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Were Neanderthals Devoured By Humans?
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 17, 2009 09:22 PM
from the subsumed-or-consumed dept.
from the subsumed-or-consumed dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that a Neanderthal jawbone covered in cut marks similar to those left behind when flesh is stripped from deer provides crucial evidence that humans attacked Neanderthals, and sometimes killed them, bringing back their bodies to caves to eat or to use their skulls or teeth as trophies. 'For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place,' says Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique. According to Rozzi, a discovery at Les Rois in south-west France provides compelling support for that argument. Previous excavations revealed bones that were thought to be exclusively human. But Rozzi's team re-examined them and found one they concluded was Neanderthal." (Continued, below.)
"Importantly, it was covered in cut marks similar to those left behind when flesh is stripped using stone tools. Not every team member agrees. 'One set of cut marks does not make a complete case for cannibalism,' says Francesco d'Errico, of the Institute of Prehistory in Bordeaux. It was also possible that the jawbone had been found by humans and its teeth used to make a necklace, he said. 'This is a very important investigation,' said Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, London. 'This does not prove we systematically eradicated the Neanderthals or that we regularly ate their flesh. But it does add to the evidence that competition from modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction.'"
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how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cannibalism: The act or practice of eating human flesh by mankind
H. neanderthalensis != H. sapiens
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
H. neanderthalensis != H. sapiens
Nope, but Homo sapiens neanderthalensis is darn close. If you saw one shaved and wearing a suit your first thought wouldn't be "Mmmm, lunch!". Unless you're a cannibal, that is.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
If I saw a cow shaved and wearing a suit my first thought wouldn't be "Mmmm, lunch!" either.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
I see one every day at my work place.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Informative)
Yep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_meat [wikipedia.org]
Being eaten by humans is the single greatest threat to Bonobos, arguably the closest primate relative we humans have.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
I may be a meat eater, but any species that can run away from ghosts in a virtual maze and knows to chase them after eating power-pellets is off my menu.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pigs are quite smart.
Just get one of those brain interfaces for them to make it easier for them to control stuff.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the problem with bush meat is it is theorized that we as a species may have had various nasty diseases passed to us by eating bush meat, including possibly AIDS and a scary variant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/file_on_4/3954963.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Parent
Get a brain, dude (Score:5, Interesting)
I know it's all the rage nowadays to troll in the name of racism and stuff, but at least you could try to use your brain first. At all. Propaganda doesn't work well if it's that incredibly stupid and unbelievable, you know?
1. Raping a chimp is a horribly bad idea. They are fast, have incredible upper body strength (they use their arms for locomotion, you don't), good reach with those arms, and don't have hangups about killing a human in self-defense. (You're not even the same species, so their mirror neurons won't even fire to prevent deadly injury.)
Briefly, it's only one notch less dangerous than trying to rape a tiger.
So the thought of an african raping one... damn, if they could do something like that, I'm starting to have serious respect for them.
2. The virus can actually be transmitted by _any_ kind of contact between infected blood/flesh/membranes and mucous membranes or unprotected flesh. E.g., probably more humans got infected with AIDS from reusing syringes, than from actual sex. Also, roll it a bit in your head that oral sex can also get you infected with AIDS: the virus _can_ enter your blood stream through the mouth.
What I'm getting at is that eating that meat raw (including smoked, as salami, etc) can get enough viruses in your mouth to run the risk of infection. It won't happen every time, but get a few million people doing it regularly, and someone will hit the jackpot.
Also, look at that "unprotected flesh" bit. Simply cutting yourself while preparing infected meat, can get _any_ infection into your bloodstream. That's in fact one risk that surgeons face every day: if you cut yourself while operating on someone with an infection, you can get infected too. (As a bit of trivia: doctors finally started washing their hands only after one operated after having dissected a corpse, and managed to kill himself by septic shock too, not just his patient.)
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Funny)
..has more to do with the lack of chimps and gorillas in the US and Europe..
Yeah we ate them all already.
