Was your ancestor a cannibal? And were their victims HAPPY to be eaten?



It's a spine-chilling discovery - hundreds of expertly-butchered human bones that suggest cannibalism was rife among early man.What's even more shocking is that the victims may have been HAPPY to be eaten ...



The birds are singing and the forest floor is dappled with sunlight. You can hear the sound of a babbling stream, running into the great river not far off to the east. Sharp ears might hear the drumming of a woodpecker or, high above, the cry of a sparrowhawk.



In a forest clearing, scattered with red campion and wood anemone, butterflies are

dancing in the sunbeams. The air is warm and still. It could be a quiet woodland anywhere in Britain today.

Spine-chilling: The burial site finding seems to show that our ancestors were cannibals as recently as 7,000 years ago

Then there comes the sound of footfalls rustling the fallen leaves. Something is approaching from the dark heart of the forest. The figures step into the clearing - and you see that this is no modern woodland. This is prehistoric Europe, 7,000 years ago.



First, comes a group of shuffling people, heads bowed. There are men, women and children, some as young as six. At least one of the women is pregnant.



They are wearing simple tunics of animal skin, mostly deerskin, cured and softened by beating with wooden paddles. The men are heavily bearded and everyone has long hair.



But these people have their hands tied behind their backs with twists of grass and sedge and they are shuffling because their ankles have been tied.



Their hair has been bound up as well, leaving their pale necks bare - as if in readiness.



Behind them follows a very different group. Warriors of magnificent physique, naked to the waist, broad-chested and strongly muscled.



Their bare flesh is heavily decorated with tattoos made by their women with the dye of madder and woad, using the pinpricks of bone needles. They show spirals and whorls, symbols of magical power in the hunt, flaming suns, the eyes of wolves.



The warriors carry long, ash spears tipped with hand-shaped flints as sharp as shards of broken glass, and blunt-headed stone clubs hanging from loops on broad oxhide belts.



Behind them come their women, almost all of them either pregnant or with infants in their arms. Wide-eyed, grubby children trot at their sides.



And further back, gliding among the trees at the edge of the clearing like wraiths, circle the witch doctors, or shamans.



There are only glimpses of these outlandishly decorated figures wearing wreaths of oak leaves and necklaces made of wolves' and bears' teeth. They carry skin drums and bone drumsticks.



As they circle the clearing, they begin a murmurous chanting to their gods - who demand sacrifice.



The shuffling victims, knowing what they must do, kneel down obediently in a line in front of a shallow pit. The warriors stand behind them.



First, they set down their spears and then they reach for the stone clubs in their belts.



Scene of death: Hundreds of bones are being excavated at the site in Herxheim, southwestern Germany

The sacrificial victims, with their heads bowed, are quite silent and still, as if they have already passed into the other world.



The warriors raise the clubs high above their heads, and the murmuring and drumming of the shamans in the shadows grows louder and louder.



The women of the tribe, expert butchers all, are watching intently, using their thumbs to test the edges of their lethally sharp flint knives for keenness. For after the killing will come the feasting.



With a great cry, the stone clubs descend. Frightened birds rise up from the trees crying out and vanish away to the west. Fires are lit - it will soon be time for the cannibal feast to begin.



The spine-chilling discovery this week of mass cannibalism in Germany 7,000 years ago is as unexpected as it is gruesome. Some of the details emerging sound as horrible as anything dreamed up in a ghoulish horror film.



The bodies found at Herxheim had been skinned, the bones expertly butchered in precisely the way you would joint a pig, and then smashed open so the sweet, juicy marrow could be sucked out. Ribs were broken away from the spine or snapped back to reveal internal organs, tongues were cut out and the heads were neatly scalped to get at the brain - as you would lop the top off a boiled egg.



Some of the victims - who may have numbered many hundreds at this site alone - appear to have been spit-roasted. Hannibal Lecter, eat your heart out. Other details are not just gruesome, but downright shocking. Not only children were eaten, but unborn babies, too.



