Homo antecessor is among the oldest known human relatives in Europe. Their fossils have long shown grim signs of cannibalism, mostly involving children. But a new finding suggests cannibalism was a more widespread practice among these prehistoric humans.
Archaeologists with the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) announced the discovery of 24 new H. antecessor fossils at the Gran Dolina site in Spain. In a translated statement (via Google Translate), the IPHES explained that the fossils included six adult individuals whose bones retained cut marks associated with cannibalism practices. This suggests that it wasn’t necessarily younger humans who were cannibalized, as previous discoveries have indicated.
“The relationship between stone tools, faunal remains, and Homo antecessor bones allows us to reconstruct an occupation area from 850,000 years ago with an extraordinary level of detail,” Andreu Ollé, the project’s co-director, said in the statement.
In 2010, archaeologists, including project co-director Palmira Saladié, proposed that H. antecessor cannibalized their young. Also at Gran Dolina, the team found bones belonging to childlike individuals with butchering marks that resembled ones left on animal remains at the site.
According to an explainer by the Australian Museum, it’s debatable whether this truly points to cannibalism, but archaeologists haven’t found evidence for alternative scenarios, such as H. antecessor funerary rites. In 2012, Saladié and colleagues published a study suggesting that H. antecessors cannibalized their young for reasons similar to some chimpanzees, who sometimes hunt the young to defend their territories.
Then last year, the team behind the latest discovery found precise cuts and human bite marks on the bones of an H. antecessor toddler, likely between 2 and 5 years old. To Live Science, project co-director Saladié said this was the “most reliable evidence that the bodies found at the site were indeed consumed.”
The new discoveries indicate that it wasn’t necessarily the youngest, most vulnerable individuals who were subjected to cannibalism. In the statement, Saladié said that the findings are a “turning point” for the Gran Dolina site, as previous discoveries had been “conditioned” by the overwhelming number of infant and juvenile skeletons.
In addition to the adult bones, the team also unearthed a trove of stone tools and animal remains from hyenas, beavers, horses, rhinos, and more. According to the statement, H. antecessor is “one of the most unknown” species among human relatives that occupied modern-day Europe, so the latest excavations provide much-needed evidence for researchers to reconstruct the prehistoric humans’ anatomy, as well as their lifestyles.
“For the first time, we can approach its demographic structure with a representativeness that we did not have until now,” Ollé said. “Each new campaign brings us a little closer to understanding how these human groups lived, how they exploited resources, and how they were socially organized.”
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