Neanderthal bones show signs of cannibalism

“The many remains of horses and reindeer found in Goyet were processed the same way”, Bocherens says.

Chapelle-aux-Saints in France and Sima de las Palomas on the Iberian Peninsula, that the Neanderthals buried the dead.

Their analysis shows late Neanderthals had limited genetic diversity and were increasingly interrelated as they approached extinction some 30,000 years ago.

Researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany found that Neanderthals had a taste for human bones and meat.

Some Neanderthal remains from Goyet have been worked by human hands, as evidenced by cut marks, pits and notches.

The researchers say it appears the human remains were used in the same way as other animals.

The 99 bones came from a cave in Goyet, Belgium, and experts were able to date them to be between 40,500 and 45,500 years old.

Washington D.C, Jul 8: According to a recent study, Europe was once home to Neanderthals who practiced cannibalism. The Neanderthals used boulders to shape stone tools and also used bone in some cases to sharpen the cutting edges (one example closer to home can be found in the bone retouchers, mainly belonging to deer, recovered on the Azlor site in Dima, Bizkaia). However, four bones discovered in Goyet is evidence that the subspecies not only ate their own kind but also used their bones as tools.

I don’t want to be accused of being politically incorrect against some of current humanity’s antecedents, but to judge from recent events in the USA from Louisiana to Minnesota to Dallas, high caliber Neanderthal cannibalism on the streets of our cities stills survives today-except that we derive no nutritional benefits. Other digs have yielded more sophisticated arsenals of stone tools.

This study follows another study , from April 2015, that determined “Neanderthals from the French region of Poitou-Charentes cut, beat and fractured the bones of their recently deceased companions, as revealed by the fossil remains of two adults and a child found at the Marillac site”.

The discovery was made possible by the largest haul of Neanderthal bones north of the Alps. These manipulations have been observed at other Neanderthal sites, but scientists still do not know whether they did this for food or ceremony.

Tübingen University professors Hervé Bocherens and Johannes Krause, along with Cosimo Posth and Christoph Wißingm, did the research.