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Nestled in the dramatic Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, UK, there's a roomy limestone cave called Gough's Cave where a few generations of people lived about 14,700 years ago. They littered the floor with the remnants of their meals, leaving hundreds of bones behind for archaeologists to find. Now, scientists have analyzed these bones and discovered that some of them are from six separate human beings. And they bear the distinct marks of ritual cannibalism.

Natural History Museum of London scientist Silvia Bello and her colleagues write in PLoS One about the find. The bones came from a child, two adolescents, two adults, and one elderly adult. All showed evidence of butchery, which leaves characteristic marks behind when sharp tools are used for defleshing. The bones were also covered in human tooth marks from biting and gnawing, and some had been broken open for their marrow.

But this was no murder scene, nor an example of desperate people eating each other during a period of starvation. The abundance of animal bones show that these people had a rich and varied diet. And the human bones were prepared in careful, symbolic ways that suggest Bello and her team were witnessing the remains of a complex ritual.

Abstract patterns and skull cups

The researchers focused on one remarkably well-preserved adult radius bone, a long bone from the forearm. The inhabitants of Gough Cave had defleshed it, then immediately covered it in a series of repeating designs that look like a row of chevrons, or a zig-zagging line. It also resembles a row of abstract birds taking flight. But there's nothing unusual here—well, other than the cannibalism. "The zig-zagging pattern itself is not unique for this period," note the researchers in their paper. "Repetitive geometric designs, sometimes called ‘schematic’ or non-figurative art, are very common in Palaeolithic art."

Directly after carving these symbols, the Paleolithic group cracked the bone open to reach the marrow, presumably for eating. Bello and her colleagues suggest that this might have been part of a funeral rite, where the recently deceased person was commemorated in the act of defleshing, carving, and eating. It's clear that the bone wasn't decorated with the idea that it would be used and displayed later—it was broken immediately after the carvings were made.

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The most elaborate modifications were reserved for cranial bones. In total, 95 percent of the skull fragments in Gough Cave had been chipped or gnawed in some way. Cave dwellers were fashioning them into what archaeologists call "skull-cups." Yes, that's just what it sounds like. After removing all the soft tissue from a skull, ancient people would chip the top of the skull into the shape of a cup, which was likely used as part of the cannibalism ritual. It's not certain that they ate the face or brains of the people whose skulls they modified, but the heads definitely got a lot of attention during what the researchers call "intensive processing of entire corpses to extract edible tissues and... produce skull caps."

Symbolism and memory

Bello and her colleagues say there is "no doubt" that these carved bones were "produced with no utilitarian purpose apart from an artistic representation." Ritual and art are often intertwined in ancient human history, and the bones at Gough Cave are among the oldest examples of artistic cannibalism ever found. "The engraving was an intrinsic part of the multi-stage cannibalistic ritual and, as such, the marks must have held a symbolic connotation," write the researchers.

Earlier this year, archaeologists in Spain uncovered a set of 10,000-year-old human bones that showed signs of roasting. They were also marked by human bite marks and other ritualistic carvings. Similar practices have been spotted in France.

People living at roughly the same time in Turkey were modifying skulls , carving them with deep grooves, drilling them, and possibly suspending them from the walls of ancient temples. Human bones played a role in many rituals throughout Europe and the Middle East at this time. This suggests a shared belief system, and possibly contact between distant communities.

What brought all these groups of people together was a shared need to memorialize the dead and remember history. Perhaps they ate their dead to incorporate their lives into the ongoing story of their families. By interacting with the bones and flesh of their ancestors, these ancient people kept them alive. In this way, a sense of history may have come from cannibalism.

PLoS One, 2017. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182127

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