Anthropologists have spent centuries piecing together human history. For every interesting detail they discover, there are others that are, well, unpleasant. A new analysis of human bone fragments paints a particularly gruesome picture of our Neanderthal relatives.
The study, published Nov. 19 in the journal Scientific reports on naturesuggests that these remains belonged to six women and children who were killed, butchered and eaten by other Neanderthals. The bone fragments were found in the Goyer Cave system in what is now Belgium and are between 41,000 and 45,000 years old.
According to the researchers, the findings indicate targeted predatory behavior towards slender, short women and children from other groups of Neanderthals.
Revealing the Cannibalistic Context
When Neanderthals roamed the Earth, cannibalism was not that uncommon. Researchers have been unearthing evidence of this horrific practice for years. happening over long periods of time and in remote geographic regions.
Neanderthal cannibalism appears to be motivated by a wide range of motives, from food and survival to potential rituals. However, piecing together the context surrounding individual phenomena has proven difficult, largely due to the fragmented state of most skeletal remains and the lack of surviving cultural evidence.
With that said, the collection of Neanderthal remains discovered in the Goye Caves provides one of the clearest insights into Neanderthal cannibalism during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. This collection of 101 bone fragments represents the largest collection of Neanderthal remains in northern Europe with clear evidence of human modification.
Ancient Crime Scene Investigation
For this study, a team of researchers led by Quentin Cosnefroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France, collected as many bone fragments as possible and carried out genetic analysis. The results showed that the bones belonged to four adult women and two male children, and that the women were shorter and slimmer than the average Neanderthal woman.
Forensic examination and microscopic analysis of the remains revealed telltale signs of carnage, such as cuts and nicks. According to researchers, this is evidence of food cannibalism.
When they combined their results with previous isotope analysis of the remains, they concluded that the Neanderthals who were cannibalized came from a completely different region than the one in which they died. This indicated that they were victims of exocannibalism—the practice of eating people outside their own community—perhaps as a result of intergroup conflict, territoriality, or cultural treatment of outsiders.
“At a minimum, this suggests that weaker members of one or more groups from one neighboring region were deliberately targeted,” the researchers wrote in the study. They suggest that exocannibalism could serve as a selection strategy aimed at undermining the reproductive potential of one or more competing groups.
The study's findings, while nauseating, are a window into our distant past. They illustrate how subtle clues from ancient human remains can reveal the complex social tensions and selective violence that shaped the lives of Neanderthals and, ultimately, our own.
