Citation: Cannibalism was profitable for Homo antecessor (2019, May 7) retrieved 4 February 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2019-05-cannibalism-profitable-homo-antecessor.html

But, when overviewing the evidence of H. antecessor cannibalism in 1999, Spanish palaeontologist Yolanda Fernandez-Jalvo and colleagues instead ascribed the relative abundance of facial cut marks in the H. antecessor sample to the strongly contrasting structure of the muscle attachments between humans and typical animal prey items (that is, defleshing the …

cannibalistic behavior of Homo antecessor, reexamining the data of earlier work. They estimated the amount of food which could have been obtained from each of the animals

Homo antecessor female eating a human head. Jose Luis Martinez Alvarez from Asturias, España/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA. So why then did prehistoric cannibalism occur?

Archaeological Evidence for Cannibalism in Prehistoric Western Europe: from Homo antecessor ... Several Homo species, including Homo sapiens and other ancestral hominin species, practised this type of consumption, which is associated with a wide range of behaviours. By definition, cannibalism is the act of eating the tissues (e.g.

A protein analysis suggests the supposed cannibal species Homo antecessor was distantly related to humans and Neanderthals. Comments (1) Skeletal remains of Homo antecessor — an archaic relative ...

In addition to marks showing flesh was stripped from the bone, evidence suggests the Gran Dolina residents—an ancient human relative called Homo antecessor—ate their victims’ brains.

According to the most recent examinations of the remains from TD6.2, there are 181 specimens (bones and teeth) of Homo antecessor belonging to a minimum of 11 individuals (Saladié et al. 2015; Saladié et al. 2012). The specimens come from approximately six children, four of whom were younger than 5 years of age and two of whom were between 5 and 9 years of age at the …