Six adults and four children were massacred and consumed as a form of humiliation after a violent conflict with a rival group
At the end of the 19th century, they appeared in the Cave of Maszycka, located near Cracovia (Poland), the remains of ten individuals 18,000 years ago: six adults and four children, probably members of the same family. The skulls, fragmented, showed clear marks of having been burst, but the reason was not clear. Did anyone want to access the brain to devour it? Or the heads had been used in a funeral ritual? An international team of researchers led by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPhes-Cerca) and the CSIC has found new evidence that the group was cannibalized, probably by another rival group “to humiliate them” after a conflict in which Clear losers were. An act of extreme violence that is known as war cannibalism.
“They ate them completely, they were treated as animals,” says Francesc Marginedas, a predoctoral researcher of the IPhes-Cerca and the Rovira I University I Virgili and principal author of the study published by the magazine ‘Scientific Reports’.
The set of 63 human bone fragments, including skulls and long bones of the limbs, was analyzed by a focal microscope and a taphonomic study, which reveals the processes that affect the individual from his death to his finding in the site. In this way, the team identified that 68% of the remains had marks of human manipulation, such as cuts and intentionted fractures to decrease the bodies, dismantle the bones and extract the muscle packages, the marrow and the brain later.
The bodies were prosecuted shortly after death without giving time to decomposition. The skull presents cutting marks resulting from the extraction of scalp and meat, while fractures are related to access to the brain, a nutrient rich organ. Long bones such as femur and humerus show fractures by percussion to extract the spring, source of fat and calories.
“They processed the entire skeleton from the skull to the rest of the body,” explains Marginedas. The remains appeared next to those of bovids, deer or horses, did not deserve a better burial. “They were treated as animals, such as food, there are no signs of love or respect, which allowed us to rule out the funeral ritual,” says the archaeologist.
Marginedas believes that the practice of war cannibalism was more common in Magdaleniense, the same culture that painted the Bison of Altamira, of what until now was accepted. In addition to Maszyckas, similar evidence has been found in at least four other deposits of the time.
«For these groups, cannibalism was probably part of their culture and practiced it in two ways: the funeral, in which they ate their own dead as a form of respect; And the war, which is a form of humiliation of the enemy, ”clarifies the archaeologist. Similar cases have been more recently documented among the Wari peoples of Brazil.
The author states that the increase in population during the demographic expansion produced after the last glacial maximum 20,000 years could have intensified competition for resources between different groups, favoring clashes and war cannibalism. “Until now it has been considered that these hunters-gatherers were rather peaceful, but it is likely that there were more conflicts than we think,” he says. The biggest sample of that violence is the massacre of Turkana (Africa), “the first war of prehistory” in which about thirty people, including six children, was massacred 10,000 years ago.
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