Archaeologists believe early Europeans ate their enemies’ brains

Ancient people living in Europe may have drained the brains of their dead enemies and eaten them, a new study suggests. Researchers examined the bones of at least 10 people from the Magdalenian culture, who lived in Europe between 11,000 and 17,000 years ago. Using imaging techniques, a team of researchers from institutions in France, Spain and Poland identified the types of marks and cuts associated with the removal of marrow in long bones and brains in skulls, reported by CNN.

Several other studies have shown that cannibalism was relatively common among the Magdalenian people as a funerary rite and as a form of violence. But this particular case was a case of war, says Francesc Marginedas, one of the study’s lead authors, because there was no special treatment of other Magdalenian sites, nor the presence of skull cups, which is associated with the ritualization of bodies.

Maszyc Cave near Krakow

Marginedas, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Paleoecology and Human Social Evolution in Spain, was part of a team studying bones preserved in Maszyc Cave near Krakow, Poland, a famous prehistoric site that has been studied extensively for decades. During that time, various theories have emerged to explain why the ancient Magdalenians cut open the skulls of dead bodies. While a study in the 1990s concluded that these ancient people consumed the brains of their enemies, later studies have highlighted the lack of human teeth marks on the skulls, undermining the cannibalism hypothesis.

For Marginedas, however, all the evidence leads us to think that this is something more related to violence and conflict than to a funeral ritual. He and his team used electron microscopes to examine the bones, identifying marks and cuts on 68% of them and demonstrating that they were made by humans, not by a natural process. The bones belonged to at least 10 individuals – six adults and four juveniles, who may have been related to each other. Additional DNA analysis is needed to confirm this.

Cannibalism: A Perfect Natural History

Since they died so long ago, it is very difficult to say with 100% certainty that this is a case of wartime cannibalism. By taphonomically analyzing the surfaces of the intact bones (the study of the processes that organic matter undergoes after death) to look for any traces that might tell a story about what happened, archaeologists determined that the bones were from arms and legs, and that they had been cut and broken to extract and consume the marrow.

Bill Shutt, a zoologist and author of Cannibalism: A Perfect Natural History, who was not involved in the study, thinks this is a really good study. However, he cautioned against concluding definitively that this is an example of cannibalism – there are alternative answers to this question about what happened. We don’t know enough about the Magdalenian culture to say that they were cannibals. Who knows what these people did? Did they believe that cracking the skulls of the dead or skinning them was respectful? There are cultures where the bodies were cleaned of their bodies during a funeral ritual.