The Ancients - Cannibalism

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

It’s a macabre topic to discuss, but also one that has fascinated people for generations. So what has archaeology revealed about cannibalism among prehistoric societies? And if cannibalism does seem to have been practised among certain groups, then why? Appalachian State University’s Dr Marc Kissel dialled in from North Carolina to talk us through several cases of potential cannibalism in prehistory, from Neanderthals to the Neolithic.Marc’s Twitter: @MarcKisselOrder Tristan’s book today: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perdiccas-Years-323-Alexanders-Successors/dp/1526775115/ref=zg_bsnr_271237_68/260-7675295-7826601?pd_rd_i=1526775115&psc=1While you’re here, don’t forget to leave us a rating and review.For more ancient content, subscribe to our Ancient History Thursday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple storeMusic: Ancient Secrets - Storyblocks

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we are talking all about cannibalism.

Cannibalism in prehistoric society. So we're going to be covering thousands of years, over a million years in fact. We're going to be covering case studies varying from one and a half million years ago, roughly that time, to 600,000 years ago, deep in the Paleolithic, to more recent times, to the Mesolithic, to the Neolithic, and ultimately to the Bronze Age. We're going to be covering various case studies, potential evidence of cannibalism among certain prehistoric societies. Now, to talk through all of this, I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr. Mark Kissel. He's an assistant professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. He works closely with Dr. Nam Kim. Nam, who's been on the podcast a few times recently.

You might remember our podcasts on the origins of civilisation or the origins of warfare. Now, Mark and Nam, they work closely, particularly on the origins of warfare, on the emergence of warfare. And Mark has a particular interest in these cases of early potential cannibalism. Now, Mark, he also featured in a new history hit documentary also called The Origins of Warfare. We had to get him on the podcast to talk about this extraordinary topic. It was great to finally chat to him. We had a lot of fun. So without further ado, to talk all about cannibalism in prehistoric societies, here's Mark. In prehistoric societies, here's Mark.

Mark, great to have you on the podcast. Oh, I'm happy to be here. Now, you are very welcome to be here, especially you're the star of one of our most recent documentaries, all about the origins of warfare. You're a good friend of the ancients veteran that is Nam Kim and his origins of warfare, origins of civilization and the like. And today we're talking about another huge topic, cannibalism in prehistoric societies. I mean, Mark, this is a topic that fascinates both the public and scientists alike, doesn't it? It does. And I don't really know why. We're sort of, we are drawn to the macabre. I have a 10-year-old and she loves gross stuff and reading these horror stuff. And she's never really been into what I do, except for this morning when I

told her I was talking about cannibalism and she got really excited. So there is maybe this sort of cultural trope that cannibalism warfare is interesting. And sometimes probably because it seems like to us deviant behavior. Most people, we assume, are not eating the flesh of their fellow humans. So if you find evidence of that, we want to ask why, or we're just sort of attracted to these things that seem different, that seem unusual. And with warfare as well, like warfare is awful and repugnant, but it seems so common and such a huge part of the human experience, unfortunately, that we do want to sort of understand where it comes from and why. And maybe for both of them, because we want to try to avoid these things, right? We want to avoid violence. Most of us don't like violence. So I think there's

a lot going on there. It seems, as you say, with warfare and ancient battles is one of the most popular topics on the podcast, happily to say, it's because they are so extraordinary. The same seems to be able to apply to cannibalism, this eating of other people. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I always have to remind myself as someone who studies this stuff is we need to be very careful because we focus on these examples. We focus on the cannibalism, the evidence of warfare like 12,000 years ago, and we write so much about it that we forget that those are the blips. Those are the unusual examples. And most of the examples we have are not of violence, are not of warfare, are not of cannibalism.

But from a realistic perspective as an academic who's trying to get tenure, I will get a lot more clicks on an article if I write a piece about the origins of violence. If I write about origins of peace, that's less likely to get attention. And I mean, same thing with everything, right? There is a reason why we're attracted to these things. So I think it's very good at the beginning to realise that yes, we have examples of this. Yes, they're fascinating and they tell us something, but it's really only a small part of the human experience. I think you're right. And I think it's important to highlight that right at the start of this podcast. And let's delve into the topic now, Mark, because scientifically, I know it sounds a very easy question to answer, but you know,

the scientific definition of it, how do we define cannibalism? I think most would say something like the act of eating organs or tissues, flesh, from an individual of the same species. Then, of course, you get into the weeds very, very quickly. As a biological anthropologist, someone who studies human origins, defining species is a whole other problem. And then, of course, there's the reasons why cannibalism happened. But yeah, very generally, it's sort of eating the flesh of an individual from the same species. And if we delve into it even more, because there seem to be these different types of cannibalism, and in particular, there seem to be two main general categories, can we say?