Our immediate reaction is to recoil in disgust. What sort of people could do things like that, even 7,000 years ago?



Experts have already suggested this ancient atrocity may simply have been a desperate last act by a starving people. After all, under terrible circumstances, similar things have happened far more recently.



During the terrible siege of Leningrad in World War II, for example, emaciated citizens, having eaten all the birds, dogs and rats in the city, finally resorted to feasting on their own kind.



Indeed, experts have speculated that 7,000 years ago, Europe may have been in the grip of dramatic climate change, with widespread famine and social collapse following in its wake.



Yet the marks of butchery at Herxheim have every appearance of being not desperate, but careful, methodical, even ritualistic.



Is it possible that cannibalism was not a desperate act, but something altogether more commonplace?



It is hard to tell. The definition of prehistory is that it predates written records - history begins with the written word. The earliest clay tablets come from the Sumerian culture of around 3,000BC.



So how can we know anything about life in Stone Age Europe? The answer is archaeology - and the revelations are truly startling.



The theory that the people of Herxheim turned to cannibalism at a time of famine makes little sense.



The time from 9,000 to 5,000 BC is called the Holocene Climate Optimum, which makes it sound like a nice afternoon on a Mediterranean beach.



And, more or less, it was. As well as being warmer than today - and that's without the contribution of cars and power stations - the climate was extremely stable. It was perfect for sustaining human life. So, no famine.



We know other things about their lives as well. The study of language is a more surprising way back into the remote past. Place names, especially for rivers, can be amazingly old, predating the Anglo-Saxon we speak.



The names of the rivers Itchen, Wey, Colne and Humber are thought to be pre-Celtic - in use since at least 500 BC. Think of that the next time you drive past Weybridge.

Studies: The bones found point to the victims being scalped and skinned before being expertly butchered

It is probable the contemporaries of the Herxheim cannibals called the area they lived in something similar.



Language experts at Reading University recently revealed that some of the most common words we use today could be an astonishing 20,000 years old.



Words such as 'I', 'you' and 'we', and numbers such as 'one', 'two' and 'three', have changed little over 20,000 years. Words that modern Germans would recognise could even have been used by the Herxheim cannibals.



We can reimagine the prehistoric wildlife and landscape of Herxheim well enough, too. A warm and equable climate, vast tracts of forest, mostly mature oak, ash and beech, with just a few manmade clearings.



The animal life would have been largely familiar to us, with some absences - no pheasants, for instance. They were introduced from Asia by the Romans.



But there would have been many more large and dangerous animals. Grey wolves, brown bears and the massive European bison, which is bigger than the American bison, with tiny populations still surviving today in Eastern Europe. They can be 7ft tall at the shoulder and weigh more than 140 stone.



Just as terrifying to those forestdwelling Stone Age tribes people, though also a good source of meat when they could kill one, would have been the auroch - now extinct wild cattle that were even bigger than bison and were famously ferocious.



And the cannibals? They would certainly have had much in common with the tribal people who still survive in remote areas today, their way of life relatively untouched by the modern world.



Nature and fertility would have been all-important; they would have worshipped sun gods, water gods, moon gods and doubtless bison gods.



Their religion would have combined elements of shamanism and ancestor worship, and the heart of their beliefs would have been the eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth.



We are presuming the cannibalism at Herxheim was an act of desperation and that those eaten were victims, but this is not the only way to regard it. It may be that in Stone Age Europe, to be eaten by the tribe was an honour.



In Sir James Frazer's vast and magisterial survey of ancient tribal beliefs and practices, The Golden Bough, published in 12 mighty volumes between 1890 and 1915, he recounts numerous examples of ancient tribal rituals that to us seem utterly alien.



And yet they tell us a great deal about what might have been going on at Herxheim 7,000 years ago.



