This water-assisted movement can also take place before the specimens are fossilized. For example, the bodies of creatures that died along the length of an ancient body of water—or in it—may have been carried away by currents and deposited together due to gravity or the physical properties of the stream or river. If sediments covered the bodies rapidly enough, they may have become fossilized, but their final location may have little or nothing to do with the behavior and associations that took place when the organisms were alive. For this reason, archaeologists must be cautious when animal and human bones are found mixed together. The mélange does not necessarily prove that humans did the mixing.13
One instance in which the evidence for human cannibalism remains solid involves Homo antecessor (“pioneering man”), the reputed ancestor of Neanderthals. The first fossils of this species were uncovered in the 1980s in Atapuerca, a region in northern Spain. Initially, spelunkers found the bones of extinct cave bears at the bottom of a narrow 50-foot-deep pit. Excavation of the pit, now known as Sima de los Huesos (Pit of the Bones), was initiated in 1984 by paleontologist Emiliano Aguirre. After his retirement, Aguirre’s students continued to work at the site, and in 1991 they began emerging from the stifling heat and claustrophobic conditions with well-preserved hominid bones.
Since then, the site has yielded more than 5,000 bone fragments from approximately 30 humans of varying age and sex. The researchers noted that some aspects of the skull and post-cranial skeleton appeared to be Neanderthal-like (including a large pelvis that someone christened “Elvis”). Eventually, though, the remains from Atapuerca exhibited sufficient anatomical differences from Neanderthals to warrant placing them into a separate species.
According to Ian Tattersall, Homo antecessor was “almost Neanderthal but not quite. . . . These guys were on the way to becoming Neanderthals.” To the surprise of researchers, the remains of Homo antecessor recovered from Sima de los Huesos were dated to a minimum of 530,000 years, indicating that the Neanderthal lineage had been in Europe 300,000 to 400,000 years before the first Neanderthals, far longer than anyone imagined.
By 1994, researchers were claiming that Homo antecessor remains showed evidence of having been cannibalized. In this case, the fracture patterns, cut marks, and “tool-induced surface modification” were identical to the damage found on the bones of non-human animals that had presumably been used as food. All of the bones (human and non-human) were randomly dispersed as well. The researchers at Atapuerca concluded that the H. antecessor remains came from “the victims of other humans who brought bodies to the site, ate their flesh, broke their bones, and extracted the marrow, in the same way they were feeding on the [animals] also preserved in the stratum.”
Interestingly, the presence of so many types of game animals led the same researchers to suggest that Atapuerca did not represent an example of stress-related survival cannibalism, and Tattersall agreed. “Sometimes the environment was pretty rich and you wouldn’t necessarily need to practice cannibalism to make your metabolic ends meet, as it were. You’d be able to relatively easily find sources of protein otherwise.”
Accordingly, the Neanderthal ancestors living at Atapuerca were likely not prehistoric versions of the Donner Party—stranded in horrible conditions and compelled by starvation to consume their dead. Instead, Homo antecessor, like many species throughout the animal kingdom, may have simply considered others of their kind to be food. In other words, they may have eaten human flesh because it was readily available and because they liked it.
No one is absolutely certain when the transition from Homo antecessor to Neanderthal Man took place, but it probably happened sometime around 150,000 years ago. If one does not subscribe to the idea that Neanderthal genes were eventually overwhelmed through interbreeding with their more intelligent cousins, then Homo neanderthalensis appears to have gone extinct approximately 30,000 years ago. I asked Tattersall to elaborate.
“Neanderthals and modern humans [i.e., Homo sapiens] managed to somehow partition the Near East among themselves for a long, long period of time, at a time when modern humans were not behaving like they do today.”
“How did these humans differ from us?” I asked him.
“They left no symbolic record [e.g., depictions of their behavior and beliefs]. As soon as they started leaving a symbolic record, the Neanderthals were out of there.”
I told Tattersall that I still didn’t see the connection, so he explained it further. “I think that by the time the Neanderthals’ homeland in Europe was invaded by modern humans, humans were behaving in the modern way and had become insuperable competitors.”
Given what we know about modern humans and their treatment of the indigenous groups they encountered, it’s difficult to argue against Tattersall’s conclusions. In all likelihood, the Neanderthal homeland was indeed invaded by an advanced, symbolism-driven species and, as we’ll see in the following chapter, it would have been more of a surprise in fact if Homo sapiens hadn’t raped, enslaved, and slaughtered the Neanderthals and other groups they encountered there.
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