Europeans were once 'child-eating cannibals'

Europeans were once 'child-eating cannibals'

www.news.com.au

THE remains of the "first Europeans" discovered at an archaeological site in northern Spain have revealed that these prehistoric humans were cannibals who particularly liked the flesh of children.

"We know that they practiced cannibalism," Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, one of the co-directors of the Atapuerca project, said.

A study of the remains revealed that they turned to cannibalism to feed themselves and not as part of a ritual.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Maybe, maybe not.

I don't know about these kinds of articles. There's only so much that can be inferred from remains found in a cave - right?

They also ate their rivals after killing them, mostly children and adolescents.

How do the researchers know who the rivals were?

I could almost believe anything about the old world, but that doesn't mean that everything should be believed.

Perhaps, there's some ancestral traits that are passed on today to those people who indulge in cannibalism.

www.news.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

you mean they dont still do that? i guess theres no reason to go to france now...

thats interesting but not shocking. i think cannibalism is pretty practical in times when you couldnt just walk 20 feet and get food whenever you wanted. and besides, look at all the meat that would go wasted.

cannibalism is a strange taboo.

Originally posted by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest
i think cannibalism is pretty practical in times when you couldnt just walk 20 feet and get food whenever you wanted. and besides, look at all the meat that would go wasted.

From the article:

They found water and food in abundance, could hunt wild boar, horses, deer, which means that they did not practice cannibalism through a lack of food.

They couldn't use lack of food as an excuse to eat each other.

reply to post by tezzajw

true but its still practical to me. they may have had other things to hunt, but if you have 100 lbs (sorry if you dont understand pounds, i dont understand kilos.) of fresh meat that you dont have to chase down or risk death/injury to acquire, seems silly to waste it. or maybe thats just me


[edit on 1-7-2009 by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest]

we also have the metric system for which you said "kill it with a stick "

kanibals? give me a freaking brake man ,have u ever seen ravenous?

When you feed an animal members of its own kind, you get diseases like scrapie. Its similar to why there is a massive social taboo about getting it on with close relatives - there are practical survival implications to it.

Either way, we don't know anything about the religious ceremonies pre-historic man had, and there's no need to paint them in such a brutal light, using inflammatory phrases like:

these prehistoric humans were cannibals who particularly liked the flesh of children.

We know nothing of their personal tastes from the evidence left behind. I don't know why they at adolescents, I just know they did. How do we know this wasn't some kind of horrible punishment one tribe inflicted on another, forcing them to eat their own offspring, and the man in question wasn't bawling his eyes out as, with trembing hands, he raised the piece of meat that was his only son to his mouth?

We don't. We don't know a damn thing.

The remains discovered in the caves "appeared scattered, broken, fragmented, mixed with other animals such as horses, deer, rhinoceroses, all kinds of animals caught in hunting" and eaten by humans, he said. "This gives us an idea of cannibalism as a type of gastronomy and not as a ritual."

After 800,000 years, I think it's a bit presumptious to say "they were definitely not part of a ritual". Since we don't actually know what rituals they performed, how do we know that spreading the bones of a dead loved one amongst the remains of prey wasn't somehow symbolic to them?

And another brilliant attempt, the best infact:

Europeans were once 'child-eating cannibals'

Oh, Europeans, eh? The French? Germans, perhaps? Or, as the article actually states, pre-Homo Sapien hominids! So they were, in no real sense of the word, European. They were not related, as they were not even the same freaking species. They just happened to live in an area of the world that would become modern Europe.

This isn't a dig at you, Tezzjw, as I have a lot of respect for yourself (and not just in part because of your 40k Eviscor Assassin avatar) but the quality of this article is just abysmal.

My opinion

Doesn't suprise me that early europeans were cannibals, many cultures have turned to cannablism at one time or another.

I think we'll never figure out the motives of the insane chimps known as humans.

thats my opinion

People still do this in the west indies and Africa. Im not too suprised by it. I imagine back in the caveman days, cannibalism was pretty frequent. It's been said we taste like salty Pork.

Homo antecessor

dated from 1.2 million to 800,000 years ago - pre dating Neanderthal by up to 1/2 million years , males approach 5/12 foot tall and weighing 200 lbs.

meat eaters and Cannibals , migrated to europe from africa and this spannish site is the only known location in the world for this sub species.


title is a bit flame bait tbh - as im sure all of the worlds population at thtat time , be they `australian` or `american` were meat eaters.

reply to post by The Last Man on Earth

If you ever get a chance, read up on kuru and how it spread in New Guinea due to eating the brains of the dead. It is similiar to Mad Cow Disease.

reply to post by secretagent woooman


Wow, that's incredibly foul, thank you for that new piece of (disgusting) knowledge!

