Why did the Neanderthals who lived in the Cova de les Teixoneres in Moià (Barcelona) around 52,000 years ago eat each other? Why if the area was rich in game, as denoted by the abundant remains of bear, hyena, lion, wolf, deer, horse or aurochs located in the debris of those caves? If they weren't hungry, why did they eat their fellow humans? That is the big question that archaeologists ask themselves when they analyze the phenomenon of cannibalism, more complicated to explain the further back they travel in time, and especially complex if there was plenty of game. So?
A team of archaeologists from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (Iphes), attached to the Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona, announced a few weeks ago the discovery of two occipital bone fragments from a juvenile Neanderthal that show cut features that reveal that the meat was separated from the bone to be eaten. In this site, remains of four individuals have been found to date, two of them approximately seven and nine years old, an old man and said pre-adult; the ages are calculated by comparing the metabolic development of those bones with ours, because the techniques that would make it possible to make more precise analyzes are still too aggressive for the conservation of such treasures. These bones were in a place that didn't belong to them, mixed with those of other animals... if it weren't for the fact that they also ended up on the plate. Many of the bones are badly fractured, a sign that they tried to get to the most nutritious part, the marrow.
"We don't know how related they were, but the mitochondrial DNA tells us that these individuals are from a Neanderthal species older than the one that would correspond to it from the context, let's say that it is like that of individuals from around 100,000 years ago, but they lived a few years ago." 50,000”, explains the director of the investigation, Jordi Rosell, to this newspaper in a telephone conversation.
"We usually think of cannibalism as something violent, but in this case we are not talking about any type of territorial conquest, we think that here it possibly has another meaning, we doubt that there was violence prior to this phenomenon." "Let's think that we are talking about a population density of around 100,000 Neanderthals throughout Europe and that when there was a meeting of different groups, they possibly thought more about reproducing and perpetuating the species than about eating each other."
It is not the first documented case of cannibalism among Neanderthals, although it is not such a frequent phenomenon. In recent years, cases of cannibalism have appeared at different stages of human development in dozens of sites, Atapuerca among them. Just finished the 2023 campaign in this Burgos site, Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, an Iphes researcher and expert in anthropophagy, attends to La Vanguardia: “Cannibalism in prehistory is relatively common, we are talking about a period of 3 million years of human evolution , and we could go up to 8 million, with the primates. We are seeing very little of what happened there and even so we are detecting it, so we can think that it was frequent. We find it in different times and environments.”
It appears in African deposits, but also in Belgium, Great Britain and Spain, in large numbers. Just at the end of June, the American Smithsonian Institute announced that possibly 1.45 million-year-old remains found in northern Kenya constituted the oldest sample of cannibalism ever discovered. The investigation fell to a team from the National Museum of Natural History of said entity, which analyzed the bones of those first humans in African institutions. He found that nine cut marks on a left shin bone of Homo sapiens probably corresponded to signs of anthropophagy. A meticulous analysis with 3D models showed that the marks had been made by stone tools, the same as in Moià (although a million and a half years later).
La Vanguardia interviewed the person in charge of that research, Brianna Pobiner, a Smithsonian paleontologist, by email: “1.45 million years ago – she said – the first humans could have seen other people as potential food, but since there are so few fossils before 1 million years with carnage marks from other early humans we can't know for sure." This specialist does not rule out "the possibility of some kind of ritual feeding activity, but since we see so few examples of hominid bone butchering from more than 1 million years ago, I highly doubt it was ritual behavior, we must wait and see." more evidence of it.
"When archeology discovers the cannibalism of Neanderthals, it seems that it labels them as savages, but what we do is bring it closer to Homo sapiens, which is the species that has practiced it the most," argues Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, an Iphes researcher who is an expert in anthropophagy. “From the symbolic cannibalism of Christianity, to extreme cases such as the well-known plane in the Andes, or the one practiced by some societies at war. There is a great diversity of causes. Let's not forget that it was an argument for the conquest of America: those savages had to be subdued. For the Aztecs, it was necessary to eat others for the sun to rise.
The great unknown of cannibalism is why: food? Ritual? War? “We have no evidence of rituals or complex cultural behaviors from 1.45 million years ago. We do not know if there was a taboo then, but many other animal species practice cannibalism, so it is possible that there was no taboo at that time. But we really can't know. My view is that this behavior was not deliberately consuming others from enemy groups, or specifically seeking out other hominids as prey, but was more likely due to the man-eating hominids simply being hungry," Pobiner argues. .
In some cultures, the predator of another human kept their strength. "I am very wary of applying any modern cultural taboos to the behavior of hominids from 1.45 million years ago." "I can perfectly imagine a Neanderthal looking at a peer as potential food," says Rodríguez-Hidalgo. This archaeologist details that in some site from as recent as the Upper Paleolithic (between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago) "we found elements of cannibal ritualization, with decoration of human bone, which denotes a complex and symbolic component."
“It is a phenomenon that must be analyzed with cultural relativism, because it is also one of the few universal taboos, along with incest. But we cannot take our interpretation to the past”, concludes Rodríguez-Hidalgo.