Yes. So again, reasonable people disagree. But for the most part, anthropologists studying human cannibalism often describe between cannibalism that's happening within the group, so eating people that you know, which we sometimes call endocannibalism, so E-N-D-O cannibalism. And then there's cannibalism where you're eating folks outside of your group. And for that, we've talked about exocannibalism. And sort of there's different meanings associated with the different types of cannibalism. And then the question becomes for archaeology is, can we ever distinguish the two? And in regards to like, when you're trying to distinguish the two, and we'll go into those examples in a minute, I appreciate the case study seems the best way forwards for tackling that.

But within these two categories, are there also various types of cannibalism within them, shall we say? Yes. In terms of endocannibalism, so eating somebody that is in your group, the examples that I think are best known for the popular audience would be sometimes called famine or survival cannibalism. So some examples, if people my age are a bit older, there was a movie, Alive. And this was about a plane crash in the Andes. I believe it was from Uruguay. And a rugby team was part of the people who crash landed on the mountain. They were stuck there for a long time and eventually resorted to cannibalism, to eating the people who had died

in a plane crash. And you can read the records there, and it's disturbing. I mean, it's really upsetting because they waited a long time. They ate part of the seat cushion. One guy ate a peanut for three days because no one wanted to eat the flesh of the dead. They were people they knew. The other sort of really classic example, at least for the United States, I don't know, across the pond, is the Donner Party. So the Donner Party is this example of people heading to California on the West Coast from sort of the middle part of the country. They were heading for, I think, one of the gold rushes. And everyone went one way. The Donner Party went a different way. They had read about a shortcut. And I believe the person who wrote about the shortcut never actually took the shortcut. He said, hey, this

might be a good way to go. They sadly got stuck in the valley by the Sierra Nevada mountain range and were there for over the winter, you know, in the 1890s perhaps. So they're stuck there for a while. And rumors were that they engaged in cannibalism. Fairly recently, archaeologists actually excavated one of these campsites that the Ana Party were in to look for evidence of cannibalism. Fairly recently, archaeologists actually excavated one of these campsites that the Anapardi were in to look for evidence of cannibalism. What they found is sort of interesting for this whole conversation, right? They found a lot of bones. And one of my colleagues, Gwen Robin Shug, looked at the bones under a microscope. If you look under bones under a microscope and you

look at the sort of cell structure, you can sometimes say what kind of species vaguely it is from. And none of them were human, but they were all crushed up. So the argument was they were really getting any little bit of things they can get from the bones. That of course doesn't prove there was no cannibalism because there were multiple sites. Maybe they treated the bones differently. We don't know. But yeah, I think the endocannibalism certainly is mostly the sort of survival cannibalism because there were multiple sites. Maybe they treated the bones differently. We don't know. But yeah, I think that endocannibalism certainly is mostly the sort of survival cannibalism. The other sort of major example of endocannibalism, which we can talk about later, would be maybe ritual or mortuary, which can be both endo and exo though. But basically, it's sort of a cannibalism where after somebody dies, under some sort of ritual significance, you eat part of the flesh.

It could be eating the flesh of your enemies as an insult, or eating the flesh of your loved ones as a way to sort of deal with the grief. And in regards to exo-cannibalism, what are the main types under that one? Again, it's tricky, right? Sometimes mortuary cannibalism could be eating the dead of your enemies, those people you don't know. Sometimes it would be sort of the unfortunate title of gastronomic cannibalism, which is like, maybe you like that taste of flesh of your fellow species. and then this would be sort of a hard to categorize maybe you would call it hostility or hostile you know sort of eating in terms of warfare so a lot of the examples we have and i'm not as familiar with this stuff but certainly examples of warfare where you eat the people you killed and in regards to that when you're looking at say yourself or your colleagues you're looking at these remains from pre-history and there's a possibility that there might be cannibalism there. I mean,

what taphonomic signs are you looking for when trying to detect cannibalism? So this is the $64 million question, right? This is the problem we have. So we can study sort of the surface modifications of bones. And studying what happens to an animal's bones or human's bones from when they die to when they're studied is called pathonomy. And a lot of work has been done on this, right? Can you tell, for example, a mark that was left on a bone because an animal gnawed at it versus one left by a stone tool? Or can you tell an animal tooth mark from a human tooth mark? And the answer is, yeah, but you have to be really, really careful. It's not easy to do. You have to spend a lot of time

sitting with sort of other examples and trying to distinguish the two because on the surface, so to speak, they do look very similar. So basically, yes, I mean, the way scientists have done this is done studies, right? Leave bones out, have animals gnaw at them, and sort of build up essentially a database. I'll tell the listeners, if you're ever looking for a really good book to read, a man named Tim White in the 90s wrote a book called Cannibalism at Moncos Canyon. And it's sort of one of the quintessential books has really good sort of pictures to distinguish the two. So we have these data.

