Early man butchered and ate the brains of children as part of his everyday diet, a new study of fossil bones in Spain suggests:
Among the bones of bison, deer, wild sheep and other animals, scientists discovered the butchered remains of at least 11 human children and adolescents.
The bones also displayed signs of having been smashed to get the nutritious marrow inside and there was evidence that the victims’ brains may also have been eaten.
Striek marks on the bone at the base of the skull also indicated that the humans had been decapitated according to the study’s co-author José Maria Bermúdez de Castro.
Bermudez de Castro, of the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, told National Geographic: ‘Probably then they cut the skull for extracting the brain. The brain is good for food.’
Scientists believe that early man ate fellow humans both to fulfill his nutritional needs and to kill off neighbouring enemy tribes.Bones of humans that had been eaten spanned a period of around hundred thousand years, indicating that the practice was not just confined to times when food was scarce.
And the fact that the bones were discarded with those of other animals suggests that there was no religious significance to the practice.
The accompanying photo bears this caption:
A model of a homo antecessor female scooping out the brains of human head