There seems to be no end to the controversy surrounding the mysterious Neanderthalers, who may have been our cousins or even our direct ancestors, and who flourished 100,000 to 30,000 years before the present. By all accounts they were accomplished individuals in many different activities, and the latest argument, prompted by a paper published in Science for October 1, is that they were possibly guilty of cannibalistic practices.
Examination of a settlement deposit at the French cave of Moula-Guercy, dating back about 100,000 years, excavated by a team of French and American palaeontologists, revealed the bony remains of six Neanderthals together with stone tools and debris from hunted animals. Marks on the human bones offered evidence that members of the community deliberately removed muscle from the heads of two young individuals, the tongue of at least one, and split the thigh bone of a large adult, apparently to remove its marrow.
Judging by the tool marks, these human remains were treated in exactly the same way as those of deer and other food animals found on the site. Indeed, the breaking and cutting patterns exhibited are very similar. On the other hand, there are no gnawing marks which would indicate that wild carnivores had fed on the bodies.
Among the many bone fragments strewn over the site, all the skulls and long bones, both of humans and of deer, had been split open in the same manner, while bones that are devoid of marrow were not damaged. A large thigh bone had its muscle cut away and was then beaten on an anvil stone in order to split it. Other cut marks on the clavicle and limb bones showed where muscles and tendons had been cut away with stone knives. There were no signs that fire had been employed at any stage to prepare the material for food.
The Neanderthalers are known to have been skilled hunters and butchers of their prey. Why they should have resorted to cannibal practices, as suspected, is not clear. Nevertheless, it is also understood that the Neanderthalers lived under severe stress from competition with those humans who were to succeed them, and from severe climatic conditions. It is postulated that in this settlement they may have experienced a desperate lack of dietary fat at the end of a severe winter, and so have been forced to have recourse to human brain and marrow. In recent years even the most civilised of mortals have on occasion been forced to live on the bodies of others in extreme circumstance.
There is plenty of other evidence that the Neanderthalers enjoyed a wide variety of skills and were more complex and multidimensional than we sometimes realise. In particular, there is evidence that they looked after their sick and their aged in a way unusual among primitive people and which possibly puts our sophisticated society to shame. And they are the earliest people to have made point of burying their dead with a degree of elaboration and even with flowers. We must not condemn them too strongly if they did on rare occasion eat their own kind.