Another good point about the book is if you're traveling and you want to make sure people stay six feet away from you, it's a good book to bring with you because no one's going to sit next to you. They have a book called Human Cannibalism. So it's a really fascinating example. So we do have examples of this. The problem is that not everyone agrees on how to interpret these remarks and these service modifications. So a lot of the internal debate

is, well, at this site, people report, oh, there's human tooth marks on a human foot. But, you know, people can disagree about that. And that's where it becomes very difficult for experts to really know what is going on here. And so I can imagine they said that's where it becomes very difficult for experts to really know what is going on here. And so I can imagine they say that's one of the big problems you have when looking at these possible cases from prehistory. I mean, if we therefore look at some of these case studies now, and I know a few of these are in your book, which you co-authored with Nam. But first off, maybe not a case study as such, if we go really far back into prehistory, and that's cannibalism in the animal world and cannibalism among primates, because humans aren't the only species that's engaged in cannibalism, are they? No, they're not. And this is kind of surprising. When I first

started looking into it, cannibalism is actually a fairly rare event in the primate world, which is to me me, surprising because primatologists have watched monkeys and apes and prosimians for generations. We know a lot about them, and I think people would publish about it. So it's rare enough that it does get attention. So it's not seen in that many monkeys. I think I've seen in baboons. I've seen in some marmosets, which is a small primate that lives in Brazil. It's been seen in the great apes, in chimpanzees, and maybe once or twice in orangutans. But it's fairly rare.

And when it does happen, oftentimes it will be an adult eating a young baby. Very often they're not related. There's examples I just remember reading recently of two orangutan mothers eating the babies after they died, which again, the reaction is why would they do that? In this example, if I recall correctly, it was suggested that it wasn't because they wanted to. It was essentially because of environmental stressors. There's a lot of tourism and they're being restricted. So all this stuff's happening. The point here is that we are not going to really know why they're doing this, right? It seems sort of rare, which might give us a clue that it's not a very common thing for

primates to do this. Maybe we do have an innate tendency to not want to eat our fellow species. Sort of the gist is it happens, doesn't seem very common. And when it does, it's often, you know, by unrelated individuals. And sometimes it would coincide with what we call infanticide. So occasionally a chimpanzee will kill a baby of the unrelated for reasons of sort of he kills the baby, then the mother will go back into estrus and might mate with him, which is a whole other debate. But yeah, it's not as common as I would expect it to be. That is very interesting. It's important to mention that case before we delve into the case studies of humans themselves. And let's therefore move away from primates now,

but let's stay deep in prehistory. Because I've got a case of a certain type of homo, it might not be homo, please correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, from South Africa. And this seems to be one of the oldest dating ones that I know you and your co-worker mentioned in your book. And this is the site of, and correct me if I said this wrong as well, Sterkfontein. What is this place? So Sterkfontein is a South African cave site. And dating the sites in these caves is really tricky because it's not like we can use radiocarbon dating or there's no volcanic activity there.

So it's really, really hotly debated about these ages. But I think it's probably about 1.7 million years old. Wow. What it is, again, we debate. It's a cranium at the head of a hominin, a primate that's more closely related to us than to any other living primate. So on our evolutionary tree, it could be a genus Homo. It could be an australopithecine, which are essentially small little bipedal things that are small brains. Yeah, we don't know what species it is. It's a hard thing to judge.

Actually, one of my PhD advisors had studied the bones at Strickfontein looking for evidence of sort of humans eating meat. And then as part of this, he's looking at this very famous skull called STW53, which is the catalog number. And many people have looked at this thing, but he's just randomly looking at it because he was looking for evidence of meat eating. And he found cut marks with defleshing marks left by a stone tool, I believe along the orbits or the eyes, which is sort of surprising. First off, like, I mean, by this time, certainly we see evidence of stone tool

use. So it's not that surprising that we find evidence of stone tool use, but I think one of the earliest evidences of sort of human cannibalism. Now, again, we have no clear why they did this. It doesn't look random, if I remember correctly, like the way the cut marks are placed, they were purposely doing this. It's not like they missed and hit somebody's skull by accident. Some of the cut marks are where you want to remove the mandible from the cranium. So yeah, I mean, maybe they were eating them. But yeah, we don't know why. But certainly it's amazing that they found that over a million and a half years ago. I mean, absolutely, Mark. How far back it stretches in time is absolutely staggering.

