Neolithic families were massacred in caves on the Iberian Peninsula five or six hundred years ago, skinned, shedding, cooked and eaten, new research suggests.
Researchers found evidence that at least 11 people, including adults, adolescents and children, may have been victims of war cannibalism in the bloody event at Elmirador Cave in northern Spain.
Bones found in the caves included cut marks, human bite marks, fractures from bone marrow extraction, and signs they had boiled, according to researchers’ findings published Thursday (August 7) in a scientific journal report.
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The grand events took place over a short period within a few days, during the final stages of the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when cave occupation, agriculture and agriculture became more common in the area. Researchers could only speculate that the violence between groups caused obvious cannibalism, but no signs of rituals or hunger that could otherwise explain the event.
“This was neither a funeral tradition nor a response to extreme hunger,” said Francesc Marginedas, a researcher at the Institute for Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Catalonia (IPHES) and the University of Robila I in Spain, in a statement. “The evidence points to a violent episode, given how quickly it happened, perhaps the result of conflict between nearby agricultural communities.”
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This is not the first time researchers have found evidence of cannibalism at the El Mirador Cave. In the early 2000s, archaeologists revealed the remains of six individuals with similar marks as those in the new researchers. However, these bodies were young from the early Bronze Age, ages around 4,600 to 4,100 years old, and their research found that they were unrelated to hundreds of newly identified old bones discovered in subsequent excavations.
The researchers made bones in the new study into bones between 5,709 and 5,573 years of age, and chemical analysis determined that they were local to the area and were slaughtered for a short period of time. The victims were ages 7 and over 50, and were likely nuclear or large families, according to the study.
This new case of potentially conflict-driven cannibalism is consistent with evidence of extensive Neolithic intergroup violence. Researchers noted that this period was characterized by conflict and instability as Europe moved from foraging to agriculture.
“The development of conflicts and strategies to manage and prevent them is part of the human nature,” said Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and an associated researcher at Ifes, in a statement. “Ethnographic and archaeological records show that even in small, untiered societies, there can be violent episodes where enemies can be consumed as the ultimate form of exclusion.”
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