in itself is interesting because it is the oldest known evidence to date 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.

Scientists have discovered that two distinct groups of ancestors were present in the region during this period—one from the Magdalenian culture and another called the 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,” the Natural History Museum said in a press release.

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 think the changes in funeral behavior found here are an example of demographic diffusion, where essentially one population comes in and replaces another population, and that 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 necessary 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 are missing the remains of most people who lived in Europe during the Paleolithic, and so it is always difficult to be sure that people did with their dead. However, this study provides fairly compelling evidence that ritual funerary cannibalism was practiced by people throughout Europe 20,000–14,000 years ago.”