Warm weather pushed Neanderthals into cannibalism

[Judi Lynn]

29 MARCH 2019
Butchered corpses coincide with rapid climate change, researchers discover. Dyani Lewis reports.


A rapid period of warming more than 120,000 years ago drove Neanderthals in the south of France to eat six of their own, new research suggests.

The study, by French researchers Alban Defleur and Emmanuel Desclaux and published in the Journal of Archaeological Science paints a bleak picture of life for Neanderthals living during the last interglacial period.

In the 1990s, the remains of six Neanderthals – two adults, two adolescents and two children – were found in a small cave at Baume Moula-Guercy in the Rhône valley in southern France.

The bones bear many of the hallmarks of cannibalism: cut marks made by stone tools, complete dismemberment of the individuals, and finger bones that look as if they’ve been gnawed by Neanderthal teeth, rather than by other carnivores.

More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/archaeology/warm-weather-pushed-neanderthals-into-cannibalism

[Judi Lynn]

1. Skinned, Carved And Boiled Skull Cup Reveals Cannibalism In Neolithic Spain

Mar 27, 2019, 11:11am

Kristina Killgrove
Senior Contributor

Science
Archaeologist, Writer, Scientist

Deep within a Spanish cave, archaeologists have found the remains of seven ancient people whose bodies appear to have been skinned, carved, and boiled in what may have been an extensive funerary practice involving cannibalism.

The skeletons discovered in Cueva de El Toro in Málaga, Spain, date to the Early Neolithic period, or around 5300 to 4800 BC. They represent at least four adults and three kids, whose bones present clear evidence of cutting, scraping, chopping, and smashing soon after their deaths.

Writing in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, archaeologist Jonathan Santana of Durham University and his colleagues at the Universidad de Cantabria and the Universidad de La Laguna detail their discovery of a skull cup among these human remains.

“Skull cups are post-mortem processed heads that display signs of defleshing, breakage by percussion, and careful retouching of the broken borders,” the researchers explain. Specifically, one of the human skulls from Cueva de El Toro was modified into a cup “by careful paring away of skin, fragmentation of the facial skeleton and base of the skull, and controlled percussion of the edges of the calotte to achieve a regular shape.” That is, the head was first skinned, then carved.

More:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/03/27/skinned-carved-and-boiled-skull-cup-reveals-cannibalism-in-neolithic-spain/#d5890264567d

[democratisphere]

2. Wonder if homo sapiens will follow the same path in the future

as global warming and climate change continues to ever increase.