Parent
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Informative)
It's called "bushmeat". African tribes are often driven to hunt it, due to famine. It's though that HIV may have transferred to humans via undercooked chimpanzee.
Parent
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Plus how do we know the human ate the neanderthal meat? Maybe they chewed it and spat it out.
--
Slow Poke [pair.com]
Parent
Technicalities. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cannibalism, although culturally repugnant to us, is fact of carnivorous history. Dogs eat their own, mice eat their own, fish eat their own, and sharks eat their own; is it so surprising that our ancestors ate their neighbors when food was scarce?
Furthermore, consider the existence (or eradication as proof thereof) of cannibalistic societies: they didn't just randomly choose to eat what they do/did, they were taught to do so by someone.
Parent
Re:Technicalities. (Score:4, Interesting)
If humans were competing with nearby Neanderthals (chances are they were; we can't even keep from killing each other, and resources were almost certainly limited), them being unlike us (genetically unable to procreate with us, according to recent studies) would almost certainly make them animals from the viewpoint of our ancestors. Their looks wouldn't help much either.
Also the fact that there were mass extinctions of all kinds of animals right after humans arrived in nearly every locale is no coincidence. We are efficient killers.
Parent
Re:Technicalities. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look how recently the average white person thought that the black person wasn't the same species. It doesn't take a major distinction for people to think of others as inferior and okay to treat like an animal.
Besides that if they were an enemy tribe and resources were limited then it makes sense to kill the enemy to protect your own. If food is limited and you are already killing something, which is eatable, then it makes sense to eat it.
Parent
Re:Technicalities. (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know the Neanderthals weren't the aggressors? But Humans being more intelligent were able to beat them into submission?
You frame your post like the big bad humans came in and exterminated the poor gentle defenseless Neanderthals because Humans are just so awful.
The swan song of the self deprececating urban 'intellectual'.
Nature's produced a hell of a lot worse and more blood thirsty killers than Humans.
Parent
Re:Technicalities. (Score:4, Interesting)
In the book "Before the Dawn" [amazon.com] it says that the idea that we reproduced with neanderthals is effectively ruled out due to genetic distance. Neanderthals were encountered by modern humans in Europe, and so Europeans should have more genetic distance from other peoples if we had bred with them.
Parent
Cannibalism still occurs in "modern" times. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, "cannibalism" still occurs in "modern" times. The most infamous incidents of cannibalism occurred in China from 1966 until 1976. According to a report [nytimes.com] by the "New York Times" in 1993, "At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over 'counterrevolutionaries,' the documents report. Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees.
'There are many varieties of cannibalism,' declares one report, 'and among them are these: killing someone and making a late dinner of it, slicing off the meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each person takes a large chunk home to boil, roasting the liver and eating it for its medicinal properties, and so on.'
The documents suggest that at least 137 people, and probably hundreds more, were eaten in Guangxi Province in southern China in the late 1960's. In most cases, many people ate the flesh of one corpse, so the number of cannibals may have numbered in the thousands."
According to a report [time.com] by "Time Magazine" in 2001, "The atrocities took many forms, according to documents. One report refers to 'eating people as an after-dinner snack . . .barbecuing people's livers . . .banqueting on human meat.' The same document matter-of-factly relates specific tales of depravity. 'On May 14, 1968,' it says, 'a group of 11, led by the Wei brothers, captured a man named Chen Guorong and killed him with a big knife before cutting out his liver. They shared the human meat with 20 participants.' The same month Wu Shufang, a teacher at the Wuxuan Middle School, was beaten to death; her liver was roasted and eaten. During 1968, 91 members of the Communist Party in Guangxi were expelled on charges that they were involved in cannibalism, but none was severely punished."
To this day, some of the cannibals still hold political power in the Chinese government.
Parent
Re:Cannibalism still occurs in "modern" times. (Score:5, Interesting)
Spent 2 1/2 years aboard ship with a Gunner's Mate from the Philippines. One of those BIG guys from back in the hills. His dad was a headhunter. When asked directly if he had ever eaten a human, he would answer, "I ate what my mother gave me! I didn't ask!" Some years later, I got a "stepmother" from the Philippines. Pretty much the same story.
