Elizabeth Culotta
Neanderthals were skilled hunters, working together to fell deer, goats, and perhaps even woolly rhinos with wooden spears. After the kill, they expertly butchered the carcasses, slicing meat and tendons from bone with stone tools and bashing open long bones to get at the fatty marrow inside. Now, on page 128, a French and American team reports that 100,000-year-old Neanderthals at the French cave of Moula-Guercy performed precisely the same kinds of butchery on some of their own kind.
Marks on the bones clearly reveal that these early humans filleted the chewing muscle from the heads of two young Neanderthals, sliced out the tongue of at least one, and smashed the leg bone of a large adult to get at the marrow. The bone fragments were apparently then dumped amid the remains of deer and other butchered mammals. "Human and mammal remains were treated very similarly," says first author Alban Defleur of the Université du Mediterrané at Marseilles. "We can safely infer that both species were exploited for a culinary goal."
Tantalizing hints of cannibalism have been spotted at other Neanderthal sites for decades, but this is far and away the best documented case, say other researchers, who praise the team's careful comparison of breakage and cut marks in deer and human bones. "Quite convincing," says anthropologist Fred H. Smith of Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, noting that there's little sign of gnawing or other indications that carnivores rather than people mauled the bones. "And the documented cut marks seal the deal."
Smith and a few others say that without an eyewitness, we may never know exactly why Neanderthals handled corpses so seemingly brutally. But most paleoanthropologists are unfazed by the idea of early humans eating each other. As Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, puts it, "Why should modern humans be the only violent ones?"
Defleur began to zero in on cannibalism after he saw cut marks on human bones from a test pit sunk into the cave at Moula-Guercy, a site that had previously yielded stone tools characteristic of the Neanderthals' Mousterian culture. He teamed up with paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, to rigorously compare the pattern of marks on the human bones with those on bones from red deer, presumably hunted for meat, at the same site.
The bones--78 pieces identified as belonging to at least six humans and almost 400 fragments attributed to other mammals--were scattered over 20 square meters. All the braincases and long bones of both deer and humans were smashed open, presumably to allow brains and marrow to be extracted. "In both taxa, marrow bones were systematically broken, and bones without marrow were not damaged," says Defleur.
Analysis of three pieces of a large thigh bone showed how, after its muscles were sliced away, it was set on an anvil stone and hit repeatedly with another stone. Telltale striations mark the bone's outer surface on the anvil side, directly opposite "percussion pits" made by the hammerstone. Cut marks on the clavicle also show where the Neanderthals disarticulated the arm at the shoulder. Others reveal where they cut out tongue and jaw muscles, severed the Achilles' tendon, and sliced other tendons below the toes and at the elbow. The bones bear few signs of burning or roasting, says White, suggesting that even though the Neanderthals had fire, they ate this flesh raw or hacked it off the bone before cooking. "The circumstantial forensic evidence [of cannibalism] is excellent. No mortuary practice has ever been shown to leave these patterns on the resulting osteological assemblages," he says.
In White's view, this well-documented case strengthens other reports of Neanderthal cannibalism, from sites such as Krapina and Vindija in Croatia. Modern humans ranging from Fijians (see p. 39) to ancient southwesterners (not to mention the best selling Hannibal Lecter) apparently had a taste for human flesh. But the evidence implies, says White, that "the incidence of this behavior among the Neanderthals and their ancestors may have been higher than among modern people." Other researchers have suggested that Neanderthals might have been desperate for dietary fat by winter's end--and brains and marrow are rich sources of fat, Wolpoff notes.
Still, White says, "we are not claiming that all Neanderthals were cannibals, rather, that there were some cannibals among the Neanderthals." Indeed, sometimes Neanderthals buried their dead, arranging bodies in a fetal position in semicircular graves. At the moment no one knows why the Moula-Guercy corpses were handled so differently --whether they were enemies or because of some different cultural practice. "Actions fossilize, intentions don't," says Smith.
Far from implying that Neanderthals were brutes, Smith and others say that the finding of cannibalism may indicate sophistication of a sort. The varied treatment of the dead at different Neanderthal sites, Smith says, demonstrates cultural variation and therefore complexity: "When you see some Neanderthals practicing intentional burial and others practicing cannibalism, that is a clear indication of behavior that is multidimensional--a pattern that mirrors the behavior of more modern people."
"To me this is, paradoxically, a very human behavior that indicates a human mind," says anthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga, excavator at the Spanish site of Atapuerca, where there is evidence of cannibalism among 800,000-year-old humans. "Cannibalism is very old in human evolution." Other animals such as chimps sometimes kill and eat parts of their own kind, but "only humans practice systematic cannibalism," says Arsuaga. "This is the dark side of the human coin."
Volume 286, Number 5437 Issue of 1 Oct 1999, pp. 18 - 19