For fifty years, archaeologists have viewed three caves in Granada as textbook examples of prehistoric cannibalism. A new analysis of their contents shows that this textbook version was too simplistic.
An international team of researchers has re-examined nearly a thousand human bones from the Malalmuerzo, Cariguela and Majolicas caves, applying direct radiocarbon dating and modern taphonomic analysis – the study of everything that happens to a bone between death and removal – to material first removed from the earth in the 1970s.
The results, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, show that what appeared to be a single, homogeneous practice was in fact several separate episodes separated by centuries and driven by very different circumstances: a possible massacre, a repeating ritual tradition and a ceremony using a rare imported pigment.
The project was carried out jointly by the Institute of Archeology of Mérida (IAM), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Regional Government of Extremadura, and the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA).
The researchers combined radiocarbon dating data – which for the first time allows precise timing of each episode – with microscopic analysis of human cuts, fractures, impacts and bite marks, and then used statistical models and machine learning to separate deliberate human actions from damage caused by scavengers or natural decomposition.
For decades, prehistoric cannibalism has generally been interpreted as a single phenomenon, says Antonio Rodriguez-Hidalgo, a researcher at the Ramón y Cajal Institute of Archaeological Finds and one of the study’s authors. “Our work shows that it is impossible to talk about one single “Neolithic cannibalism,” and that completely different social realities may be hidden behind similar archaeological evidence. Only by combining chronology, archaeological context and what the bones themselves record, he added, can researchers begin to get closer to understanding the true meaning of these practices.
The most striking discovery is associated with the Malalmuerzo cave. Around 5000 BC – two thousand years before the pyramids of Giza were built and long before the earliest stages of Stonehenge’s construction – a single, violent event appears to have occurred in this cave.
Researchers found 714 bone fragments there, representing at least 36 people. The fractures are consistent with injuries sustained during or shortly after death, and the presence of people of all age groups suggests that most or all members of the community were killed and eaten in a single episode rather than over a period of ritual practices.
This contrasts sharply with Carihuela’s data, where dating shows several separate episodes of cannibalism occurring at different stages of the Neolithic – more of a repetition than a single incident of violence. Cariguela also presented the study’s most unusual artifacts: two skulls intentionally reshaped into cup skulls—bowl-shaped vessels made from human skulls.
This method of processing has parallels in other sites in prehistoric Europe, the most famous example being Gough’s Cave in England, where bowls made from Ice Age skulls are now on display at the Natural History Museum in London – although the examples from Carihuela date back thousands of years and belong to a completely different cultural context.
Researchers view the cranial bowls found in Granada as evidence of deliberate, symbolic post-mortem processing, perhaps related to trophies, rather than a by-product of routine butchering.
The third archaeological site, Majolikas, dates from the most recent period, around 3800 BC – centuries before the first Egyptian pyramids and around the time of the earliest cities of Mesopotamia.
Here the evidence points not to violence but to ritual: some of the bones were stained red, most likely with cinnabar, a mineral containing mercury sulfide that had to be mined and traded over long distances and is found repeatedly in Iberian Neolithic and Copper Age funerary contexts as a marker of symbolic or ceremonial treatment of the dead. Its presence at Majolica suggests that the remains were treated there with a degree of ceremony that has nothing to do with hunger or hostility.
Each cave individually tells its own story. Together they form something greater. The team found that these Iberian episodes cluster around three periods also documented elsewhere in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Europe: late sixth millennium BC, mid-fifth millennium BC. and the end of the third millennium BC.
“We cannot say that all episodes have a common cause,” said study lead author Palmyra Saladier of IPHES-CERCA, “but throughout the Neolithic, intermittently but regularly, there is a pattern of conflict and/or manipulation of remains that we think reflects changes in social organization, intergroup relations and attitudes toward death and violence.”
There is also a personal aspect to the study. Its authors include Miguel C. Botella, now professor emeritus at the University of Granada, who first excavated and made these three caves public in the 1970s while director of the university’s Forensic Archeology Laboratory—work that turned them into international reference sites for the study of European prehistoric cannibalism.
Five decades later, Botella took part in reanalyzing the same bones using tools that didn’t exist when he first pulled them out of the ground. “It was a great honor for me to work together with Professor Miguel C. Botella to re-examine the archaeological assemblages that he himself made reference more than fifty years ago,” said Saladier. “Re-examining these materials with new tools allowed us to ask questions that were then impossible to answer.”
The result is not so much a single explanation of prehistoric cannibalism as a reminder of how varied this definition can be – violence, ritual and symbolism repeated in various combinations over three thousand years in the same territory.
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