Germany's stone age cannibalism

The Guardian ^ | Wednesday, March 25th 2009 | Pierre Le Hir (LeMonde)

[SunkenCiv]

All these human remains were found at the stone-age site at Herxheim, near Speyer. About 7,000 years ago farmers, who grew wheat and barley, raised pigs, sheep and cattle, settled here, building a village of four to 12 houses, the post holes of which have survived. At the time the first farmer-stockherders were moving into Europe, supplanting their hunter-gatherer predecessors. The Herxheim settlers came from the north (between 5,400 and 4,950BC) and belonged to the Linear Pottery culture... during a rescue dig just before the area was developed as an industrial estate, in some of the ditches archaeologists uncovered tens of thousands of human bones. During the first series of excavations, at the end of the 1990s, the numerous injuries visible on the skeletons were taken as evidence that the victims had been massacred. But in 2008 Bruno Boulestin, an anthropologist at Bordeaux University, examined the fragments recovered from one of the trenches, pointing out that nearly 2,000 samples belonged to fewer than 10 individuals... Extrapolating to the whole site, only half of which was excavated, about 1,000 people must have been butchered. There is no other example in prehistory of a mass grave of this size. "We are dealing with an exceptional event," says Zeeb-Lanz. Other cases of neolithic cannibalism have certainly been identified, in particular in France, at the caves at Fontbrégoua and Adaouste, near the south coast, or at Les Perrats, further west, but never on this scale... The potsherds found among the human remains suggest it must have occurred over a period of no longer than 50 years.

[SunkenCiv]

also posted (first) here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2223389/posts

somewhat related topic here:

Archaeologists find bones from prehistoric war in Germany
EarthTimes | Thursday, October 9, 2008 | DPA
Posted on 10/11/2008 11:17:03 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2103220/posts

[SunkenCiv]

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[eleni121]

Which stone age - the one in the 20th century?

[SunkenCiv]

whoops, make that "the caves at Fontbrégoua and Adaouste".

[colorado tanker]

IIRC that was a theme in Quest for Fire (advised by Desmond Morris), that some tribes would consume captives captured from another.