Archaeologists discovered a horrifying secret while analyzing hundreds of Neanderthal bone fragments unearthed from a Belgian cave. Six Neanderthals were cannibalized 45,000 years ago, and the cannibals chose to eat women and children first.
Modern archaeologists first explored the Goyet cave system in the Walloon region of southern Belgium in the late 19th century. Excavators found 101 Neanderthal bone fragments, many with butchery marks similar to those found on animal bones, suggesting someone had killed and eaten the bones.
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“While we cannot pinpoint exactly why these people were targeted, the composition of the population (four adult women and two immature individuals) is too unique to be a coincidence,” Quentin Koznefrois, a biological anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France and lead author of the study, told Live Science in an email.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers first reassembled as much of the dissected bones as possible and discovered that the large collection of fragments comprised at least six Neanderthals. Based on genetic analysis, researchers determined that four of the Neanderthals were adult or adolescent females and two were boys, and that the females were not related. The female Neanderthal bones also showed that she was shorter and lighter than the average Neanderthal woman.
All this evidence was combined with previous isotopic studies that revealed that the Neanderthals cannibalized at Goyette were all born in a completely different region than the one where they died, but shared a similar diet. (Isotopes are variations in elements found in the environment and water that end up in bones and teeth. Different locations have different isotopic signatures, allowing researchers to determine where ancient people and animals lived.)
Researchers say the evidence gleaned from Goyette’s Neanderthal bones points to “exocannibalism,” or cannibalism by one group by another.
“At a minimum, this suggests that weaker members of one or more groups in a single contiguous region were deliberately targeted,” the researchers wrote in their paper, adding that the cannibals may have specifically sought to undermine the reproductive potential of competing groups.
“These people may have come from different groups, suggesting that the cannibalism at Goye may represent multiple events involving different groups over time,” Cosnefroy said, or they may have “belonged to the same group and were killed during a single event.”
However, it is currently unclear whether the cannibals were Neanderthals or early Homo sapiens, which likely existed in the region at the same time as Neanderthals.
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However, the researchers suggested that while cannibalism among early Homo sapiens was usually seen in connection with funerary rituals, evidence of surviving cannibalism was found in Neanderthal sites in France and Croatia. This means Goyette’s bones represent “the most convincing evidence to date of intergroup competition between Late Pleistocene Neanderthal populations.”
The Neanderthal whose bones were discovered in Goyette Cave was one of the last Neanderthals in Europe, at a time when Homo sapiens was beginning to invade European territory. If a previously isolated Neanderthal group encountered another Neanderthal group, deadly intergroup tensions could have arisen, especially if they considered each other to be enemies, the researchers wrote.
The researchers concluded that cannibalized Neanderthal women and children were likely the unfortunate result of abuse by outsiders during an era marked by cultural diversity, biological decline, and the arrival of Homo sapiens in northern Europe.
How the massacred Neanderthals ended up in Goyette Cave is still under investigation.
“Transporting living people is much easier than transporting corpses and body parts,” Cosnefory said, although Goett Neanderthals are primarily represented by leg bones. “This makes it plausible that these people were killed alive near Goyet Cave, and that a group of cannibals deposited only selected body parts inside the chamber.”
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