I mean, is it good to stress here, something to stress, is that how difficult it is for cases this far back, the ambiguity around them when you're thinking, you know, could this be cannibalism or could it not be, just because you don't have the context, as it were. Yeah, exactly. That's a great point to keep in mind, right? If this thing is an Australopithecine, you know, we don't know much about their culture. We know very little bit about their biology and their behaviour. Even for the earliest members of our genes, the genus Homo, usually the debate is how human are they? So when we find examples of this, we're probably not going to know why they did that. I mean, even if someone wrote something down, people lie about why they're doing

things. So maybe we can get into a little bit later, the examples we know from sort of the ethnographic record of cannibalism. And even there, it's tricky, right? So like, we don't know. It's interesting, and it's relevant to the story. Some people say that could be interpersonal violence that killed this individual. But yeah, it's just interesting to think about. But yeah, we'll probably never know exactly why they did these things over a million years ago. Well, let's go under a million years ago next now, because I want you to go into detail about the next place, the next case study. Because I know you guys have done a lot of work on this, and it is absolutely extraordinary for this topic. And we're going to Spain. We're going to the Gran Delina Cave, because Mark, what is this case study? So this is sort of the one

that gets the most attention, not just for cannibalism, but also for warfare. Gran Delina is a site in the Atapuerca Mountains in the north part of Spain. And Atapuerca has a lot of archaeological and human fossil remains. It is an amazing site. They have multiple sites with different kinds of early members of human origins. They have done incredible work here. Grandolena is one of these caves. At that cave, again, this is where it gets complicated.

There's multiple layers, right? So stratigraphic layers. Within one of the layers, scientists have found something like 90 or 100 bone fragments of a hominin, of which, again, because scientists like to debate, I cannot tell you what species it is. To make it simple, it's probably not a Neanderthal, but something maybe on the way to becoming a Neanderthal. Some folks call it Homo antecessor.

So anyway, they found these bones of these individuals, and about, of them, I think about 50% of these bones of what we think was living at that site of those species show evidence of cut marks and scraping marks on their bone. And they're sort of placed at places where you would remove the flesh. So again, pretty good example of what we would think would be human cannibalism. I believe they even could argue that there's tooth marks left by humans gnawing at the bones. Again, given what we talked about before, some folks disagree.

But I think most experts would say this is a sign of people were cannibalizing domains of their fellow species. You can then, of course, ask why were they doing this? And that's where it gets really interesting, I think, from my perspective, because we know so much about this site. It's such a prominent site. People have been working there for a long time, and my colleagues have a lot of data. So, for example, it seems unlikely that this would be what we call survival cannibalism, because it doesn't seem like a one-off thing. It happened a couple of times. It looks like it was not a one-off event. So we think maybe it's not, they have nothing else to eat. So it's not like a time of food stress, in other words.

It's also sort of interesting that the individuals they do find with the cut marks tend to be on the younger individuals. And some scholars have said, well, that's kind of what we see when we see chimpanzees attacking other chimps that are not in their group, is they'll attack the ones they know they can kill. They're not going to go for the alpha male. That's not a good idea. So some scholars have multiple lines of evidence saying, hey, maybe this is eating people outside of your group, right? This exo-cannibalism. Maybe they were purposely going for the individuals they could kill. If that's the case, you know, some scholars then go another step and say, well, if you are purposely attacking other people, isn't that warfare? Now, again, that's a lot of ifs and a lot of sort of good, but sort of, you know,

chaining together different lines of evidence. But I think because of that, it's sort of, there's been a lot of debate about it because people could say, well, is that really warfare? Is that really cannibalism? Do we really know they were eating people that weren't them in their group? Yeah, we don't. I could have mentioned this before, but one of the sort of things about cannibalism we look for is they seem to be treating the bones not special in any way. So it's not like they were treating them with reverence. So yeah, perhaps it is cannibalism. As someone who tends to be sceptical of these things, I think they make a pretty good case that something extraordinary is happening there. Absolutely. absolutely like it's so interesting

looking at that mark and that whole site i think it's something like is correct if i'm wrong but like 600 000 years ago or something like that which is mind-boggling how much information we have surviving and the analysis of these bones and yet as you say one of these great debates is whether if it is cannibalism whether it's endo-cannibalism or whether it's exocannibalism, whether it's warfare or whether it's for some other reason. Yeah, I should say it's about 600,000 years ago. They're constantly trying to get better dates for the site because, again, this is really hard to tell. But yeah, a long, long time ago. These are not modern humans.

They're not like us. Maybe they're not sort of thinking in the same way we're thinking. So it's very hard for everyone, even anthropologists who are trained to think this way, to not look at data and interpret it under our own lens. But yeah, I mean, I think make a very, very good case for being exo-canonism.

You know, I say this, I'm sure, as soon as we stop recording this, they're going to come up with something new proving it is something different. But for now, yeah, I think it's the best case we know. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're gonna be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast. From the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11, we reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world.

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Now, Mark, what is this? So Bodo was about 500, 600,000 years ago in Ethiopia. So same time, but way different location and also probably a different hominin group or species, if you want to use that term. And as with the Sturckmantan things over a million years old, it's kind of the same story where it's a very famous cranium found in Ethiopia, I believe in the 80s. And yeah, we find evidence of cut marks on it, of individuals defleshing the face. And it's the same problem as always. Yes, there's cut marks. Yes, they probably were doing it to take off the flesh. What that means, we just do not know. off the flesh. What that means, we just do not know. If it was more recent, we might at least have some way to sort of get into the, is it a ritual significance? The problem here, Tristan,

that I should have admitted also with the previous examples, is one of the biggest debates about these groups is how human are they? Do they even have the ability to sort of link things and ideas together in really complex ways that humans do almost innately to sort of link things and ideas together in really complex ways that humans do almost innately and sort of symbolically thinking? So with these earlier things, anyone who's going to claim that Bodo is a ritual defleshing, they're going to be hammered by colleagues who say, no, no, no, only modern humans do that. So I tend to be agnostic on the thing.

