Eleven people, including children, were skinned and eaten by their neighbors in Atapuerca 5,700 years ago.
5,700 years ago, in the Atapuerca mountains (Burgos), eleven people, including children and adolescents, were murdered and skinned. Their flesh was cooked and consumed by a neighboring community in just a couple of days. This is the macabre story revealed by remains found in the El Mirador cave, now explained in a new study led by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), published in the journal Scientific Reports .
Far from being a ritual act or a means of survival in the face of famine, the researchers point out that this event was the result of an episode of extreme violence between farming communities. The motivation was a conflict between two neighboring communities, according to the authors.
"We are dealing with a case of the total elimination of a human group, which included the systematic consumption of bodies. This behavior could have functioned as an extreme form of social control or revenge," explains Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, a CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
The remains, found in two different areas of the cave, show cut marks, fractures used to extract bone marrow, signs of cooking, and even human tooth imprints. Strontium isotopic analysis confirmed that the victims were native to the region, ruling out the hypothesis of an attack by outsiders.
The study places this violent act in a very specific period of the Neolithic occupation of the cave, just before it began to be used as a funerary space. "This is not a ritualized practice or a funerary custom. Everything points to a sudden attack, possibly related to territorial or resource tensions between livestock communities," comments Francesc Marginedas, also the author of the article.
The episode of cannibalism discovered at El Mirador is not an isolated case in the history of the European Neolithic. In fact, various archaeological sites on the continent have revealed signs of collective violence, some of it extremely brutal. However, most of these events do not include conclusive evidence of cannibalism, making the Atapuerca discovery an exceptional case.
One of the best-known examples is the Talheim site in southern Germany, where the remains of at least 34 people brutally murdered around 7,000 years ago were found. The victims had injuries to the skull and spine, indicative of a massacre, possibly the result of tensions between farming communities. However, no signs of postmortem manipulation associated with human consumption were found at Talheim.
Something similar occurred at Els Trocs, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, where a group of Neolithic settlers was systematically exterminated. There, the marks on the bones also prove extreme violence, but there are no traces of cannibalism either. These cases reflect that intergroup violence was relatively common in early sedentary societies, but the shift to consuming bodies is much rarer.
However, the case of El Mirador, with episodes of violence and cannibalism, is not unique in Europe. In the Fontbrégoua Cave (France), dating from the Middle Neolithic (between 5,000 and 3,000 BC), archaeologists found human remains treated in the same way as those of animals, suggesting their consumption. In Herxheim, another German site, more than a thousand human skeletons were found with signs of having been dismembered and possibly eaten, in a context also marked by conflict.
However, at none of these sites is the evidence as clear, concentrated, and systematic as at El Mirador. Here, the violent act occurred in a very short period of time and with an apparent objective: to completely eliminate a family group and even erase its existence through cannibalism.
This discovery is not the first at El Mirador. Another episode of cannibalism had already been identified in the Bronze Age, making this cave a unique site for studying how prehistoric humans dealt with death, conflict, and the human body as part of their beliefs or social strategies.
"The recurrence of these types of practices makes El Mirador an exceptional laboratory for exploring the limits of human behavior in contexts of tension and violence," says Palmira Saladié, director of the study and an expert in prehistoric taphonomy.
But El Mirador Cave wasn't the only place that witnessed cannibalism. Just a month ago, at the presentation of the results of the latest excavation campaign in Atapuerca, the teeth of a young adult and a small vertebra of a three-year-old child were revealed in the Gran Dolina. They lived 850,000 years ago, much earlier than those described in the recently published study. These remains show bruises, marks, and even human bites. The child's head was sliced open.
There is also controversial possible evidence of cannibalism at the famous Sima de los Huesos. Remains of Homo heidelbergensis—ancestors of Neanderthals who lived more than 400,000 years ago—have been found there, bearing marks and fractures that could be associated with post-mortem manipulation. However, it is possible that it was more of a collective funeral ritual than cannibalism. Nevertheless, Atapuerca continues to provide evidence that cannibalism was not an isolated practice among our ancestors. "Cannibalism is one of the most difficult behaviors to interpret in prehistory, probably because there is a lack of understanding within our society," Saladié concludes. "However, we are increasingly finding more recorded cases from different periods."
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