Menschen, die in der späten neolithischen Zeit auf der iberischen Halbinsel leben, haben ihre Nachbarn möglicherweise in einem düsteren und grausamen Akt sozialer Gewalt gegessen, wie neue Beweise zeigen.

From the article: At least 11 individuals – including children and adolescents – appear to have been skinned, defleshed, disarticulated, fractured, cooked, and eaten by other people, according to the marks on bones dating back to 5,709–5,573 years ago, found in El Mirador cave in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain.

Even more intriguingly, the evidence suggests that all of this cannibalism occurred at around the same time, in a single, possibly isolated incident. This suggests that the people living there at the time were not habitual cannibals, but may have engaged in the practice for extenuating reasons, such as local inter-clan conflict.

„In [this study](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-10266-w) we are dealing with a new case of cannibalism at the Atapuerca sites,“ says paleoecologist Palmira Saladié of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Spain.

„Cannibalism is one of the most complex behaviors to interpret, due to the inherent difficulty of understanding the act of humans consuming other humans. Moreover, in many cases we lack all the necessary evidence to associate it with a specific behavioral context. Finally, societal biases tend to interpret it invariably as an act of barbarism.“

Humanity’s ancient history appears to be riddled with smatterings of cannibalism throughout the millennia, with the practice appearing in multiple instances in the Iberian Peninsula alone.

There are many reasons why our ancestors may have practiced cannibalism, ranging from sustenance to the funerary rite of transumption – incorporating the deceased into the bodies of the living to symbolically keep them alive.

I like to think that this is the result of mental illness in someone who came to be a leader who leads everyone in something nuts that either becomes tradition or they end up killing the person and starting fresh.

I assume the leading human in a group back then would have ascended to that position through a true survival of the fittest kind of situation so they likely held a lot of sway.

Or maybe it was a drought and that faction that got eaten lost.