The myths and perturbing realities of cannibalism

Mary experimentally cut a series of fresh and aged bones, a number of which bore cut marks from some years ago. She then sent me bones and replicas of marks in a blind test to see if I could distinguish from the microscopic features alone whether delayed or immediate processing had occurred. Since both bone surfaces and cut marks weather and age over time, I was able to diagnose all of the experimental sample correctly. A fresh cut on a fresh bone meant immediate processing, as did an old cut on an old bone; only a fresh cut on an old bone indicated delayed processing. With this knowledge in hand, I re-analyzed the Fontbregoua material. All the bones -- animal and human alike -- showed the features of immediate processing. Fontbregoua wasn't, then, a case of secondary burial. The interpretation of the Fontbregoua remains, published last year in Science, is that they make a strong case for dietary cannibalism. Human and animal remains were treated similarly in terms of butchery strategy, fracturing for marrow, and mode of discard. If it's accepted that the animals were butchered and eaten -- and you would have to look long and hard to find someone who wouldn't accept this as true -- then so, too, must the humans have been. The evidence is the same; only the implications are different.

Because each pit appears to represent a single butchery episode,we can deduce that there were at least three episodes of cannibalism in the cave as well as ten of butchering wild or domestic animals. The cave was inhabited for about 1,800 years (4750-2930 B.C.), based on carbon-14 dates. Of the three pits preserving human remains, one can be securely dated at 3740 B.C. plus or minus 190 years; the others, which were somewhat disturbed, were probably made between 4300 and 3700 B.C. It's impossible to tell whether the three cannibalism episodes occurred essentially contempora- neously or among three different groups of people who inhabited the cave over time. If the three episodes were simultaneous, it could be argued that this was survival cannibalism -- perhaps the group was trapped in the cave for some reason. But remember that 13 or 14 people were eaten, and by anybody's estimate, that's a lot of meat, especially when added to the animal remains that date from the same period.

What Paola and I find most likely is that these bones from Fontbregoua represent dietary cannibalism, carried out by people who simply saw no difference between sheep, goats, wild boars and deer, and humans. There's no evidence from Fontbregoua that could be interpreted as indicating ritual treatment of the human remains. Since tribal peoples often have a name for themselves that means ''the people'' and for all others a name that indicates a subhuman or animal status, I find it tempting to speculate that the victims at Fontbregoua were strangers to the inhabitants of

the cave. Unfortunately, since there's no associated cemetery area, we can't test the hypothesis that the victims were biologically distinct from the cannibals. In any case, it's more often the cultural distinctness and not the biological one that weighs most heavily. How uncomfortable it is to realize that only a few thousand years ago our species was unable or unwilling to recognize the humanity of others!