Were Our Paleolithic Ancestors Cannibal People ?
Having cannibalistic ancestors is a very difficult reality to admit, and yet ... Doubt still hangs over certain dietary practices of Paleolithic men.
The Paleolithic men who adorned the caves and produced the masterpieces of Lascaux, the "Sistine Chapel of prehistoric times", flattered our pride for a long time before we realized that our ancestors were cannibals! The unearthing of the remains of these human feasts at several sites initially caused horror and undermined a self-indulgent myth. Then science tried to provide answers to these practices.
For a long time the image of the "good savage" living in harmony with lavish nature prevailed in people's minds. How can we imagine that these 20,000 to 50,000 men of the hexagonal Paleolithic could have been violent, even more "deviant", since all they had to do was gather, fish and hunt, taking advantage of unlimited resources that no one dreamed of challenging them? They even had time to paint or engrave the walls of their caves!
So why eat the other one? Myth of a golden age of humanity before the Neolithic came from the 7th millennium BC, and predatory but peaceful man became a jealous producer, raised his animals and cultivated his land ... at the risk of arouse concupiscence, and therefore violence, to defend one's goods and acquire others.
Violence has always existed ...
Cave paintings and engravings depicting man are so rare that we had to wait, quite recently, for the scientific analysis of the graves to realize that animals were not the only victims of human "violence". . This is evidenced by three pits discovered on the Fontbrégoua site in the Var: the remains of fourteen people (adults and children) clearly show that the bodies were butchered, emaciated and broken, and the streaks visible on the bones come from flint knives, which were in short primitive "butcher's" instruments.
Did the Paleolithic hunters have the custom of breaking long bones (femurs, humerus) to extract the marrow and consume it, or even to crush small bones into thin splinters to fatten a hot broth? In any case, the authors of the excavation lean towards the thesis of "food cannibalism".
Other excavations in the cave of Perrats, in Agris, in Charente, confirm this hypothesis. Indeed, the analysis of the bone remains of five adults and three children testifies to deliberate fractures, signs of decarnization on the bones, in short, a real butchery work pushed to the breaking of skulls to extract the brain mass. There are even traces of chewing on some bones that owe nothing to animal intervention!
Eat your neighbor out of respect
Was the nutritional goal of cannibal people essential? Many anthropologists doubt this and believe that the ingestion of blood, flesh or marrow was rather a warlike behavior, a symbolic act to make the vanquished enemy disappear, or even to appropriate his strength and courage by consuming it.
We do not know whether the “victims” of Fontbrégoua were enemies or belonged to the same community. In the second hypothesis, it could be a sacrificial act to please deities or supernatural powers. The ingestion thus becomes no longer a murder, but a sacrifice, symbol of a redemptive purification for the community.
Finally, one can very well imagine, at least this is the hypothesis of certain prehistorians, that cannibalism made it possible to nourish oneself while remaining within the framework of a funeral ritual, the surviving consumers thus integrating the body and the soul of their dead in the context of a privileged relationship between the living and the dead and it was not for cannibal people an act of barbarism.
In the absence of irrefutable archaeological evidence, we have to be content with our hypotheses to explain the cannibalistic behavior of our ancestors, without being able to provide definite answers to one of the great questions of our prehistory.
Practices that have not completely disappeared
If the evidence is lacking to demonstrate the anthropophagy of our ancestors, we know today that primitive peoples would still do so. It was in 1956 that a doctor discovered within a tribe of New Guinea, the Fore, a strange epidemic affecting 300 to 400 people each year. The natives speak of kuru or "thrill", which no treatment can overcome. We think of a genetic disease confined to this isolated tribe before we think of a particular form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a spongiform encephalopathy. A veterinarian talks about scrapie in sheep. It is then that we discover that the Fore engage in scenes of ritual cannibalism in which the deceased is eaten by his relatives. Consumption of the viscera of a deceased infected with the kuru pathogen is believed to explain the epidemic.
