Washington, July 7 (ANI): Remains of the earliest known Homo sapiens from southeastern Europe have suggested that earliest Europeans wore shell and mammoth jewellery, and likely practiced cannibalism.
The 32,000-year-old human remains and artefacts, discovered at a shelter-cave site called Buran-Kaya III in the Ukraine, reveal incriminating cut marks.
But the cannibalism was linked to funeral rituals, since the bones were not butchered like meat.
"Our observations indicate a post-mortem treatment of human corpses including the selection of the skull," Discovery News quoted co-author Stephane Pean, a paleozoologist and archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, as saying.
"We demonstrate that this treatment was not for nutritional purposes, according to comparison with game butchery treatment, so it is not a dietary cannibalism," he said.
Instead, Pean said that he and his colleagues believe that the "observed treatment of the human body, together with the presence of body ornaments, indicates rather a mortuary ritual: either a ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice for secondary disposal".
The study has been described in PLoS One. (ANI)
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