Skull - Drinking beaker - Cannibalism or?

How has no one mentioned the legend of Sawney Bean?

The Beans were an Incestual cannibalistic tribe of a family that horrified Scotland during the 16th century. Killing groves of innocent people and eating them...

en.wikipedia.org...

The people in question were the Cresswellian derivative of the magdalanian culture.

 I personally think the cresswellians might have been a archaic/modern hybrid, or archaics preying on modern humans, as their points are extremely primitive, at not at all the level of quality you see elsewhere in western Europe at the time.


Cresswellian point

Food species eaten by Creswellian hunters focused on the wild horse (Equus ferus) or the red deer (Cervus elaphus), probably depending on the season, although the Arctic hare, reindeer, mammoth, Saiga antelope, wild cow, brown bear, lynx, Arctic fox and wolf were also exploited.


Highly fragmentary fossil bones were found in Gough's Cave. They had marks that suggested actions of skinning, dismembering, defleshing and marrow extraction. The excavations of 1986-1987 noted that human and animal remains were mixed, with no particular distribution or arrangement of the human bones. They also show the signs of the same treatments as the animal bones. These findings were interpreted in the sense of a nutritional cannibalism. However, slight differences from other sites in skull treatment leave open the possibility of elements of ritual cannibalism.[8]

en.m.wikipedia.org...



Here is an article about the latest research from Goughs cave.


www.sciencedaily.com...

Analysis of ancient cadavers recovered at a famous archaeological site confirm the existence of a sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains, according to a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum, University College London, and a number of Spanish universities.


Gough's Cave in Somerset was thought to have given up all its secrets when excavations ended in 1992, yet research on human bones from the site has continued in the decades since. After its discovery in the 1880s, the site was developed as a show cave and largely emptied of sediment, at times with minimal archaeological supervision. The excavations uncovered intensively-processed human bones intermingled with abundant butchered large mammal remains and a diverse range of flint, bone, antler, and ivory artefacts.


New radiocarbon techniques have revealed remains were deposited over a very short period of time, possibly during a series of seasonal occupations, about 14,700 years ago.

The skull cup

Dr Silvia Bello, from the Natural History Museum's Department of Earth Sciences, lead researcher of the work said, "The human remains have been the subject of several studies. In a previous analysis, we could determine that the cranial remains had been carefully modified to make skull-cups. During this research, however, we've identified a far greater degree of human modification than recorded in earlier. We've found undoubting evidence for defleshing, disarticulation, human chewing, crushing of spongy bone, and the cracking of bones to extract marrow."


The presence of human tooth marks on many of the bones provides incontrovertible evidence for cannibalism, the team found. In a wider context, the treatment of the human corpses and the manufacture and use of skull-cups at Gough's Cave has parallels with other ancient sites in central and western Europe. But the new evidence from Gough's Cave suggests that cannibalism during the 'Magdalenian period' was part of a customary mortuary practice that combined intensive processing and consumption of the bodies with the ritual use of skull-cups.


Simon Parfitt, of University College London, said, "A recurring theme of this period is the remarkable rarity of burials and how commonly we find human remains mixed with occupation waste at many sites. Further analysis along the lines used to study Gough's Cave will help to establish whether the type of ritualistic cannibalism practiced there is a regional ('Creswellian') phenomenon, or a more widespread practice found throughout the Magdalenian world

I think it is absolutely nutritional canabalism, as the is no detectable difference in the treatment of game vs humans they ate them and tossed them in the garbage pit.

 There is certain amount of  revisionist political correctness in anthropology, when it comes to the discussion of canabalism.

 

en.wikipedia.org...

In 1996, Bryan Sykes of Oxford University first sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man, with DNA extracted from one of Cheddar Man's molars. Cheddar Man was determined to have belonged to Haplogroup U5, a branch of mitochondrial Haplogroup U, which has also been found in other Mesolithic human remains.[2][3] Sykes obtained DNA from the 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man's tooth and from a 12,000-year-old Cheddar tooth from the same cave. Bryan Sykes's research into Cheddar Man was filmed as he performed it in 1997. As a means of connecting Cheddar Man to the living residents of Cheddar village, he compared mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) taken from 20 living residents of the village to that extracted from Cheddar Man’s molar. He found two people who shared the same mtDNA as Cheddar Man, due to the fact that around 10% of Europeans belong to Haplogroup U5.[5] They, like anyone else carrying haplogroup U5 today, share an ancestor with Cheddar Man of many thousands of years ago through his maternal line.[6][7] In May 2013, Craig Dent, from Melbourne, Australia travelled to Cheddar Gorge to visit Gough's Cave following mtDNA testing which confirmed that he too belonged to haplogroup U5 and thus shared a distant ancestor with Cheddar Man

a reply to: Marduk

So they smashed the head in, nice!

I actually own a skull and fill it with food and liquid daily, talk through it, and look out on the world through two holes in it. It's a wonderful thing to carry around.

a reply to: Aleister

oh wow, you went full creepy.

a reply to: Saturnalia

This is actually a Germanic cultural thing that is evident in all Germanic languages today. Words like cup in English and Kopp in Norwegian, same as German Kopf, Head. This is even evident in Latin, a non-Germanic language, we see the same word in Kaput, Head. When Norwegians toast, we say Skål, same word as English Skull. The reason may have been cultic and surrounded by high magic and deep mystery, but purely rationally, please follow me, the top of some skull, whether they be animal or human skulls— are quite perfect as cups for drinking and eating when you look at it. You could probably carve a little spoon out of some guy's skull too. And if you had the skull of a wooly mammoth, you'd have the perfect punch bowl!

originally posted by: Saturnalia
a reply to: Aleister

oh wow, you went full creepy.

Not at all, read my post again.

originally posted by: rexsblues
How has no one mentioned the legend of Sawney Bean?

Because its one of those legends that has no supporting evidence...

originally posted by: rexsblues
How has no one mentioned the legend of Sawney Bean?

The Beans were an Incestual cannibalistic tribe of a family that horrified Scotland during the 16th century. Killing groves of innocent people and eating them...

en.wikipedia.org...

It's worth taking ad notam that, apparently the Sawney Bean clan was convicted and punished for high treason, i.e. not cannibalism and mass-murder. Was the cannibal-serial-killer story just a cover up for a wide conspiracy involving 1000 dead over a period of quite a few years, and the thrones of Scotland and England and one king James VI or I respectively?

en.wikipedia.org...

The clan was captured alive and taken in chains to the Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial; the men had their genitalia cut off, hands and feet severed and were allowed to bleed to death; the women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive. (This recalls, in essence if not in detail, the punishments of hanging, drawing and quartering decreed for men convicted of treason while women convicted of the same were burned.)

Question lingers: Why were they executed as if they'd been convicted of treason? Were their acts so bizarre they threatened the very foundations of justice and the pillars of of society? Or was power, religion, revolution and politics involved somehow? What happened to King James VI of Scotland? ==> en.wikipedia.org...

from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean's reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI [ca. early 1600s], whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before. Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years. Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership ... To add to the intrigue, we do know that cannibalism was not unknown in mediaeval Scotland and that Galloway was in mediaeval times a very lawless place; perhaps nothing on the scale of the Bean legend took place, but every story grows and is embroidered over time.

i.e, its a story, which grows with each retelling

The Sawney Bean legend closely resembles the story of Christie-Cleek, which is attested much earlier — in the early 15th century

and there is the original truth