Humans may have eaten Neanderthal babies

Humans may have eaten Neanderthal babies, new study suggests.

Analysis of bones found in a cave in Belgium revealed cannibalism, with the victims being children and young women.

Scientists say the identity of the cannibals is unknown, and may have been rival Neanderthals, or early Homo sapiens preying on another group of Neanderthals.

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are two cousin species descended from the same ancestor. The two species have coexisted for millennia and often interbreed.

Goet Cave in central Belgium, discovered in 2016, contains Neanderthal bones dating back to around 45,000 years ago and some with cut marks, a sign of cannibalism.

The eaten women and children may have been abducted by the cannibals in the attack, researchers said, or the body parts may have been hacked and taken to the attackers’ home cave for ease of transport.

It’s also possible that Neanderthals, including infants and six-year-olds, cooked body parts before eating them, the scientists suggested.

Dr Isabelle Crevecoeur, director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and lead author of the study, told The Telegraph: “Neanderthals eating other Neanderthals is the most plausible hypothesis based on the archaeological and behavioral data from our study.

“However, we cannot completely exclude the hypothesis that Goate Neanderthals were killed and killed by early Homo sapiens.”

DNA and structural analysis of Goyat Cave revealed that four of the six eaten were young women and two were children.

One child had cut marks on his collar bone, indicating that a knife had been used to cut his flesh.

Further analysis revealed that the adults were mature female Neanderthals, described as gracile and short in stature.

The study also found that the victims were not related to their captors and lived in a different area than Goyet Cave.

It’s possible, the scientists said, that a tribe of people raided a rival group and abducted six women and children and then took them to their cave to eat.

But they said it was also possible that the cannibals killed their victims and then killed them where they fell, only to take the edible body parts back to their base.

While the identity of the cannibals remains unknown, scientists say there is a strong possibility that it is another Neanderthal group.

Homo sapiens have not been found to have inhabited modern Belgium at the time of the slaughter, but they were found only 370 miles to the east in Rhineland, Germany, and may have been present in the region.

However, experts have cast doubt on the suggestions and instead point to Neanderthals as the culprits.

Professor Chris Stringer, a human evolutionary anthropologist at the Natural History Museum, said it was “definitely possible” that Homo sapiens groups were living in western Europe at the time of the Goet Cave cannibals.

“But on the current evidence we can’t put them anywhere near this site in Belgium at that time, so I think it could be one,” he told the Telegraph.

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Dr Quentin Cosnefroy, a post-doctoral researcher at the CNRS and co-author of the study, said Homo sapiens criminals were possible but unlikely.

“There is no archaeological evidence that Homo sapiens existed in the Goyet region during that period,” he said.

“Another important point is that the Neanderthal remains at Goet were processed in a manner consistent with other Neanderthal-on-Neanderthal cannibalism sites, and differ from patterns seen later in contexts where Homo sapiens practiced cannibalism.”

The remains are from around the same time period as the recently discovered earliest evidence of human deliberate fire, which was found in Suffolk 40,000 years ago and was probably a skill that came from Europe.

Goyet’s remains showed no signs of burning, the researchers said, but this was not enough to rule out cooking human flesh.

In a previous study, scientists wrote: “Although the Neanderthal remains show no signs of burning, the possibility that they may have been roasted or boiled cannot be ruled out.

“The high number of cut marks and the fact that DNA can be successfully extracted, however, are inconsistent with this possibility.”

The CNRS study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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