Were Neanderthals Devoured By Humans? 502
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.'"
how is it cannibalism? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cannibalism: The act or practice of eating human flesh by mankind
H. neanderthalensis != H. sapiens
Were Neanderthals Devoured By Humans? (Score:5, Interesting)
Misleading title...
RS
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?
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.
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!
Re:Would you eat your cousin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:1, Interesting)
Indeed. One popular method of hunting among those for whom guns, bows, or even spears are not hardcore enough is to simply follow the animal until it falls down, and then cut its jugular, if it isn't simply stone dead already from sheer exhaustion. Of course, carrying the creature back to your truck/village after walking for three days straight is the *real* test of endurance. It's not quite as glamorous as killing a man-eater cat by ripping its tongue out with your bare hands, though*.
There are several reasons we're top of the food chain--it isn't just our big, juicy brains.
*This actually happened. And the guy was like 70 years old when he did it, too.
Re:Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Very true, see: Persistence hunting [wikipedia.org].
Leading to this [youtube.com].
Kalahari desert hunters chase (on foot!) a Kudu to exhaustion.
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.
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.
Re:Cave art was a method of teaching hunting (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoops, I accidentally posted the parent item as "Anonymous Coward". Silly mistake!
I should also perhaps have mentioned that while H. sapiens was evolving in Africa, with rapidly changing environment between scarcity and plenty, it would have made sense during the droughts and famines for the strongest groups to annihilate the weaker groups. Otherwise overpopulation meant that everyone died. It was better to reduce population rapildly so that the survivors would have enough to eat.
Well, how would you know who to kill during a drought or famine? Here's where language becomes really invaluable. Language developed in Africa about 250,000 years ago probably. And language clearly distinguishes one group from another. Language is extremely useful for group hunting. But it's also makes foreign language speakers seem like animals, who are therefore "fair game" to kill and maybe eat. This process of breaking a species up into tribes according to languages was only possible in humans. The reason we only see tribalism and wars and genocide in humans is because only humans have language. Language is the prerequisite for tribalism, and tribalism is the prerequisite for genocide.
Therefore it was inevitable that the sophisticated language users from Africa with tribal programming would wipe out the Neanderthals.
ARCHAIC (Score:2, Interesting)
Srsly now, you guys in funny skirts, let's stop pretending like you are above the Nature and stop destroying its fine inventions. =)
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.
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.
Re:Cannibalism still occurs in "modern" times. (Score:3, Interesting)
My girlfriend's father, a retired PLA colonel (and card-carrying Party member), told me about some things that he saw during the Cultural Revolution that didn't even make it into Jung Chang's book on Mao. "And there are other things that I can't discuss with you because they are still state secrets. Very terrible things. If only they could just cause me so easily to forget them altogether."
I guess this is one of the things he was talking about.
Re:hansel and gretel: (Score:3, Interesting)
"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"
In the immortal words of nineteenth century Australias most infamous convict escapee:
"A full belly is prerequisite to all manner of good. Without that, no man knows what hunger will make him do. " - Alexander Pearce.
Eight convicts escaped into the Tasmanian wilds together. As they wandered around for weeks and starved they started killing off the injured and sick members of the group, then the weak, then the ones nobody liked, until only two remained. Mr Pearce obviously won that fight.
Unfortunately he seemed to gain a taste for human flesh as on his next escape attempt he killed his mate before they had even run out of food...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/21/2426730.htm [abc.net.au]
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.
Suprised? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ask an african about slavery, do they EVER mention that the majority of slaves shipped to europe and america were SOLD by black slavers?
Ask a german wether he/she "es gewust habe". "Nein, ich habe es nicht". 12+ million people rounded up and slaughtered by volunteers and special units that nobody had ever heard about.
Ask a ROMAN catholic who killed Jesus Christ, bet you none of them make a direct link between ROMANS and ROMAN catholics.
Ask an american to explain the difference between conquering the west and the final solution/lebensraum. Making proper use of land illused by the lesser natives who are to be concentrated into special places where they would be more happy? Nah, no link.
Ask a dutch person why one of the most hated words, "apartheid" needs no translation. Ask them why in their colonies in the america's, the natives are BLACK.
