Anthropologists have spent centuries piecing together the story of human history. For every fascinating detail they unearth, there are others that are rather, uh, unsavory. A new analysis of human bone fragments paints a particularly gruesome picture of our Neanderthal cousins.
The study, published November 19 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, suggests that these remains belonged to six women and children who were slaughtered, butchered, and cannibalized by other Neanderthals. The bone fragments were found inside the Goyet cave system in modern-day Belgium, and they appear to be between 41,000 and 45,000 years old.
The findings point to targeted predatory behavior toward slender, short-statured females and children from other Neanderthal groups, according to the researchers.
Neanderthal remains from the Troisième caverne of Goyet in Belgium © Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences/Scientific Reports
Unearthing cannibalistic context
Back when Neanderthals roamed the Earth, cannibalism wasn’t all that uncommon. Researchers have been digging up evidence of this grisly practice for years, with instances occurring over extended time periods and across distant geographic regions.
Neanderthal cannibalism appears to stem from a broad range of motivations, from sustenance and survival to potential rituals. However, piecing together the context surrounding individual occurrences has proved difficult largely due to the fragmented condition of most skeletal remains and a lack of preserved cultural clues.
With that being said, the assemblage of Neanderthal remains recovered from the Goyet caves offers some of the clearest insight into Neanderthal cannibalism during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. This collection of 101 bone fragments is the largest assemblage of Neanderthal remains in Northern Europe with clear evidence of human-made modifications.
Investigating an ancient crime scene
For this study, a team of researchers led by Quentin Cosnefroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France, reassembled the bone fragments as much as possible and conducted a genetic analysis. The results indicated that the bones belonged to four adult women and two male children and that the women were shorter and more slender than the average female Neanderthal.
Forensic investigation and microscopic analysis of the remains revealed clear signs of butchery, such as cut marks and notches. This is evidence of nutritional cannibalism, according to the researchers.
When they combined their findings with a previous isotopic analysis of the remains, they concluded that the cannibalized Neanderthals came from a completely different region than the one they died in. This indicated that they were victims of exocannibalism—the practice of eating a person from outside of one’s own community—possibly as a result of intergroup conflict, territoriality, or cultural treatment of outsiders.
“At a minimum, it suggests that weaker members of one or multiple groups from a single neighbouring region were deliberately targeted,” the researchers wrote in the study. They hypothesize that exocannibalism may have served as a selection strategy aimed at undermining the reproductive potential of one or more competing groups.
The study’s findings, while stomach-turning, are a window into our distant past. They illustrate how subtle clues from ancient human remains can expose the complex social tensions and selective violence that shaped Neanderthal lives and, ultimately, our own.
