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Cannibalism fascinates people. The image of a human being who is prepared
to eat another human being is compelling. The huge black cooking pot of
countless films and cartoons has firmly planted the idea in most people’s
minds. But in 1979 our unquestioning acceptance of the existence of this
phenomenon was shattered by the publication of William Arens’s book The
Man-eating Myth. In it, Arens revealed that there is almost no reliable
evidence in history or ethnography for the custom of cannibalism (see ‘Eating
people isn’t right’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 20 September 1979). The debate is still
going on.

No one disputes the occurrence of ‘survival’ cannibalism under extreme
circumstances such as a plane crash in the Andes or starvation at sea. But
Arens was unable to unearth any evidence for cannibalism as a custom in
any society at any time: all he could find were second-hand accounts and
lots of hearsay. Nevertheless, almost every people on Earth stands accused
of the practice at some point in its history. The Roman historian Strabo
said the Irish were man-eaters, and in the 18th century Gibbon claimed the
same of pre-Christian Scots and Picts. In the 16th century the Spanish thought
the Aztecs were cannibals, and the Aztecs held the same opinion of their
conquerors. The word was coined by Columbus, who adapted it from the name
of the Carib people of the Caribbean.

The accusation of cannibalism is essentially a term of abuse. Such accusations
are levelled at enemies, neighbours or ‘inferiors’, to show how ‘primitive’
or subhuman they are. This persists today: Henry Kissinger, for example,
recalled in his book Years of Upheaval that Leonid Brezhnev told him the
Chinese were ‘cannibalistic in the way they destroyed their top leaders;
they might well, in fact, be cannibals’.

Being an anthropologist, Arens concentrated on the ethnographic record,
and had comparatively little to say about archaeological evidence. But cannibalism
has long been a favourite and dramatic explanation for broken human remains
in prehistory, and almost all Pleistocene hominids-early humans-have been
accused of it at some time or other. Who is right? More recently, advances
in in our knowledge of what can happen to bones after a human or an animal
dies – for example, crushing and trampling by animals such as hyenas and
bears, or damage by rock falls – have done much to clear away many of the
myths.

This is particularly true for Neanderthal people. In the early part
of the 20th century, anthropologists such as Marcellin Boule assumed almost
routinely that Neanderthal people practised cannibalism, because the notion
fitted their prevailing view of them as subhuman, shambling brutes. Since
then, anthropologists have recognised that the Neanderthal people were
relatively sophisticated in some respects, so they have taken a fresh look
at the evidence for the supposed cannibalism.

In 1899, a palaeontologist called Dragutin Gordajanovic-Kramberger excavated
Krapina, a cave in Yugoslavia. He found more than 650 fragments of bones
from dozens of humans, dating from between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.
At first archaeologists interpreted these as the remains of a cannibal feast,
in which bodies had been smashed open to get at marrow and brains, and flesh
had been cut off. But this gruesome image did not stand up to closer scrutiny
by American anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico.
In 1985 he claimed that the bones show no evidence of the sort of impact
fractures characteristic of marrow extraction by humans. He believes that
the high degree of fragmentation of the bones from Krapina can be explained
by roof falls, crushing by sediments and the use of dynamite in the earliest
excavations. Some of the bones are marked with grooves that could be cut
marks, but when two years later anthropologist Mary Russell at Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, carefully compared these with butchery
traces on reindeer bones from another Neanderthal site at Combe Grenal in
France, she found a huge difference in the location, orientation and length
of the marks.

What the Krapina marks did strongly resemble-in appearance, location
and frequency-were cut marks on human bones from secondary burials in a
burial site in Michigan dating from the Late Woodland period, around the
14th century AD (see ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, Science, 26 March 1987). Secondary burial
is the ceremonial burial of bodies that have already been buried or left
to decompose for some time, and often involves the removal of flesh and
cutting of bones. It is still practised in some cultures. Russell thinks
it highly likely that the Neanderthal people did remove flesh from the Krapina
bones with stone tools-but only when the bodies had partially decomposed,
as a stage in mortuary practice. Other researchers insist that cannibalism
is still a contender in this case.

The other classic piece of evidence for this period is from Guattari
Cave at Monte Circeo in Italy. In 1939, archaeologist Alberto Blanc found
two Neanderthal bones there-a skull and a jawbone, probably from the same
individual. The context of the find was extraordinary. The skull lay in
a ring of stones on the cave floor, the hole at the base of the skull was
enlarged, and there were fractured areas around the right temple. Archaeologists
immediately reconstructed the scene: the Neanderthal, a man aged about 45,
had been killed by a blow to the head and his brains extracted through the
hole in his skull. A clear case of ritual cannibalism. Since then, innumerable
popular works have repeated the story.

In 1989 a team of Italian and American anthropologists looked again
at the evidence. Now they suggest that the ‘ring of stones’ was caused by
a landslide, while animal bones lying elsewhere on the cave floor, some
of them bearing gnaw marks, and the presence of hyena bones and coprolites
(fossilised hyena faeces) all point to the conclusion that Monte Circeo
was a hyena den when the bones were deposited there around 50,000 years
ago. There is other evidence to support this view. No cut marks have ever
been found on any bones from the cave, and few stone tools have been found
on the cave floor. The skull shows no sign of having been tampered with
by humans, and hyenas have been known to carry human skulls into their lairs.
The fractures on the skull are consistent with hyena toothmarks; the hole
in the skull has gnawed edges without any trace of marking from stone tools;
and the jawbone was also gnawed. Neanderthal people definitely used the
cave before the hyenas took possession of it, so it is possible that the
animals took the head from a buried body at or near the site. Some fragile
bones in the skull are excellently preserved, however, which may indicate
that the skull was never buried.