Yes, there ARE people alive today who have eaten human flesh.
Repugnant? I dunno. If I were starving, and given the choice of human flesh or rat, I might opt for the long pig. I've NEVER heard anyone say that rat tastes good, but long pig is supposed to be just like - well - PIG! (I often wonder if that fact has anything to do with Islamic and Jewish prohibitions against pork - it tastes to much like human?)
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Re:Would you eat your cousin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Would you eat your cousin? (Score:4, Funny)
9 to 5 can be 9 to 4 some days. The rest is just been able to do laundry. Having a nice safe boy friend or girl friend helps the cover too.
Dont keep a diary, moms do read them.
Parent
Re:yeah, its called bushmeat (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, what is UP with your movie already? It seems like you've been pushing this movie you're supposedly making (over at K5 and now, I guess, here too) for at least three years now. Are you seriously ever going to come out with a movie, or are you just jerking off over there?
Not that I really want to watch it, but I'm getting tired of seeing you brag about the fact that you're a hip indie filmmaker in your sig. What a douchebag.
Parent
Were Neanderthals Devoured By Humans? (Score:5, Interesting)
Misleading title...
RS
Not cannabilisim (Score:4, Informative)
Eating apes is pretty close to cannibalisim (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you draw the line? Neanderthals were pretty close to modern humans, and as far as we can tell, they were mostly "other tribes we're competing/fighting with", which were the typical target of cannibalism in most human societies that practiced it regularly (as opposed to starvation situations like the Donner Party or that airplane crash.) They may look a little funny, but they're basically the neighbors, not just wildlife.
There are other reasons for it - some of the South Pacific islanders in Vanuatu have explained their motivation for cannibalism as "people are tasty", and that's pretty much why some Africans eat our near cousins like chimps and bonobos, which are about 98% like us. And there are occasional societies that practice it for magical reasons (it's currently a bad time to be albino in some parts of Africa, although the practitioners-of-traditional-medicine don't tend to actually eat the victims.) And we're certainly close enough cousins that eating undercooked apes and even monkeys is a really bad idea - seems to be where AIDS and a few other diseases have gotten to human populations from.
That's not to say that chimps are peace-loving hippies themselves - one of the more vicious things I've seen on TV nature channels was a gang of half a dozen chimps hunting and killing a monkey.
Parent
Re:Eating apes is pretty close to cannibalisim (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you draw the line?
At the "is it another species" line.
No = cannibalism.
Yes = not cannibalism, though it may still be weird or gross.
Parent
Re:Eating apes is pretty close to cannibalisim (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that modern biology shows that that line is arbitrary; common descent means that what appear to be separate "species" are just pairs of ring species [wikipedia.org] where the intermediate populations have died off. And in particular, whether Neanderthals could or did breed with us is a controversial topic; the "did not breed" is the leading theory right now, but it hasn't killed the "did breed" one just yet.
Parent
Re:Not cannabilisim (Score:4, Informative)
The taboo against cannibalism, like the taboo against eating, say, pigs comes from the risk of cross infection. Any virus that infects a piece of meat of a prey can also infect a predator of the same species. To minimize this risk predators tend to eat outside of the species. OTOH, as we have seen, there can be across family, order, or even class, but the risk of infection does seem to decrease we move up the taxonomic classification. So we may have a specific taboo against eating within the family or genus, but that taboo is not cannibalism.
Parent
Only in France! (Score:5, Funny)
Only in France would a Scientist subvert his own work due to culinary objections!
-Peter
"The Inheritors" (Score:4, Informative)
William Golding wrote a fictional account of the Neanderthals' extinction at the hands of Homo sapiens:
The Inheritors [wikipedia.org].
Scary, but beautifully written.
CJ
Neanderthal (Score:4, Insightful)
The Other Other Other White Meat.
Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:5, Funny)
That robust frame of theirs was probably good for endurance, but those tasty suckers sure couldn't run fast!
Poor neanderthals. Probably thought they were the top of the food chain too, until H.s.s. came along.
