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The People Who Ate Each Other

posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 17 2016, @07:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the kids-are-like-veal dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

About 15,000 years ago in Gough's Cave, near Bristol in the UK, a group of people ate parts of each other.

They de-fleshed and disarticulated the bones, then chewed and crushed them. They may also have cracked the bones to extract the marrow inside.

It was not only adults that showed signs of being eaten. A three-year-old child and two adolescents all had the tell-tale marks of being nibbled on.

Some of their skulls were even modified into ornaments called "skull cups", which may have been used to drink out of.

What was going on in Gough's Cave? Was this an example of human violence between rivals, a strange kind of ritual behaviour, or simply a desperate bid for survival?

Article: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161011-the-people-who-ate-each-other
Archived: https://archive.fo/JeZdl
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161011-the-people-who-ate-each-other

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday October 17 2016, @10:00AM

    by theluggage (1797) on Monday October 17 2016, @10:00AM (#415152)

    What was going on in Gough's Cave? Was this an example of human violence between rivals, a strange kind of ritual behaviour, or simply a desperate bid for survival?

    Or just primitive humans, unfettered by the arbitrary taboos of 'modern' (as in, new fangled stuff from the last 10,000 years) civilization, not letting good nutrition and tool-making materials go to waste.

    15,000 years ago the extent of respect for the dead may have been "don't eat the green wobbly bit" until these new ideas from foreign parts (i.e. more than a day's walk away) about "burial", "cremation" and "CJD" started trending on FaceRock. Its dodgy enough applying 2016 values to historical events barely out of living memory, let alone pre-history.

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:10AM (#415154)

    Facerock: it's what I use to smash your face in before I steal your food and rape your corpse. Simpler times, those were the good old days.

  • (Score: 2) by weeds on Monday October 17 2016, @12:12PM

    by weeds (611) on Monday October 17 2016, @12:12PM (#415174) Journal

    This: "Kuru is an incurable degenerative neurological disorder endemic to tribal regions of Papua New Guinea. It is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, caused by a prion found in humans." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) [wikipedia.org] and other diseases might be a good reason to avoid it.

    • (Score: 2) by ledow on Monday October 17 2016, @01:33PM

      by ledow (5567) on Monday October 17 2016, @01:33PM (#415187) Homepage

      No different to CJD and yet people still eat cows.

      I very much doubt that such a disease is in such prevelance that it would stop you going near ANY part of body, or even specifically the brain if you're a prehistoric human who's unlikely to live until 30 or be able to put 2 and 2 together when it comes to eating brains and catching a disease months, or even years, later.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by theluggage on Monday October 17 2016, @08:32PM

      by theluggage (1797) on Monday October 17 2016, @08:32PM (#415381)

      This: "Kuru is an incurable degenerative neurological disorder endemic to tribal regions of Papua New Guinea.

      I did mention CJD (same sort of thing).

      15k years ago, the risk was probably insignificant compared to the other ways your food could kill you (e.g. being unco-oporative about becoming your food). However, just goes to show that most modern religions are just helpful tips for food safety gone horribly wrong.

  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:57AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:57AM (#415526) Journal
    A gene designated G127V was discovered among the Papua New Guinea tribes that still practised mortuary cannibalism, and it protects against the deadly CJD-like prion disease kuru. It was found to be widespread only among peoples where kuru was prevalent, and it is rare in the general human population. This suggests that cannibalism, mortuary or otherwise, was never a very common practice in human societies since prehistory, or else G127V would have to be much more common by evolutionary necessity. Either that, or there may have once been other, similar prion diseases spread by cannibalism long ago whose protective genes still exist in the general human population (and now have no use), and that kuru is only the most recent variant.
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.