But yes, there's evidence. It shows something's happening. There was a book, someone claimed that Bodo was the first evidence of warfare. I mean, that you just don't know, right? How would you know why it died? Because we don't have the entire fossil, we just have the skull. Fair enough. But still, it's a very, very interesting to mention and to highlight. And then if we move on from that to another species, mention and to highlight. And then if we move on from that to another species, the Neanderthals, because Mark, I mean, I don't know if it's justified or not, but Neanderthals,

they seem to have become regularly associated, shall we say, with cannibalism. They have. And Neanderthals get kind of a bum rap, I think. It's changed in the last 10 or so years. There's been more of a pushback. But for a long time, Neanderthals were the classic other of human evolution, right? We sort of saw Neanderthals as not us. They were seen as sort of an archaic form that went extinct. And modern humans either out-competed them or killed them off or whatever. We now know that's not the case. Every human on the planet seems like they have a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in them. So there's evidence of gene flow. The point being that I think the cannibalism angle for a long time was a way to make them seem even more other because classically cannibalism is the thing you accuse the other group of doing. Early anthropologists would talk about how, oh, this group says the group down the hill or over the valley are the cannibals, because it's a way of dehumanizing people, in many cultures at least.

So, yeah, mangathas have been associated, and in some sense, yes, for good reason. We find a lot not. Again, it's hard to say a lot, because I tried to count the percentage, and there's no way to do it, because the record isn't there. But we find examples. Probably the best known site is Krapina, a cave site in Croatia, about 130,000 years ago, the site dates to. And it's a really good example for somebody who's interested in sort of the sociology of science, because it's been studied for over 100 years, essentially. And the story of how you look at these fossils has changed. So the story here is that these remains, classic Neanderthals, sort of the textbook what a Neanderthal looks like, have a lot of the fleshy marks on them left by stone pools. Early scholars said, hey, this is cannibalism. And it's sort of aggressive, maybe survival cannibalism, maybe violence cannibalism, but it's cannibalism.

And then people began to say, well, wait a second. Is it really what we think it is? So a woman named Mary Russell, who was a Michigan PhD student, and now she actually writes really great science fiction novels. So I recommend you read her books. Her dissertation was looking at the site. And she did something I think was really interesting. She compared it to other things that were being eaten and to other examples of burials in different parts of the world. And her argument was they were not treating the Neanderthals the way they might treat

deer remains. They were treating them in ways we see that individuals who have these ritual burial practices, it's called secondary burial. Somebody dies, you do ritual, you bring them back somewhere else and you bury them again. So it seems like her argument was that it was not maybe cannibalism, it was more sort of a ritual act. Again, we don't know what you were doing when you take the flesh off. I mean, there are some Neanderthal sites sites which does seem pretty good argument that they were eating each other but then as we've talked about before it's not that surprising to find it in the

human archaeological record i mean is that something once again to stress mark is this i mean yeah you mentioned like sites seeming more linked to cannibalism neanderthal sites and i've got like mula guersi or trasiem cave Cave at Goyer. But, you know, perhaps these are the exceptions to most places where we find these remains. These are the extraordinary exceptions where we do seem to find perhaps cannibalism. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Again, I can't tell you the statistics off the top of my head, but I do think these are the ones we talk about because they're the ones who show the evidence. If we had non-human primate archaeology, maybe we'd find more examples of this too. So I think it is common. A bit of an interesting side note here is Neanderthals are the first really good example of a human species

that are burying their dead in caves. It's just a lot easier to find examples of them. Up until then, people weren't really burying their dead in the way they do today. So we find more examples of them. And Neanderthals were in Europe, an industrialized place where a lot of people live. It's easier to find sites. So there is sort of a bias, I think, as well as to what we're finding. Well, let's keep on cave sites then, but move a bit further forward. We're going to early anatomically modern humans, now Homo sapiens. And I want you to go move a bit further forwards we're going to early anatomically modern humans now homo sapiens and i want you to go in a bit of detail of this place because it is on the doorstep here in the uk it is of course goff's cave mark take it away yeah goff's cave

is like this incredible example it's received a lot of attention a lot of back and forth and scholars looking at this. Two things that are interesting about this site. One is the one that I think has gotten the most attention is the skull cups. So they're essentially taking the top of the head of someone who's dead, turning it over, kind of fixing it, making it into a bowl to drink water out of or something like this. And Goss Cave has one of the, I think the oldest human skull cup ever found, and about 15,000 years ago. So it was really sort of shocking. And they've done work on like the process of making this cup. It's not just like virtually processing, it's then using it for something. It also got a lot of attention fairly recently. There is a radius, a lower arm bone

