About 120 thousand years ago in Europe, on the territory of present-day France, the climate began to slowly change, which primarily affected the animals. After 20 thousand years, the Neanderthals living there began to experience such serious problems with obtaining food that they became cannibals.
Scientists figured out this by analyzing the remains of ancient people found 20 years ago in the Moula-Guercy cave in France, where Neanderthals lived 100 thousand years ago.
New research paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
In total, the remains of six people were found and teeth marks were found on parts of the bones, and other bones were broken, supposedly with stone tools, in order to extract bone marrow from them.
Bones with traces of cannibalism turned out to be 50% of all Neanderthal bones found in this place. Thus, we can conclude that cannibalism among the local Neanderthals was very widespread at that time.
The fact that these Neanderthals suffered from severe malnutrition was also revealed by the analysis of the preserved teeth.
In those centuries, the next ice age was ending and the climate became warmer, so many large animals, accustomed to living in cold climates, either died out or left to the north. Neanderthals lost a significant proportion of their meat, which could not be replaced by the gathering and hunting of small animals.
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The debate about cannibalism among Neanderthals has been going on for a long time, since the assumptions of this appear regularly. However, this study proved for the first time that, at least in French Neanderthals, cannibalism was associated with survival and was a necessary measure in conditions of hunger.
Among the remains of six people - two adults, two teenagers and two small children, half were eaten by their relatives. Whether they were children or old people, as weaker, the study did not report.
Earlier, traces of Neanderthal cannibalism were found in a Belgian cave in 2016. The remains were about 40,000 years old and were the first known evidence of regular cannibalism among groups north of the Alps.
Around the same time or a little earlier, a man of the modern type (Cro-Magnon) came to Europe and the cannibalism of the Belgian Neanderthals was probably also associated with the loss of food competition to the Cro-Magnon.