Early Europeans may have eaten their enemies’ brains, archaeologists say

Ancient humans living in Europe may have scooped out the brains of their dead enemies and eaten them, a new study suggests.

In the study, published last week in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers examined the bones of at least 10 people from the Magdalenian culture who lived in Europe 11,000–17,000 years ago.

Using imaging techniques, the team of researchers from institutes in France, Spain and Poland identified types of marks and cuts "associated with the removal of the marrow in the long bones and the brain in the skulls."

Multiple other studies have shown that cannibalism was relatively common among Magdalenian people, both as a funerary rite and as a form of violence.
But this specific instance "was a case of warfare," Francesc Marginedas, the co-lead author of the study, argues, because there was "no kind of special treatment compared to other Magdalenian sites," nor the presence of skull cups, "which is related to the ritualization of the bodies."

Marginedas, порно жесток бесплатно an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, was part of a team studying the bones deposited in Maszycka Cave, near Kraków, Poland – a well-known prehistoric site that has been extensively studied for decades.

During that time, different theories have emerged to explain why the ancient Magdalenians cut open the skulls of dead bodies.

While a study in the 1990s concluded that these ancient humans consumed the brains of their enemies, later studies highlighted a lack of human tooth marks on the skulls, undermining the cannibalism hypothesis.