When the work was written, many tribes around the world still ate the enemies they killed in battle - especially an enemy who had died with conspicuous courage.



Among the Basuto of Southern Africa, Frazer records, the liver of the vanquished would be eaten to impart bravery, the ears to pass on his intelligence and his testicles to give strength.



The rest of the body would be burned to ash, ground to powder and made into a paste in the horn of a bull to be administered to the warriors on special occasions. This was nothing to do with the scrabbling desperation of a starving people, but a highly ordered, solemn and even reverent religious ritual.

Doubts: The site at Herxheim, as shown on the map, was unlikely to be experiencing drought at the time of the killings

In the wars between the British Empire and African tribes in the 19th century, clashes between a modern industrialised nation and Stone Age tribes people, cannibalism reared its head.

In 1824, the commander of the British expeditionary force, Sir Charles McCarthy, was killed in battle against the Ashanti. His heart was then devoured by the tribal chiefs.



For the Regency gentleman back in Britain, this would have seemed like the most conclusive evidence imaginable that the Africans were nothing but savages.



But are we making the same mistaken judgment about the cannibals of Herxheim?



For the true reason the Ashanti ate McCarthy's heart was not in malicious triumph, a sign they despised him or the fact they were savages, but because they so admired his valour and the heroic way he had fought and died. They wanted literally to ingest those qualities themselves.



His bones were long kept in the temple of the Ashanti at Kumasi as relics of great power, not in mockery, but in the same way that saints' bones were kept in medieval cathedrals - with the greatest reverence.



His skull was rimmed in purest gold and used for years by the kings of the Ashanti as a ceremonial drinking vessel.



Or take the example of the Mayans in Central America. Theirs was essentially a Stone Age civilisation, and yet one that developed the most advanced astronomy and mathematics.



Yet another thing about Mayan culture tells us something quite extraordinary about how they viewed this world. They played a primitive kind of football in great stone stadia, which you can visit in Honduras and Guatemala. The football match wasn't a sporting occasion; it was a religious ritual. At the end of the match, the winning team was led to an altar and sacrificed.



Yes, the winning team. It is almost beyond our comprehension. Wouldn't you try pretty hard not to score a goal and perhaps even pop in a few home goals for good measure?



But this is a 21st-century view. For those ancient Mayan warriors, to win and be sacrificed was the highest honour. Only the most perfect beings, the greatest heroes, were sacrificed. After death, they would go to the great Hall of Heroes and live in perpetual bliss.



Can we be so sure that our German cannibals in their Rhineland forests were just a bunch of savage, grunting, Stone Age Hannibal Lecters?



Only a little later than them, on the island Malta, another Stone Age people built a beautiful <cite>Hypogeum </cite>or underground tomb for their dead.



It is the most astonishing prehistoric site I have visited, more evocative and beautifully haunting even than Stonehenge.



There, many thousands of years ago, a nameless people reverently buried their loved ones. Excavations-have found one small tomb holding the skeleton of a little girl.



Beside her lay the tiny skeleton of a puppy, which had been deliberately killed, cradled for ever in her arms.



Again, our first reaction might be disgust: 'Just because the poor child had died, that was no reason to kill her puppy, too.'



But this is to look down the wrong end of the telescope. For those early people, death was most certainly not the end.



To them, the little Maltese girl was going off on her great journey into the next life, alone and a little frightened. What greater kindness could there be than to send her beloved puppy after her, to keep her company?



Thus understood, these bones become some of the most moving artefacts in archaeology.



We will never know for sure the truth about the Stone Age tribes people of Herxheim. We will never know their names, or the names of their gods, nor exactly why they ate their dead.



But if we consider what we know of other cultures around the world, the mysterious truth might be that, rather than a frenzied orgy of cruelty, killing and cannibalism, what really happened there 7,000 years ago was a ritual of tender reverence.



• William Napier's best-selling Attila trilogy is published by Orion.

