Evidence from Les Rois cave, France. Cut marks from butchering with a flint stone on a possible Neanderthal jawbone (top image). Cut marks on jaw fragments from a reindeer (lower image).
Credit: Fernando V. Ramirez Rozzi/Journal of Anthropological Sciences
BRISBANE: Early modern humans may have used Neanderthal body parts as ornaments, and even feasted on them, a controversial study say.
Re-examined artefacts from the Les Rois cave, a settlement of early modern humans in southwest France, include a jawbone with flint-knife cut marks on it and a pendant made from a child's tooth cut out of another jawbone, according to a report in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.
“Secondary burial practices and cannibalism are the two explanations traditionally proposed to account for modifications on prehistoric human bones,” the researchers wrote.
Although researchers can’t be certain the 30,000-year-old jawbone belonged to a Neanderthal, several of its features are characteristic of that species, said co-author Marian Vanhaeren, an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Nanterre.
Cultural interaction
Shorter and stouter than modern humans, but with larger brains, Neanderthals lived in Europe, central Asia and the Middle East for about 170,000 years before disappearing between 33,000 to 24,000 years ago – around the same time modern humans were migrating across Europe for the first time.
Although both groups lived during the Palaeolithic era, there is little evidence to tell how much cultural interaction they had.
The remains were first discovered in the 1920s at the Les Rois cave, along with artefacts indicative of the flint-based Aurignacian culture, which is only associated with early modern humans, Vanhaeren said.
When co-author Fernando Ramirez Rozzi realised that some of the bones had Neanderthal characteristics, the team decided to reinvestigate the artefacts, excavated between 1948 and 1952, to see if there was evidence of other cultures, particularly artefacts associated with Neanderthal cultures.
But they only found the butchered remains of reindeer and horses, as well as flint blades and spear-points made from antlers. There were no indications of Neanderthal cultural artefacts, Vanhaeren said.
Cut marks on jawbones
However, the researchers noticed cut marks on the jawbone, similar to butchery marks on the reindeer remains. The marks could have been made by cutting the tongue out for eating or during ritual processing of the body, Vanhaeren said.
They may even have been made during attempts to remove teeth, Vanhaeren said, to be turned into pendants similar to the one found at Les Rois, although that pendant does not come from the marked jawbone.
With no Neanderthal cultural artefacts present, the find suggests that humans brought Neanderthals or their remains to their site, Vanhaeren said, to be eaten or used for symbolic purposes.
The team has excavated the site further over the last four years in an attempt to gather more evidence, and will soon analyse the new finds.
Colin Groves, a bioanthropologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, said the find was “quite a breakthrough” and likely to change our ideas about how humans and Neanderthals interacted.
“It opens up a whole world of possibilities,” he said.
Out of the box!
Maybe they were honoring the dead! Their dead!
Sometimes there are Toooooooo many assumptions!
really?
So a jawbone fragment which may or may not have been human, and a tooth pendant which is unrelated to the jawbone indicate canabalism of Neanderthal?
The scientists should be ashamed of themselves for coming to such sweeping conclusions based on scant evidence.
It seems more likely to me, based on the lack of Neanderthal culture at the site, that the jawbone was human and the "butchering" marks on the jawbone are a result of trying to make another tooth pendant.
To be fair, the possibility
To be fair, the possibility that the jaw bone was human and that the marks on it may have been an attempted tooth extraction were both mentioned in the article.
Pendant
Maybe the Neander made the pendant to honor thier dead!
What a great find!
I think it's fantastic that archaeologists are revisiting past finds along with excavating new finds to shed more light on such a dark past. Shame on anyone who doesn't appreciate how difficult the sciene of archaeology is - how else are we to figure out our past if we don't start with a theory and begin to expand on it? If we had more studies like this, we'll probably find that the evidence for cultural interaction has been under our nose for many years, we just didn't know what we were looking at.