Butchered Human Remains Found in a Polish Cave Suggest These Prehistoric People Cannibalized Their Enemies
The bones and skulls were found strewn among animal remains, a burial that was meant to humiliate a conquered rival even after defeat
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Archaeologists in Poland have discovered widespread evidence of cannibalism among prehistoric humans who gathered in Maszycka Cave, near modern-day Krakow, some 18,000 years ago.
The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, are based on advanced 3D imaging of 63 human bone samples dated to the Magdalenian period. Sixty-eight percent of the samples show evidence of human manipulation, including cut marks and scratches consistent with cannibalistic practices like extracting muscles, bone marrow and brain matter for consumption, according to a statement.
The discovery offers new insights into the cultural and mortuary practices of prehistoric Poland. It also forms part of a larger story about violence during a period of mass migration across Europe.
Maszycka Cave is “the remnant of an encampment of a group of people who arrived 18,000 years ago from Western Europe,” following the path of retreating glaciers from their cave art-filled dwellings in Spain and France to settle areas of the continent, including present-day Poland, Marta Połtowicz-Bobak, an archaeologist at the University of Rzeszow, tells the Polish Press Agency (PAP), per Notes From Poland’s Agata Pyka.
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Archaeologists first excavated the cave in the 19th century, finding hundreds of bones and bone fragments from men, women, children and antelopes. All appeared to have died and been buried in a single event, rather than a series of burials over time, as radiocarbon dating and archaeological analysis later confirmed.
Early excavators discovered skulls with cut marks, which have long fueled theories of cannibalism in Maszycka Cave. But researchers had no surefire way to prove human consumption of these remains. A skull manipulated into a cup in a post-death ritual, for example, would not necessarily appear different from one cut open for consumption of the brain.
But more evidence in favor of cannibalism began to accumulate when Francesc Marginedas, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, found butchered sections of human bones previously misidentified as animal remains in the archives of the Archaeological Museum in Krakow.
After creating detailed 3D scans of the bones, researchers examined the fragments and markings with greater precision and detail than ever before. They found clear signs that certain bones had been deliberately destroyed in areas that were rich with nutrients, such as muscles and the brain.
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Study co-author Dariusz Bobak, an archaeologist at the Rzeszow Archaeological Center Foundation, tells PAP that his team found “micro-scratches” where muscles were separated from bones, as well as “traces of [humans] crushing” marrow-filled bones and evidence of attempts to “access the brain.”
As Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, tells Science magazine’s Andrew Curry, “There’s no doubt it’s a case of cannibalism.”
This evidence of cannibalism joins multiple examples from the same time period across Europe, such as Gough’s Cave in England and Brillenhöhle in Germany. It indicates that human-on-human consumption was an “integral practice within the cultural systems of these Magdalenian groups,” write the authors in the study. But the question of motive remains.
Given the focus on nutrient-rich areas, the cannibalism may have simply been a result of hunger. “The distribution of marks on the bones provides strong evidence that the bodies were processed for food, not merely treated for funerary purposes,” Marginedas tells TVP World. It’s worth noting, however, that animals like antelopes were ripe for hunting in the region at the time.
Połtowicz-Bobak further suggests that it might have been an instance of funerary cannibalism, in which family members consume a recently deceased relative to ingest their wisdom and prevent undignified decomposition, according to Science. In this way, cannibalism “could also be a symbol of respect and love,” the archaeologist said. But the haphazard disposal of the remains, strewn among animal bones in a cave, tempers that theory.
Instead, the authors argue that this disrespectful burial was key to understanding the context in which the cannibalism took place. The violence and dehumanization, in other words, was the point. Warring groups fighting over resources and land might have consumed their conquered enemy “as humiliation,” Marginedas tells Science, in a practice known as warfare cannibalism or exocannibalism.
Proving this specific hypothesis is essentially impossible, especially because the butchering was thorough enough to obscure signs of initial violence. But as the authors write, the disorganized assemblage of human bones in Maszycka Cave and at other sites across Europe shows that cannibalism among Magdalenian peoples was “not particularly extraordinary, even if it was not a habitual part of their daily or domestic life.”