So much for Neanderthal cannibalism. What about modern humans? Some
archaeologists continue to claim that the phenomenon was an intrinsic part
of several more recent cultures. At the ruins of Knossos, once a city in
Minoan Crete, for example, archaeologist Peter Warren found the bones of
two boys dating from about 1700 BC; the bones bore cut marks and substantial
parts of the skeletons were missing. His first interpretation was one of
cannibalism. But significantly, some cut marks were on bones that would
not have carried meat. As with many other cases, the most likely explanation
is a secondary funerary ritual, a phenomenon already well documented from
prehistoric Crete.

But what if the cut marks do correspond to the meaty bits? This is so
in the case of bones that belonged to the Anasazi, a people who between
AD 400 and 1300 built sophisticated cliff cities in the southwestern US,
such as Mesa Verde. Their settlements sometimes yield the remains of people
who came to a violent end. These remains are often in single dwellings;
their bones are fragmented, smashed or charred, bearing cut marks and sometimes
with missing parts. In 1989, for instance, anthropologist John Cater and
his colleagues from the University of Colorado discovered a mass of shattered
and burnt human bones in a subterranean burial chamber or ‘kiva’ near Yellow
Jacket, Colorado. These bones bore butchering marks very similar to those
found on deer bones. A clear case of cannibalism?

More such evidence emerged in the 1980s. A team, of French and American
archaeologists investigating the Neolithic cave of Fontbregoua in southeast
France provided the best-documented case for prehistoric cannibalism. The
team discovered the bones of more than a dozen people dating from about
6000 years ago, in three small, shallow pits next to 10 similar pits containing
animal bones. They bore cut marks and breakage patterns identical to those
on the animal remains, and archaeologists took them as evidence for cannibalistic
defleshing of fresh bones. The evidence could not be explained on the basis
of secondary burial practices, as in North America. However, the Australian
archaeolo-gist Michael Pickering has pointed out that the mortuary rituals
of some Australian Aborigines produce exactly this type of remains. In these
rituals the bodies are left exposed for a while to decompose, then the flesh
is removed and the bones broken up and buried. Sometimes the remains of
several individuals are buried together.

Proponents of the idea of cannibalism at Fontbregoua, like Pat Shipman
of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, argue that researchers
should apply the same logic to both human and animal remains-that identical
butchery marks and methods of disposing of the bones indicate consumption
of the meat in both cases. At first glance, this certainly appears to be
correct. But there is ample evidence-from prehistory to the present-of consumption
of animals by humans, and almost no reliable evidence from any period for
cannibalism. So we should be extremely cautious in our interpretation of
the Fontbregoua data-especially as the human remains are treated separately
from the animal bones.

Mature English man-eaters

The latest piece of evidence for prehistoric cannibalism comes from
a site where human and animal bones are mixed. Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge
in southwest England was occupied about 12,000 years ago by people who hunted
animals, and butchered and defleshed them with stone tools. During new excavations
at this site, Roger Jacobi and his colleagues discovered bones from at least
seven people-some of them bearing cut marks-that are mixed with animal bones
in the sediments at the bottom of the cave. The cut marks on the human bones
include marks on skulls at the point of muscle attachment and on the inside
of the jaw of a 12-year-old boy, suggesting that his tongue had been cut
out.

Despite subsequent lurid headlines in the press about our cannibal ancestors,
researchers investigating the cave are divided as to how to explain the
identical marks and breakage of human and animal remains, and their disposal
together. Jill Cook, from the Stone Age section of the British Museum, speculates
that the find may be evidence of a secondary funerary ritual, in which partially
decomposed bodies were dismembered for disposal: ‘On balance, it looks as
if these very few remains here are probably the results of some kind of
ritual burial which probably did not include cannibalism,’ she says. Andy
Currant, an expert in animal bones at the Natural History Museum in London,
disagrees: ‘My personal feeling is that they were eating their own kind.’

The Cheddar case reveals that, as so often in archaeology, how we interpret
the scanty evidence depends on our own preferred vision of our ancestors.
The only definitive evidence for prehistoric cannibalism would be the discovery
of human remains inside fossil faeces or inside a human stomach. But human
coprolites and stomachs are extremely rare in archaeology, and the chances
of finding any kind of human remains inside them slim indeed, despite continuing
advances in analytical techniques.

Some anthropologists were outraged by Arens’s book. Thomas Riley of
the University of Illinois compared it, somewhat theatrically, to the work
of historians who claim that the Holocaust did not happen. Cannibalism may
occasionally have existed in prehistory, but concrete evidence is still
proving hard to find. Tim White, one of the archaeologists working at Monte
Circeo, and others are studying marks on other early human bones, but so
far these have all been explained in terms of mortuary practices or the
activities of carnivores such as hyenas. The idea of cannibalism is, it
seems, becoming increasingly hard to swallow.

Paul G. Bahn is a freelance writer on archaeology.

Further reading: William Arens, The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and
Anthropophagy, Oxford University Press, 1979.