French Cuisine That Was Not for the Queasy
Some Neanderthals practiced cannibalism
French caves are known for sheltering exquisite paleolithic paintings. But a cave in Ardeche, in southeastern France, hides uglier bits of culture--the best evidence yet of cannibalism among Neanderthals.
Anthropologists have long suspected that Neanderthals, cousins of modern humans, who lived in Europe from about 125,000 to 30,000 years ago, practiced cannibalism. But turn-of-the-century excavations had obliterated any evidence of the practice.
Since Neanderthal bones were found in the Baume Moula-Guercy cave in 1991, prehistorian Alban Defleur of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie in Marseille has unearthed the remains of six Neanderthals: two adults, two adolescents, and two children as young as 6 or 7.
Plat du jour. Defleur enlisted the help of Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California-Berkeley, to analyze the 120,000-to-100,000-year-old bones, which had been defleshed with stone tools and broken apart. Mingled among them were identically processed bones of red deer and other game animals, suggesting that the Neanderthals had been dismembered not for some grisly mortuary ritual but to be eaten instead, the scientists concluded in last week's Science.
What motivated these relations of early humans to cannibalize, though, remains a puzzle. While modern humans have practiced cannibalism to stave off starvation--a recent example being the survival for 72 days of members of a Uruguayan rugby team who ate dead passengers after their plane crashed in the Andes in 1972--it can also serve a ritualistic or religious purpose. Records from the 1500s indicate that the Aztecs sometimes consumed their enemies, perhaps in the belief they would absorb their strength. Cannibalism also has been used as a mortuary ritual, in which a family or community member is eaten by loved ones, assuming a sort of immortality.
Scientists hope that evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in Ardeche, and at similar sites in Croatia, may shed light on the beliefs of this little understood species. Unlike other animals, says White, "when people eat people, they think about it." The question now is what they were thinking.
With Jennifer Couzin
This story appears in the October 11, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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