The list goes on and on. Human history ain't nice but we like to pretend that we are nice even while we are butchering millions.
Ask why millions are starving from lack of food and water, while we are getting fat arguing on slashdot. But hey, I am nice, it wasn't me. And you better agree, or it is you too.
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?)
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.)
Re:Technicalities. (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly; most likely they were the initial aggressors, defending their territory from us as we poured in. But when it comes to killing, seriously there is no other animal that does it as efficiently as we do. 30 large species of mammals went extinct when humans arrived in North America 10,000 years after the last Neanderthal disappeared. It was like a buffet where we ate our way down from the largest animals towards the smaller ones.
It is intriguing that they appeared to be stronger than humans, their children probably matured faster than human children, and yet.... here we are.
Not only that, we generally know when to restrain our killing.
I'm not so sure about that part of what you said though.
Re:Suprised? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ask an american to explain the difference between conquering the west and the final solution/lebensraum. Making proper use of land illused by the lesser natives who are to be concentrated into special places where they would be more happy? Nah, no link.
Better yet - ask an Israeli.
It amazes me they don't see the irony when committing illegal land grabs.
Re:Get a brain, dude (Score:2, Interesting)
Raping a chimp is a horribly bad idea. They are fast, have incredible upper body strength
Maybe it's just me, but the size of their biceps isn't what stops me wanting to have sex with chimps?
Re:Run, neanderthal, run! (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, they were immensely strong. Anatomical studies of things like muscle attachments points indicate that they were as much a 3x the strength of a modern human. They are also quite brainy: they made tools and weapons and must have hunted cooperatively because they sometimes went after big game, like mammoth.
So, slow and tasty they might be, but since they were armed with clubs and spears and were probably strong enough to rip your arms off with their bare hands, they weren't exactly easy pickings. If modern humans ate them, it was probably in the context of warfare -- as in the case of historically documented modern human cannibalism.
I wonder whether Neanderthal strength was too much of a good thing. Modern humans don't need it. Neanderthal skeletons indicate a rough life -- lots of broken bones. Some have suggested they jumped on moderate sized prey and wrestled it to the ground for the kill. It's pretty bad-ass, to be sure, but unnecessary for a creature with a brain that size. Modern humans, being weaker, have greater incentive to improve their tactics and weapons, and in the long term that beats out any conceivable degree of physical strength.
Re:how is it cannibalism? (Score:3, Interesting)
There seems to be almost no living thing (an isn't deadly toxic) that humans won't eat.
And even then we might go to great lengths to remove the toxins either by preparation, or even by breeding versions that aren't toxic. See almonds.
I think it's actually the aliens out there that would have to worry about us eating them, we've already tried everything edible on this planet.
And we only figured out what was edible by trying everything else.
Seriously, you have to wonder. There was a person out there who said "Okay, so Grunk may have died eating one of these nuts... but maybe if I boiled it really good first!" Someone (maybe the same person) must have said "I wonder if I can eat this rock", followed by "Okay that didn't work out, but what about limestone instead of granite?"
Re:One of the best maybe, the best? No so sure (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah I don't know about overall endurance, but note that those herds of wildebeast don't move very fast. One of our advantages is that we have a nice efficient jogging gait, while prey animals like wildebeast or deer don't. They can walk for a very long ways, or they can gallop a short ways. Part of our trick was to jog after the animal at a pace in between its own gaits, so it'd run away then get tired and walk, then we'd get close, then it'd have to run again, and this helped tire the animal out more rapidly as we pursued it at a constant rate. And really it's not so much about energy efficiency as it is about heat dissipation. It's heat exhaustion that ultimately would doom these animals.
Wolves also have a jogging gait and will sometimes pursue prey in the same way. More support for the idea that they would fit in very well with humans and that this helped along the domestication process.
Re:Technicalities. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Humans throughout their history have jumped at the chance to make war on fellow humans. It would be astounding if they didn't do the same to Neanderthals."
Chimps make war on other tribes of chimps too (remember the recent article here about how they actually use battle tactics, do border patrols, do organized genocide, etc.?) Neanderthals probably did the same. It's not a human thing, it's a PRIMATE thing. We humans just happen to be better at it than some of our former competitors. That's why they're "former" and we're in charge, rather than the reverse.