from there from a human, a modern human, right, that shows not just cut marks and tooth marks, so not just indicators of cannibalism, but there's kind of this weird zigzag incision. And if you type in Goff's Cave into Google or something, you'll probably be able to find this image of this sort of zigzag motif. So what they argued is this is very similar to things we found in other sites of sort of design that's engraved artifacts. So maybe then this is actually part of their cannibalistic practices, right, is engraving this. As we get more recent in time, we have more better evidence, right, this could be part of this ritualistic behavior because we don't really see that in the past. To be clear, right, as you

get more recent in time, you have more stuff because there's not just more people, but there's better preservation. So that there is a bias there. But yeah, I mean, I think Goss' cave is probably the best example of when you can sort of really see this ritualistic behavior. They're not just eating each other, but they're doing stuff with them. And again, as to why they're doing it, that might be harder to ascertain. Yes. I mean, it is very interesting, Mark. I do, of course, want to get the best out of you in this interview. So of course, I know you are a paleoanthropologist at heart. So let's focus then on more of these case studies from the

Paleolithic and that area in prehistory. Are there any other case studies that might be to do with cannibalism from this time period that are of particular interest to you that you'd love to highlight? Honestly, you kind of hit the main ones. I think the problem is the other examples are just not that interesting. Like, yes, there's a bunch of cut marks on bones, sites in Belgium, sites in Spain show evidence of this. El Cidron is a site of early hominin, maybe in the Anatol or early modern human, where we see cannibalism. El Cidron is sort of maybe survival cannibalism because there's not many of them. But as someone who's not an expert in it, but yeah, as you get into the more recent past, the Neolithic, early farming, then we find a lot more examples of the stuff just because there's more samples. All right, buddy, then let's delve into the

Neolithic. Let's talk about some of these sites. And I've got right at the top of my list for the Neolithic, the site of Herxheim. This seems pretty prevalent here. So this, I think, is interesting. I kind of get jealous with the amount of data you have. So Herxheim, I believe, is about 5,300 BC or so, maybe a little more recent than that. It's what we call the linear pottery culture or the linear band cram. So the Neolithic is farming. So these people are farmers, very sort of rudimentary farming. And so they're living in sort of settlements, settled down. So again, more easy to find stuff. And at the site, scientists found these pits that have massive amounts of human bones in them. And what would really be sort of the classic example of cannibalism, right?

It looks like the skulls are fractured, I believe. This is what I was mentioning before, these chewing marks on the human feet that they find. There's evidence that the bones were roasted, so that they were put over a fire or something, but the sort of distribution of the burn marks in the bones make it look like the meat was on the bones when they were roasting it. So like this sort of seems exactly what you'd expect to see if people are actually eating each other, you know, if you will. What amazed me about the site, why I think it's interesting, is it shows what we can find out. So if you look at a fossil, a bone, bone is an organic compound, and it takes in the things that you eat, and it sort of records signatures.

One of the things they record in their bones, in their teeth, is where they lived. So this site in Germany, you mentioned, scientists looked at the isotopes, the strontium isotopes, which tells you the origin, where they were born in their teeth, because teeth don't change after you're born. And it looks like the individuals at the site who are being eaten are not local. So they're coming from far away. And with that, with the fact that there, I think there's some skull cuts taken before, you know, it could be armed conflict, right? It could be they're eating people who are not them. It could be these ritualized practices where you're sort of consuming these skulls. To be 100% honest, you could make up another story that's equally as plausible. There are sometimes people come places, maybe they went there on purpose, and maybe they're being sacrificed. Another sort of fascinating topic. But certainly

the fact that the strontium isotopes, the sort of some of the ceramics looks like they're distinguishable from the local ceramics. So it does look like an example, I think, probably the best one I know of, that could really be exocannibalism. I mean, Mark, it is so interesting when you look at cases like that. And I know it's so hypothetical when you're looking at the evidence. And then you mentioned the words human sacrifice there. And I guess you kind of think, if it is exo-cannibalism, if this is hostile, this is a result of warfare, you know, could human sacrifice also be linked in this whole ritual, in this whole exo-cannibalism process? But I guess, once again, it's hypothetical. We don't know for sure, but the evidence is intriguing, interesting, to say the least.

