“They received special treatment… they were carefully broken to produce a skull cup.” (The Trustees of the Natural History Museum)
Early Britons ate each other's remains and drank from skulls
“All the bones from the head down were heavily modified with chewing”
New evidence has shown that early Britons engaged in cannibalism, eating each other’s remains and using the skulls as cups.
Modern carbon-dating techniques have been used to investigate a system of caves in Britain’s Somerset. Remains in the caves date back to around 15,000 years ago.
The new information, compiled by a research team from London’s Natural History Museum and University College London, found that every single one of the bones found in the caves carries evidence of cannibalism, The Times reported.
“They received special treatment… they were carefully broken to produce a skull cup.”
Experts have been aware of ancient human remains at the caves since the 1880s, but have only investigated them recently.
“All the bones from the head down were heavily modified with chewing,” Dr. Silvia Bello, who led the research, told the newspaper.
The skulls were the only parts of the skeletons that hadn’t been chewed, Dr Bello said, adding: “They received special treatment… they were carefully broken to produce a skull cup.”
“It was a very careful process - they were really trying to create an object,” she said of the hunter-gatherers, known as Cro-Magnon or Magdalenians,
According to The Independent, “the vast majority of the remains had also been cracked so that the cavemen could get to the marrow inside, while scratches and bite marks suggested they used tools and their teeth to get to every scrap of human tissue.”
