Our baby-eating ancestors

Much of modern cannibalism revolves around the ritual consumption of one's adult enemies, but apparently this was not what was practiced by H. antecessor. The case for Neandertal cannibalism was advanced by White and Toth, but it's my impression that it's controversial. Since the Upper Paleolithic, modern humans have certainly devised numerous new ways of being cruel to one another, but it seems that cannibalism is not one of them. Certainly, our more recent ancestors have imbued meaning and ritual to the process, but it does seem that the act could very well be performed by a symbol-free culture.

Hominid Hunting has more.

J Hum Evol. 2012 Sep 1. [Epub ahead of print]

Intergroup cannibalism in the European Early Pleistocene: The range expansion and imbalance of power hypotheses.

Saladié P, Huguet R, Rodríguez-Hidalgo A, Cáceres I, Esteban-Nadal M, Arsuaga JL, Bermúdez de Castro JM, Carbonell E.

Abstract

In this paper, we compare cannibalism in chimpanzees, modern humans, and in archaeological cases with cannibalism inferred from evidence from the Early Pleistocene assemblage of level TD6 of Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain). The cannibalism documented in level TD6 mainly involves the consumption of infants and other immature individuals. The human induced modifications on Homo antecessor and deer remains suggest that butchering processes were similar for both taxa, and the remains were discarded on the living floor in the same way. This finding implies that a group of hominins that used the Gran Dolina cave periodically hunted and consumed individuals from another group. However, the age distribution of the cannibalized hominins in the TD6 assemblage is not consistent with that from other cases of exo-cannibalism by human/hominin groups. Instead, it is similar to the age profiles seen in cannibalism associated with intergroup aggression in chimpanzees. For this reason, we use an analogy with chimpanzees to propose that the TD6 hominins mounted low-risk attacks on members of other groups to defend access to resources within their own territories and to try and expand their territories at the expense of neighboring groups.

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Earliest drinking skull-caps (15-12 thousand years ago)

I had no idea that skull-caps as drinking vessels is not an ethnographic oddity, but a widely attested practice. Besides the infamous Krum, and Herodotus' Scythians I did not have any other examples in mind. A new paper is a good primer on the subject, and it also presents evidence for the earliest known use of skull-caps from Gough's Cave in England.

From the paper:

At Gough's Cave there is unambiguous evidence for the intentional controlled production of skull-cups, resembling those from the Le Placard and Isturitz as well as modern ethnographic examples [8]. The distribution of cut and percussion marks, however, suggests that this meticulous shaping of the cranial vault was preceded by the processing of the cadavers for consumption of body tissues (including bone marrow from the mandible), with a pattern of cuts and impact damage that is identical to that found on other large mammals from the cave [26]–[27].

PLoS ONE 6(2): e17026. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0017026

Earliest Directly-Dated Human Skull-Cups

Silvia M. Bello et al.

Abstract
Background
The use of human braincases as drinking cups and containers has extensive historic and ethnographic documentation, but archaeological examples are extremely rare. In the Upper Palaeolithic of western Europe, cut-marked and broken human bones are widespread in the Magdalenian (~15 to 12,000 years BP) and skull-cup preparation is an element of this tradition.

Principal Findings
Here we describe the post-mortem processing of human heads at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Gough's Cave (Somerset, England) and identify a range of modifications associated with the production of skull-cups. New analyses of human remains from Gough's Cave demonstrate the skilled post-mortem manipulation of human bodies. Results of the research suggest the processing of cadavers for the consumption of body tissues (bone marrow), accompanied by meticulous shaping of cranial vaults. The distribution of cut-marks and percussion features indicates that the skulls were scrupulously 'cleaned' of any soft tissues, and subsequently modified by controlled removal of the facial region and breakage of the cranial base along a sub-horizontal plane. The vaults were also ‘retouched’, possibly to make the broken edges more regular. This manipulation suggests the shaping of skulls to produce skull-cups.

Conclusions
Three skull-cups have been identified amongst the human bones from Gough's Cave. New ultrafiltered radiocarbon determinations provide direct dates of about 14,700 cal BP, making these the oldest directly dated skull-cups and the only examples known from the British Isles.

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Injuries and Violence in Iberian Neolithic and Bronze Age

American Journal of Physical Anthropology doi:10.1002/ajpa.21089

Possible relationship of cranial traumatic injuries with violence in the south-east Iberian Peninsula from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age

S.A. Jiménez-Brobeil et al.

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to analyze the presence and distribution of cranial trauma, as possible evidence of violence, in remains from the Neolithic to Bronze Age from the SE Iberian Peninsula. The sample contains skulls, crania, and cranial vaults belonging to 410 prehistoric individuals. We also studied 267 crania from medieval and modern times for comparative purposes. All lesions in the prehistoric crania are healed and none of them can be attributed to a specific weapon. In all studied populations, injuries were more frequent in adults than in subadults and also in males than in females, denoting a sexual division in the risk of suffering accidents or intentional violence. According to the archeological record, the development of societies in the SE Iberian Peninsula during these periods must have entailed an increase in conflict. However, a high frequency of cranial traumatic injuries was observed in the Neolithic series, theoretically a less conflictive time, and the lowest frequency was in crania from the 3rd millennium B.C. (Copper Age), which is characterized by the archeologists as a period of increasing violence. The relatively large size and the high rate of injuries in Neolithic crania and the practice of cannibalism are strongly suggestive of episodes of interpersonal or intergroup conflict. The number and distribution of injuries in Bronze Age is consistent with the increase in violence at that time described by most archeologists.

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