It is. And like, you know, again, most of the examples I know of sort of a human sacrifice don't often include cannibalism, but sometimes they do. It would be really hard to know exactly. I think in this example, there's pretty good evidence that they're not local people. So perhaps it is. What it comes down to essentially is, right, we have this really thorny problem in archaeology that, going back to the surface is, right, we have this really thorny problem in archaeology that going back to the surface modifications, right, different processes can lead to the same end result. So this is a fancy word that's called equifinality. And sometimes we do have this problem. We don't really know for sure. What Herxheim has for us is that there's so many

lines of evidence converging together. Much like Grandolina, we begin to get a more sort of, I think, robust picture, but we still have to give the caveat that we don't know for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Fair enough, as with so much in the archaeology world. Okay, if we move a bit further on, we talked about the Neolithic. We'll go to the bronze age next we probably won't go any further than the bronze age because then it gets the you know romans and greeks and roman writing saying everyone who's not a roman is a barbarian and so they partook in cannibalism and all of that but i've got one another place in my notes which is la cueva del mirador now what is this site so this site is again a site where they have skull caps. If I'm remembering from the taphonomy correctly, it's, again, kind of what we might call gastronomic cannibalism.

They're sort of clearly breaking the remains and getting to the places that have a lot of flesh on them. Then they're sort of reburied later. What's really cool about this site, I believe it's in the Ataprecker Mountains, so it's actually much, much later than a grandolina cave. So it's not like this cultural continuity, but they seem to be eating people. And then later other folks are coming in and reburying the bones that they've eaten. So yeah, I mean, it's just a good example of the complexity of this stuff,

right? Here you have fully modern humans, Bronze Age peoples, you know, totally biologically us, but we're still hampered by the archaeological record not being perfect. You know, one of the problems we have is there's very few Pompeii's in archaeology, very few perfectly preserved sites. This one's a really good example, which is why I like it, because the archaeologists did a really, really good job of making this argument of being sort of secondary reburial of the individuals that were already eaten. But yeah, I mean, it's just a good example of what you could find if you're looking for it, and if you get lucky to find a perfect site. There's certainly probably ceremonial practices, maybe, but, you know, maybe just eating it because they were hungry.

Maybe indeed. Mark, we've covered so many case studies so far, and I do appreciate that most of them have been kind of focused in Western Europe, in Central Europe, in that area. Is there a reason why there seems to be so many case studies focused in this area of the world? I mean, do we have prehistoric possible examples of cannibalism from elsewhere in the world at all? We do. There's some sort of a bias, I think. I'll say as well, and this is a complicated thing to talk about, but it's actually really, I think, relevant to the discussion we're having. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this, because we're amongst friends, right? It's easy to talk about

cannibalism amongst the Neanderthals, amongst homo antecessor, amongst things that are really, really old. And even though, yes, there are ancestors, they're not our direct ancestors. It's a lot trickier and a lot harder and a lot more problematic talking about these things amongst people whose descendants are still living today. So why I'm saying this is in the United States is a really sort of classic example. I mentioned Tim White's book about Monaco's Canyon, the ancestral Pueblo, or in the southwest of the United States. And in the 70s and 80s, I think it was, some scholars started saying, well, we find evidence in this group of people cannibalizing other humans.

And then modern Native people were sort of, for I think good reason, critical of sort of the interpretation that it came, especially in the popular literature, right? Because in the United States, Native Americans are sort of like, right, a minoritized population. And it was being read in the popular literature as saying, oh, look how unhuman like these people were. They're eating the dead. So it became a huge sticking point in the archaeology in the 80s and 90s about like all these examples, really cannibalism. And if they are, you know, why are they doing this? As we talked about, there's so many other reasons why you might cannibalize other than it being this sort of ritualistic cannibalism because of, you know, to insult the dead or something like this. I think that's part of the issue is because of that. Also in the United States, again, for very good reason, it's become harder to study human fossils of native peoples. There's been a

sort of move away from that and a different sort of a focus on different kinds of questions, which is a very long way of saying, I mean, we find it almost anywhere we look. There are other examples in the Near East as well. It's just the Europe is the example that we just know the most about. Fair enough. Fair enough indeed. Mark, this has been great going through these case studies. As we start to wrap up, I'll always ask this question. And if you can't think of any others you'd like to highlight, that's absolutely fine.

But are there any other case studies that you'd like to highlight of cannibalism from prehistory? Maybe not prehistory, but I think the warrior may be a good example. Go for it. I mention this only because I actually talk about this sometimes in my classes for the inter-anthropology. And I think it's something that I think is really important to think about cannibalism. We tend to think of cannibalism as a bad thing, right? It seems abhorrent and unnatural to us. The Wari are an indigenous population in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, and they don't practice cannibalism anymore. But anthropologists working with them have sort of recorded very good evidence, and they would just talk about how they used to eat

the flesh of the dead and they sort of there's a distinguishing here between like sometimes they might eat the flesh of someone they didn't like other enemies but usually most of we know about from this population they would eat their family members they would never eat their sort of direct family members it was always i think um extended family and you know they talked about how this process, how they, I mean, hoping not eating dinner, but like, you know, they would burn in a fire, they would roast the body. And then some of the relatives would eat part of the flesh. And why I mentioned this, why they did this is complicated and debated. It seems to be a way to deal with the grief that the family felt. But what I think is interesting is worry,

for them, that was a sign of respect. You did that to help the family grieve through this horrible process of a loved one dying. And as we all sadly know in COVID times, so much grief, dealing with death is really hard. This is one of the many things they did to deal with the death of a relative. It sort of helped, according to the way they saw it, it helped the family members go through this grieving process.

