Neanderthals Weren’t Cannibals, So Who Ate Them?
When a Neanderthal skull was discovered in a cave on the property of a beachfront hotel south of Rome in 1939, it prompted a theory, since debunked, that Neanderthals had engaged in ritual cannibalism, extracting the brains of their victims to eat.
Now, a find at the same site, made public on Saturday, appears to have confirmed the true culprit: Stone Age hyenas.
New excavations at the site in the coastal town of San Felice Circeo have uncovered fossil remains of nine more Neanderthals of varying sex and age along with the bones of long-extinct hyenas, elephants, rhinoceroses and even the Urus, or Aurochs, the now-extinct ancestor of domestic cattle.
Experts say the findings, at the Guattari Cave, will offer fresh insight on the culinary peculiarities of the Neanderthal diet and much more.
“The story of the cave didn’t finish in 1939 and still had a lot to give,” said Mauro Rubini, the chief anthropologist of the local branch of the Culture Ministry. “Consider that the human skeleton is a formidable archive that tells us everything: their age, sex, height, what they ate, their genome, whether they had illnesses, how much they walked and even if they were able to have fun,” he added.
“We are working on solid scientific data so we can give a complete picture of the situation,” said Mr. Rubini, whose staff is in charge of analyzing the Neanderthal remains. One of the Neanderthals found in the cave lived about 100,000 to 90,000 years ago, and the other eight have been dated from around 65,000 to 50,000 years ago.
The cave’s discovery in 1939 created an international buzz when it yielded what remains one of the best preserved Neanderthal skulls ever found. The skull had a large hole in the temple, and its fame may have been fueled by the thesis put forth by Alberto Carlo Blanc, the paleontologist who first studied it, that the Neanderthals had engaged in ritual cannibalism.
In the latest excavations, led by a multidisciplinary team that has been working since October 2019, researchers found hundreds of animal bones with signs they had been gnawed on by hyenas — the Stone Age ancestors to today’s carnivores — who used the cave as a sort of pantry, said Mario Rolfo, who teaches prehistoric archaeology at the University of Rome at Tor Vergata.
It appears that the hyenas also had a taste for Neanderthals, and one skull found at the site had a hole similar to the one found in the 1939 cranium. That find definitively put to rest Blanc’s theory of cannibalism and cult rituals.
“Reality is more banal,” Professor Rolfo said, adding that “hyenas like munching on bones” and probably opened a cavity in the skull to get to the brain.
It is unclear whether the Neanderthals were killed by the hyenas or the hyenas snacked on Neanderthals after they died from other causes.
“What it does mean is that there were many Neanderthals in the area,” Professor Rolfo said.
Neanderthals flourished in Europe for about 260,000 years, until roughly 40,000 years ago, though the dating is subject to much scholarly debate. Their bones have been found at sites across Europe and western Asia, from Spain to Siberia. But “finding so many in one site is very rare,” said Francesco Di Mario, the Culture Ministry archaeologist in charge of the excavation.
The recovery of new fossil remains, along with the 1939 findings, makes the cave “one of the most important Paleolithic sites in Europe and the world,” he said.
Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, called the finds an “extraordinary discovery” that enriches research on Neanderthals.
The site was particularly well preserved because a prehistoric landslide had closed the entrance to the cave. So when workers at the Guattari Hotel stumbled on it eight decades ago, “they found a situation that had been frozen in time, mummified to 50,000 years ago,” Professor Rolfo said.
The cave was studied until the early 1950s, but was not excavated again — and studied more comprehensively — until the last 20 months. That work has involved areas of the cave that were previously unexplored, including one cavity that regularly floods in the winter months.
The team of archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists and paleontologists also worked on the anterior area of the cave, unearthing burned bones, carved stones, and bones with cut marks, indicating that they had been hunted.
“We found rich traces of Neanderthal life there,” Professor Rolfo said.
Angelo Guattari, whose father owned the hotel in 1939 and was among the first to see the earlier Neanderthal skull, said that over time the cave had been mostly forgotten, unfortunately. Now, as the delegate for cultural heritage for the town of San Felice Circeo, he hopes the discoveries will lead the site to be opened to tourists.
The mayor, Giuseppe Schiboni, has applied for European Union funding to develop the town’s archaeological and anthropological pull. The hotel that the Guattari family once owned — since renamed “Neanderthal Hotel” — is up for sale. Mr. Schiboni said that he would love to buy it and install a European center on Neanderthal studies.