Chasing a boar or whacking your cousin in the head?

Uhmm..Its 10 degrees out and I'm starving...

Hey Cuz can ya give me a hand????

Oh right so northern spain speaks for the whole of Europe?

reply to post by Spartak_FL


Where in the West Indies do they still practice cannibalism? Please name some examples, thank you.

Anyway.. I also don't think it's a far stretch that human ancestors may have practiced cannibalism hundreds of thousands of years ago.

these people where not humans anyway and we are not descended from them!

It says in the article:

In 1992 they found a complete, intact skeleton and two years later they discovered remains dating back more than 800,000 years.

End quote

This of course doesn't imply that all the remains were that old. Other finds all over Europe show a more consistent and somewhat apalling fact: remains of Neanderthals often show marks of cutlery as if they had been cut to pieces for cooking or roasting. Apalling because the finds coincide with the seemingly unexplained disappearance of the Neanderthals. Reminds me of that bible story when the children of the fallen ones were fed by humans until there was no more food and the giant offspring started eating everybody and everything they could stick a fork in. Just because most of real history is supressed by our controllers doesn't mean it didn't happen! Remains of seven to ten foot tall people are still found all over the planet, that's why the Smithsonian's suppressor squads are always very busy. If you happen do find something on your piece of land just don't call them, preserve the find for real scientists.

There also exist disgusting stories of twentieth century cannibalism in China and Africa: often, the enemy's liver is eaten.

The Spanish finds consist of the remains of children and adolescents. I wouldn't be surprised if the victims had died in winter when it was too cold to go outside for hunting. The older family members were strong and armed whereas the victims were neither. This gets more disgusting with every sentence.

I find it a little funny that people can actually feel offended by this.

But the title of the article is a little missleading, it implies that they are talking about ancestors of today Europeans, while actually it's talking about an extinct species that is not directly related to us. Humans (of the genus Homo), yes, but not our ancestors.

With the age of the find it is not surprising at all, hunters hunt.

they wouldnt have been eating members of their own "tribe", but members of competeing groups.


And canabalism has been practiced by many cultures of modern man when things get really tough.

The turn of the 13th to 14th centuries was one of the hardest times in north-central europe. A shift in climate cause massive crop failures and very hard winters. People isolated by the forest and or mountains turned to canabalism to survive. These horrors live on today in the form of various fairy tales about "witches" and "trolls" that capture and eat people, children in particular.
I read a really good paper several years ago, tracing the origins of some of the scarier fairy tales to the middle ages in germany. At the time germany was still a vast wilderness of forest, with very isolated populations, ideal conditions for incedents of canabalism.

Eventually we will learn the full scope of the canabalistic horror that was the Anasazi in the southwestern US. Recent discoveries are starting to paint a disturbing picture of their society.
Some of the more recent discoveries,

A small family sized dwelling was found with the butchered and cooked remains of the family that lived there.
Several other sites show signs of canabalism.
A skeleton was found buried at one of the large low land "ceramonial" kivas, that is not an anasazi he was a mexican. He was buried in a fashion similar to practices farther south in mexico, with feathers of mexican tropical birds, and his teeth were filed sharp, this was common in places in mexico but not for the anasazi.

Some newly found cliff dwellings were left in such a hurry that corn was left in baskets as it was, the food was basicaly left on the table.
Some show signs of a struggle others do not.

I think the large "ceramonial" kivas were actually holding pens, they are a large building around a central courtyard, the courtyard is about the size of a basketball court or so. Around this courtyard was a building that consisted of two rows of small rooms that opened only to an internal corridor that in turn leads to the central courtyard.
Its a lot like a modern prison building.
It was at one of these lowland kivas that the first signs of canabalism was found, and was dismissed as purely ritualistic.
recently a reasercher noticed something that nobody ever did, each anasazi cliff dwelling is within sight of at least one other cliff dwelling and usually more than one. And each of these groups of cliff dwellings is within sight of a large kiva on the desert floor.
Until youve been to a cliff dwelling you cant appreciate what these people went through to go about their daily lives.
There must have been a huge pressure to cause them to adopt such a lifestyle.
I think they were being hunted by the people of the lowlands.

reply to post by tezzajw


Somehow I'm not surprised that our ancestors were cannibals, considering that way back then we likely had no language and only rudimentary forms of vocal communication or the early roots of language.

Slowly but surely we worked this barbaric tendency to eat our own kind out of our behavior, though even today a few cannibals remain typically we think of them as mentally ill and just plain evil but is this really the case?

The only thing I find truly disturbing by this discovery is that they were eating children, that's scary because kids are the most vulnerable and weak and can't defend themselves, that's just so wrong.