Re:Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:4, Interesting)
That robust frame of theirs was probably good for endurance, but those tasty suckers sure couldn't run fast!
I dunno, I saw an interesting documentary on them that suggested they probably had shit for endurance compared to us. They attributed that conclusion to their different gait and the fact that it would require more energy to move that heavy frame.
Humans aren't very fast by the standards of the animal kingdom but we do have a fair amount of endurance compared to a lot of other animals. With enough water a reasonably fit human can march all day long. Many other animals can't do that because they overheat and tire out much quicker than we do. Dogs/wolves are adapt at doing it -- maybe that explains why they adapted so easily to living with humans?
Parent
Re:Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans actually have the best endurance of all land animals (better than horses - humans win long distance races against horses all the time.) I read that it's easy to catch a gazelle - just stalk it for about a day and it will lay down, exhausted and all you need is a stick or a rock to kill it. Some larger animals like moose take 2 to 3 days. There are still tribes that hunt this way and there's a theory that this was the primary hunting method of early hominids after they ventured out into the savanna - since their brain (hence energy needs) grew much earlier than there's evidence of weapons like spears.
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Re:Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, humans are pretty much the Terminators of the animal kingdom.
We can chase prey for days. We can hold grudges forever. Rip out our "claws"? We don't care, we'll pull out new ones and throw them at you. We can warp reality so that everything is trying to kill you. You have a nice adaptation for cold weather? We'll kill you and take it.
Gazelle 1: Oh man, I've been running for a whole five minutes and that human's still chasing me!
Gazelle 2: It gets worse. The wolves have started teaming up with them.
Gazelle 1: Oh God...
Parent
Reparations (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly, the only decent thing to do is to resurrect the Neanderthal species as soon as we can reconstruct their DNA, then pass the Earth into their custody, along with a bashful apology etched as the introductory paragraph of our Rosetta stones.
Re:Reparations (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
hansel and gretel: (Score:5, Insightful)
don't stray from mom and dad and go in the woods or the crazy lady will eat you
its a kids story, with a useful function, and also probably an oral historical memory of when this was real
"long pig" is the name in the south pacific for human meat. because, obviously, we taste like pig
which, as a lover of bacon, makes me a little nervous: i'd probably like the taste
i would wager that every single eyeball reading these words is the offspring, some great-great-great-ancestor, ate human flesh at some point
you can feel morally repulsed by that diea, but the human stomach outweighs your moral compass when push comes to shove, and famine was not an uncommon thing in human history
Someone please tag (Score:5, Funny)
Could someone please tag this with 'nomnomnom'?
there is no good definition of "species" (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of comments say "not cannibalism!" And they have a point. But...
The root of this semantic impasse is that there is no good definition of species, and I don't think there ever will be.
The one usually taught in undergrad bio -- ability to make viable offspring -- has problems. To name a few:
* Two same-gendered humans can't make a viable offspring.
* Prepubescent children, post-menopausal women, and many other humans are sterile.
* Sometimes two "species" could create viable offspring, but they don't. (E.g., different mating dances preclude them mating, but in a lab, sperm A and egg B make a viable offspring.)
* Sometimes A can mate with B, and B with C, but A cannot mate with C directly. (A Chihuahua cannot mate with a Great Dane. It's physically impossible.)
* The nontransitivity above (A, B, and C) is generally true of ALL creatures if you're allowed to go back in time. Go back far enough, and our ancestors could mate with chimp ancestors. A little farther and we share ancestors!
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
So whether or not this is 'cannibalism' relies on whether the fossil H. sapiens are conspecific with the fossil H. neanderwhatever. And that's a semantic question with no answer.
But cannibalism or not, our ancestors apparently ate them some neanderthals!