And the worry for them, now they don't do this anymore. Now they sort of bury their dead after a couple of days of mourning. And the older folks are like, well, we don't like this. This is very disrespectful to bury the dead. This is not what we should be doing. This is not how we should be doing. This is not how we honor our ancestors. And I give it as an example of how complicated it is to be an anthropologist, right? Because we have this thing, and it's debated, basically called cultural relativism, which is

really, really hard for us to come in and say something is, you can't understand the process without understanding the culture behind it. So I think it's really powerful to remember that we tend to assume that when someone dies, we're going to bury them, maybe cremate them. That's what Western culture has taught us. But we also have learned, right, that globalization and colonialism has removed a lot of other practices. And it's very, very hard for us to remember that sometimes. The quick example I'll give, just because I'm a parent of two young kids, I have to teach my kids table manners, right? Eat with a knife and fork. Don't put the knife in your mouth. And I could come up with a reason why. I could say, well, maybe the knife is going to stab you if you put it in your

mouth. But honestly, from what I have read about the history of table manners, which does exist because academics are weird, it's probably just a random thing, right? It's just how they learn to do things. And we don't question that. We rarely question our own practices. So I think it's sometimes important to say, if you took an anthropologist from Mars, it is maybe weird to bury the dead. It is an odd thing thing to do but we don't think of it's odd because we rarely question our own preconceived notions it's good to point out that fact at the end as you say that our mindset from which we approach this topic mark also great that you got a history of table manners in there as well i mean i don't think i've ever heard that before on the ancients podcast so well done to you on that i mean as up, I mean, there's so many lessons to take away, so many

interesting stories that we've discussed over the past 45 minutes or so. But it does seem really distressed, doesn't it? You know, cannibalism in ancient societies, it is extraordinary. It is difficult to see, it's difficult to distinguish. And if it did happen in some of these ancient societies from some of these case studies we've looked at, it could have happened for a variety of different reasons. Yeah, I mean, exactly. I think that I don't want the takeaway to be that we don't know because we do know a lot about the past. Right. I think it's when we get to the specifics. So, yes, my takeaway is, yes, humans in the past, and even today, have eaten the remains of their dead. Sometimes they've done it because they're in situations that no human would ever want to be put in, and they have no choice. Sometimes they do it because maybe they're like criminals, right? Criminals have done this. Serial killers do it very rarely, but that tends

to be something that we're fascinated by. Sometimes they do it for acts out of love, out of ritual, out of respect. And I think what we need to remember is that it's very tricky to get outside of our own viewpoint. So if you want to look at Grand Alina Cave, what is that? You know, being the anthropologist in the room makes us say, well, wait a second. Yes, they're eating the dead. Maybe they're not local folks. We don't know. But to get to the whys and the wherefores is really, really tricky. Even anthropologists today talking to living peoples have a very hard time figuring out why people do things, right? Because we don't know why we do things. We don't

know, you know, in the United States, why everyone has to mow their lawn, which is a stupid thing to do, but why we are forced to do this, right? So we don't really ask why we do things. And I think with cannibalism, it's just a good example of this. But when we begin to question it, oh, well, maybe it's not as abhorrent or aberrant as we're sort of accustomed to thinking. Mark, this has been an absolutely awesome chat. Last but certainly not least, you and Nam, ancient veteran Nam, you have written a book all about, well, partly about this topic and also mainly to do with warfare, which is called?

Immersion Warfare and the Evolutionary Past. Brilliant. Well, Mark, pleasure to have you on the podcast. And you've also been on History Hit in the new documentary The Origins of Warfare. Thank you so much

for taking the time to come on the show today. Oh, it's a pleasure. If any of you listeners have a question, you can find me online. I'm happy to chat via Twitter or whatever.

Brilliant. We'll put your Twitter handle in the description below. Sure, thanks. well we are really kicking off 2022 with a bang aren't we first alexander the great versus julius caesar and now cannibalism that was an awesome episode to record with dr mark kissel so i really do hope you enjoyed. Now, you know what I'm going to say next, and I'm going to say it anyway. If you want more ancients content, if you have an insatiable appetite for all things ancient history,

if ancient history is literally erupting from your body like Vesuvius, like Alien, you just can't get enough of it. You know, that feeling, it's euphoric. If you're at that stage, then you've passed the test. Then you can subscribe to our Ancients newsletter via the link in the description below. Now, I've either just come across as a complete madman or someone who absolutely loves their job. So I'll leave you to ponder over the next few days which of those things I am. But in the meantime, have a great ponder,

and I'll see you in the next episode.