Once the site opens, possibly as soon as this year, visitors will be presented with a 10-minute virtual-reality video “and be catapulted into the cave” in its prehistoric guise, to help them better understand their surroundings, said Mr. Di Mario, who is coordinating the on-site research.
Neanderthals, said Mr. Rubini, the anthropologist, “were the uncontested lords of Eurasia for about 250,000 years.”
Whether humans will match that is an open question, he said.
“We don’t know if we will be — we’re still relatively young.”
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MattH
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The discovery of burnt bones and carved stones suggests the caves were inhabited by Neanderthals which is at variance with the suggestion hyenas had feasted on Neanderthal skulls in the cave or dragged dead Neanderthals back to the cave. Hyenas are thought to be not that strong on collecting carved stones in their art collections.
With cannibalism it was common after battle to take the defeated as slaves and those slaves were used as a ready meal at the whim of the masters. Some slaves became too useful to eat, including breeding slaves, commonly called mum or birthing person.
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LLOYD
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Common with who? Please be specific.
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MattH
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Hi Lloyd and readers.
Cannibalism is recorded in many areas of the world including the Donner party in America and the plane crashed Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes. When needs must the devil drives.
It was a cultural norm in the Pacific as there was mainly seafood for protein sources. When Captain James Cooke undertook his voyages of discovery he recorded that in most Polynesian archipelago groups the inhabitants had just had a war with neighbours, were at war, or were preparing for war.
Cook and earlier explorers introduced domestic animals throughout the Pacific to provide protein sources. Pigs were generally the most successful introduced species.
Europeans were also dispatched and eaten. The Boyd massacre is the most notable event in New Zealand where over 60 Europeans were eaten. The members of a long boat on the sister ship on one of Cooks voyages were consumed in Cannibal Cove, Marlborough Sounds.
The missionaries curbed the practice but the introduction of large mammals made it possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyd_massacre
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Wisenox
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There are stories from around the world about giants being hunted. In ancient stories, the giants were once thought highly of, but then considered to be a demon because a god was trapped in a man’s body, so they needed to be killed. The stories were buried by authorities. In fact, in some areas it is still taboo to speak of them.
The skulls from the caves can be seen here:
https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=Guattari+Cave+art&o=0%3AEB2C911C857A2EAC09DD5B6E88B107E49DC732DB
Take special note of the shape of the skull, because these are the people who used to run the en priesthood. Meaning, they ran Enki’s religion, which today is run by the Pope. Here is early Sumerian art from an area called Mari. Again, take special note of the shape of the skulls:
http://sumerianshakespeare.com/312101/index.html
This is how the elites work. They use a people to oppress for their own gain, then when its time to hide, they flip everything and turn the people against their previous tools of oppression. Every country and civilization they built gets destoyed, and history leaves a trail of dust leading up to to where we are today.
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Mark Tapley
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It is very likely that the original cannibalism theory was correct, just not shall we say very tasteful. Protein is a critical, hard to come by element in the natural world. Humans being slower than other animals and therefore easier to fell were probably high on menu. Although also denighed for many years in a politically correct attempt to perpetuate the myth of the noble savage, it is now known that lots of the ancient Indians of the Amer. southwest were ravaging cannibals that attacked other tribes in order to put them in the pot and cook them for dinner. The Aztecs (or was it the Mayans) carried on bloody sacrifices, cutting out the heart and hanging the carcass on a meat hook as part of the pagan ritual. The ancient Judahites (Jews) began copying the degenerate Canaanite practice of sacrificing their children to pagan gods that was condemned as a abomination in Jeremiah 7:30-31 and Deut. 12:29-31. But of course the Jews have always been a big problem.
The paleoentologists like the evolutionists (and liars in general) always have to modify their stories as they go. Having originally stated that the Neanderthals contained no African DNA. this was not politically palatable so oh vey! now a new study has found some. This is all similar to the discovery that the ancient
Egyptians were the scions of white Europeans, not the mythical Wakonda promoted by the Jew producers in Hollywood. As far as the carbon dating systems (and all the others). there’s about as much truth in that as shabbas goy senator Warren is an Indian.
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Wisenox
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The Mayans and Aztecs were created by the same people. The Popol Vu states that tall white people built their cities. They brought with them slaves, and they all spoke the same language but wrote different ones. Their religion is based on the sams system of symbols and their version of the Aker Lions is virtually identical to the eastern one. They have the 4 point cross, and their version of the flesh eater is the centipede. In the east, the flesh eater is the vulture and the panther. Even their buildings were the same.
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Tom
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No doubt, these poor creatures were the first to get gate’s putrid injections.
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