Man Eat Man World... (Score:4, Funny)
Denial - Not Just a River - Also Druids Cannibals (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Denial - Not Just a River - Also Druids Canniba (Score:4, Interesting)
I read an essay by Martin Gardner in one of his books [amazon.com] on cannibalism, asking whether it really happened. The essay was really a discussion of a book, which made the claims:
The book claimed that all evidence of customary [1] cannibalism effectively boiled down to a tribe / people / whatever saying: "Those guys who live over there, they are cannibals!" So anthropology students have been taught for ages that various primitive tribes engaged in cannibalism, but there is seemingly no proof of this statement. This was controversial and a few years ago (10, perhaps?) so I'm not sure what the current state of the art is.
[1] There are obvious one-off examples, like recently those rugby players down in South America, and in (pre)history perhaps eating mighty chiefs/warriors to try to absorb some of their strength or mana. This is, rather, looking at the idea of tribes that eat people on a regular basis.
Parent
Press sensationalism or bad anthropology? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sick of this kind of story, and I'm not sure if the problem is in the press, or with the anthropologists, but its a big leap from the evidence to concluding that its cannibalism. The evidence is interesting and consists of cutmarks on a neanderthal jawbone, cutmarks consistent with defleshing of the jawbone using stone tools. Now why would someone want to do that? To eat lips and cheeks? Really? Sure its possible, but there are other explanations that are just as likely. What would show cannibalism conclusively would be neanderthal dna in homo sapiens sapiens coprolites. I haven't heard of anyone doing any such testing, though someone recently found australopithecine hair in hyena dung from Sterkfontein cave in South Africa, indicating they were eating early hominids at least occassionally.
Humans have a long history of curating bones (especially skulls and jawbones) from others. Some of these are manually defleshed, while others are left to deflesh by natural means. These can be bones of ancestors, relatives, or people killed in warfare. So, cut marks, for me, are much more likely to indicate defleshing for curation.
minefield, hard to prove (Score:4, Insightful)
This kind of thing is a minefield, and very hard to prove. To see what I mean, do a google search on "cannibalism anasazi." People get emotional about certain scientific issues, and often the reason they're so emotional is that there's painful history involved, and/or a history of the misuse of science. For instance, it's theoretically a reasonable scientific topic to look for correlations between race and intelligence -- but if you try study it, you'll unleash such a shitstorm that you'll wish you hadn't. Part of this is because the topic isn't PC, but part is also because of history (eugenics, Nazism, Cyril Burt).
Cannibalism has historically been one of these scientific issues that are just hard to study because emotions run too high. For instance, you have the history of Europeans portraying Africans as savage cannibals (which made it easier for Americans to justify slavery, and for the Belgians to justify cutting people's arms off in Congo).
Some archaeologists and anthropologists have gone so far as to claim that cannibalism simply doesn't exist, and never has. Others have found physical evidence that they interpret as evidence of widespread cannibalism in certain societies. Still others say that it exists, but only in a ritualized form.
I'm not convinced that the chances are very good of coming to a definite conclusion about cannibalism that might have happened hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we can't even study the more recent cases.
Humans and other animals (Score:5, Informative)
"Human" is a term applicable to all members of the genus "Homo", just like "Chimpanzee" is the word for all members of "Pan" - the biological genus, that is, not the club (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Club_Copenhagen). As a note of interest, some biologists even argue that chimpanzees are biologically so close to us that they should be included in the same genus.
I suspect the idea that humans are somehow special and "more" than animals stems from the kind of religion we have traditionally practised here in the West, which is in many ways still a "famer- and shepherd religion". To most hunter/gatherers this distinction is unknown - the animals you hunt are seen as persons you have to respect; when we became farmers, animals became mere items that the Creator had made for our convenience.
And of, it isn't hard to see this traditional prejudice reflected in the constantly repeated "Humans vs Neanderthal" nonsense - something that continues despite the ever growing body of evidence that shows the Neanderthal Human to be a sophisticated creature with culture on par with our own at the time - there is evidence that they took care of their elderly and sick, such as the remains of a person who was clearly disabled, yet lived to adulthood, as well as eg. the "Divje Babe" flute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_flute) which may be evidence that they practised music. They were clearly very clever hunters, possibly more so than Homo sapiens - a recent study suggests they hunted large prey actively rather than simply scavenging.