Human bones marred with man-sized teeth marks have been found in caves and tombs across the world, leading scientists to conclude that our ancestors ate flesh.
Scientists have previously suggested that early humans turned cannibal to get a much-needed protein boost when food was scarce.
But new research suggests our early ancestors may have actually feasted on human flesh as part of a cultural or social ritual.
Carving up the human body to calculate the caloric value of each part, the study argues that prehistoric cannibalism—while less rare than widely assumed—was a dangerous undertaking offering relatively meagre nutritional rewards.
Kilo for kilo, a wild horse, bear or boar had more than three times the calories in fat and protein than our lean-and-mean human ancestors, who were mostly skin, muscle and bone, according to the research, published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The findings help flesh out the idea that cannibalism among homo sapiens—as well as Neanderthals, homo erectus and other hominins—was suffused with cultural meaning.
‘Episodes of Palaeolithic cannibalism have frequently been defined as ‘nutritional’ in nature, but with little empirical evidence to assess their dietary significance,’ said Dr James Cole from the University of Brighton.
‘It seems unreasonable to think that early humans wouldn’t have had as complex an attitude to cannibalism as we modern humans,’ Cole said.
‘They may have had as many reasons to consume each other as we do.’
‘It’s not just about the meat,’ he added.
Sucking the marrow from a leg bone or gnawing on a spleen might have been a way to affirm territorial control and pay homage to deceased family members, Cole said.
‘The consumption of the food in that scenario is a kind of bonus,’ he pointed out.
More broadly, the study suggests that our cave- or savannah-dwelling cousins were probably far more sophisticated than we suspect.
A review of the fossil record, along with recent genetic research, shows that cannibalism among hominin species, or early man, was fairly common.
‘We don’t have a lot of human remains,’ Cole said.
‘But even within that small sample, we still see quite a lot of evidence of human modification on those remains—butchery, cut marks on the bone—consistent with cannibalism.’
Bones with cut marks at the tendon joints to remove filets of muscle; long arm and leg bones that have been cracked to access the marrow; human teeth marks—all are telltale signs of humans feasting on humans.
The earliest confirmed case of human cannibalism—found in a cave in Spain—features the species homo antecessor and dates back nearly one million years.
Other research has shown that prehistoric humans developed some immunity to diseases, known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), that are spread by eating infected brain matter.
‘The only reason an evolutionary adaptation would develop is if you are over-exposed to the pathogens,’ Cole said.
That could have arisen when a human ate, say, a lion that had consumed a bovine brain.
The human variant of mad cow disease that erupted in the 1990s spread when people ate beef from cows that had been fed the brains of infected animals.
‘Or it comes from eating the brain matter of members of our own species,’ as is thought to have occurred with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who practiced cannibalism.
A wide range of motivations are used to explain modern-day cannibalism, ranging from psychosis (think of the liver-and-fava-bean loving Hannibal Lecter), to warfare, medicine or funerary ritual. Shipwreck and plane crashes can also lead to survival cannibalism.
But for early humans, Cole said, that complexity has been unjustifiably boiled down to ‘nutritional’ versus ‘ritual’, with the added presumption that food is usually the main motive.
For his research, Dr Cole studied the calorific value of human meat in comparison to that of other animals.
He constructed a nutritional template for the human body by analysing the total average weights and calorie values (fat and protein) for each body part.
Dr Cole also compiled nutritional information for animals whose remains have been identified at sites of Palaeolithic cannibalism.
He found that human skeletal muscle has a nutritional value broadly in line with species of a similar size and weight.
But human muscle provides significantly fewer calories than most of the larger animals, such as mammoth, woolly rhino and species of deer, which are known to have been consumed by hominins.
Dr Cole said: ‘Results show that humans have a comparable nutritional value to those faunal species that match our typical body weight, but significantly lower than a range of fauna often found in association with anthropogenically-modified hominin remains.’
‘This could suggest that the motivations behind hominin anthropophagy may not have been purely nutritionally motivated.
‘It is proposed here that the comparatively low nutritional value of hominin cannibalism episodes support more socially or culturally driven narratives in the interpretation of Palaeolithic cannibalism.’
The research was published in Scientific Reports.
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