Contested signs of mass cannibalism

[Adsos Letter]

Source: Science News
By Bruce Bower

At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests.

Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.

“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.

Herxheim offers rare evidence of cannibalism during Europe’s early Neolithic period, when farming first spread, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Artifacts found at Herxheim come from the Linear Pottery Culture, which flourished in western and central Europe from about 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.

LINK: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/50351/title/Contested_signs_of_mass_cannibalism_

[nemo137]

1. Huh. The past is a strange, strange place.

Foreign country doesn't begin to describe it.

[Adsos Letter]

2. Really getting a grasp of how different the ways of thinking of people in the past

is one of the greatest difficulties for Historians and Archaeologists, I would think.

[nemo137]

11. Ach. I did early modern history in college.

Which is slippery, because people in the 17th century thought enough like us to be familiar, but were still not us.

[Adsos Letter]

13. Very familiar with that phenomenon...

The comp exam reading blocks for my Masters in History were divided into two sections: "Atlantic World" (focused primarily on England, her colonies, and the English Civil War/Revolution); and "Colonial/United States intellectual history: 1750-1860).

Those people's ideas on history and philosophy were often fundamentally different from our own, and as you pointed out, many people simply don't realize that when they think about our past.

[JoeyT]

3. Damnit!

Based on the title I thought the zombie apocalypse was finally here. You shouldn't get peoples' hopes up like that, I had my shotgun halfway loaded before the article sank in.
Recced anyway because it's interesting. ;)

[Adsos Letter]

4. LOL! I went with the article's title, but I wondered how people would initially take it...

:D

[XemaSab]

5. I was reading about the Bog People the other day

Most of them showed signs of having been ritually killed. :(

[Yupster]

6. Must have been about the time they ran out of

Neanderthals.

[Thothmes]

7. The Neanderthals time had run out between 24,000 and

30,000 year ago. Looks like these folks were dining on Homo sapiens

[ZombieHorde]

8. Sex threads are against DU rules. nt

[RagAss]

9. Mods...Please move this to the cannibal forum.

[blogslut]

10. Posts #8 & #9

...might be the greatest DU responses EVAR!

[OneGrassRoot]

16. +1 LOL n/t

[AngryAmish]

12. People are very weirded out by human sacrifice and cannibalism

There is very good evidence that some Native American cultures practices cannibalism at various times. Get over it.

Yet people deny this. Despite all the evidence.

People are weird.

[undergroundpanther]

15. alot of animals eat their own

Kind

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/31-cannibalism-the-animal-kingdoms-dirty-little-secret
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/sharkland/animal-cannibalism/1946/
Why should we be any different? We ARE animals...after all.

[undeterred]

14. Not sure if they were the ancestors of Nazis

or Democrats.

:shrug: