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Were Neanderthals Devoured By Humans?
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.'"
Cannibalism: The act or practice of eating human flesh by mankind
H. neanderthalensis != H. sapiens
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Misleading title...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Neanderthals are not the same species, eating them is on par with eating a great ape.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Only in France would a Scientist subvert his own work due to culinary objections!
-Peter
William Golding wrote a fictional account of the Neanderthals' extinction at the hands of Homo sapiens:
The Inheritors.
Scary, but beautifully written.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
The Other Other Other White Meat.
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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.
Loose lips lose spit.
Well, let's think about your question. sapiens and neanderthals are like cousins, so it would be like eating a cousin... would you eat your cousin? Would you call that cannibalism? You know, since we are using spacious reasoning for now, I would also like to propose that neanderthals were major geeks. As I imagine it, this is how it went down. Joe Sapien and Richard M.S. Neanderthal were hanging out one day like they always did. rich was helping joe with a abacus virus he caught while placing the beeds in suggestive positions. The cave collapses and now Rich is trapped with Joe and some of his frat brothers. They can't get out. They get hungry. Heck - Rich isn't even the same species... who do you kill - THE GEEK. Its the only explanation that makes sense. The neanderthal was one major geek. Thank you. Thank you. I do take requests.
When all else fails, try.
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.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
An ancient fossilized variety of soylent was found perfectly preserved!
Scientists reached the conclusion that:
SOYLENT GREEN WAS NEANDERTHAL!
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 are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
Could someone please tag this with 'nomnomnom'?
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!
The truth is out... the existence of early Wall Street traders now confirmed.
christians practice ritualistic cannibalism every sunday, body of christ, blood of christ, etc.
All these replies of people saying 'but but No! Our ancestors weren't cannibals!' reminds me of a Science/Nat Geo/Discovery Channel show I saw recently about those Cannibal Druids and all the evidence of that happening. Lots and lots of dolts went on camera to mouth a ton of excuses and 'buts' rather than admit that the Druids as Mother Earth loving, New Age darlings were bloodthirsty, life hating, human sacrificing cannibals. I particularly liked when one of the 'professors' said that their cannibalism and human sacrifice was perfectly understandable when you consider that the Roman Army was marching on them and you know how much pressure people are under when those scary Romans are marching. Human sacrifice, cannibalism, savagery, pillaging, raping, - that's who we are folks. It's our heritage, just acknowledge our darker past (and present) and let's try to do better.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
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.
Well, "cannibalism" still occurs in "modern" times. The most infamous incidents of cannibalism occurred in China from 1966 until 1976. According to a report 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 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.
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.
You seem to be implying that myth tends to have no reasoning or value.
I'd suggest that attempting to explain the universe based on observable phenomenon is one of the most important traits of humanity: it's the foundation of culture, and usually where science begins, for example.
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.
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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.
"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.
I read an essay by Martin Gardner in one of his books 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.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Plus how do we know the human ate the neanderthal meat? Maybe they chewed it and spat it out.
--
Slow Poke
"Lots and lots of dolts went on camera to mouth a ton of excuses and 'buts' rather than admit that the Druids as Mother Earth loving, New Age darlings were bloodthirsty, life hating, human sacrificing cannibals."
Very little is known about the Druids since they had no written language, most of what is known was written by the Romans who were not above using propoganda on their enemies. This is the main reason why historians doubt the written (by the winner) accounts. The written accounts (and the arguments) have been around for centuries and I suspect you just pulled the "Mother Earth loving, New Age darlings" bit out of your arse because it suits your own worldview rather than anything to do with the content of the documentary.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.)
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