In a cave in northern Spain, researchers have uncovered the oldest solid evidence of human cannibalism ever found, dating back roughly 850,000 years. The bones, belonging to the early human species Homo antecessor, show cut marks, deliberate fractures for marrow extraction, and smashed skulls that are identical to the butchery marks found on animal bones in the same layer of sediment. In 2025, a team led by Dr. Palmira Saladié announced the discovery of a child’s neck bone with clean cut marks indicating the two-to-five-year-old had been decapitated and processed.
The remains of at least 10 individuals, mostly children and teenagers, were found at the site called Gran Dolina in Atapuerca. Rather than a desperate act of starvation, the evidence suggests these early humans routinely ate rivals who wandered into their territory as a form of territorial defense. About 14,700 years ago, at Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England, archaeologists found the remains of at least six people who had been skinned, sliced, and cracked apart for marrow. Three of the skulls were carefully crafted into cups, with faces removed and edges trimmed smooth.
A human arm bone engraved with a zigzag pattern was also found, leading researchers to believe this was not simple hunger but a ritual practice. Neanderthals also engaged in cannibalism. At Moula Guercy in France, bones from at least six individuals dating back 100,000 years showed the same processing techniques as red deer butchered in the same cave. In Spain’s El Sidrón cave, a family group of around a dozen Neanderthals was found skinned, dismembered, and chewed dating back roughly 49,000 years.
At Goyet, Belgium, Neanderthal bones were not only eaten but repurposed into tools. Anthropologists categorize cannibalism into several types. Endocannibalism involves eating members of your own group, often as a funeral custom. Exocannibalism means eating outsiders and enemies as a display of power.
Survival cannibalism occurs during extreme starvation. Nutritional cannibalism treats humans as a regular food source. Medicinal cannibalism involves eating human remains because of a belief that it cures illness. The word cannibal itself has a bizarre origin.
Christopher Columbus encountered people in the Caribbean in 1492 whom he recorded as Caniba, mistakenly believing they were subjects of the Great Khan of Asia. Rumors that these people ate human flesh caused the name to become attached to the practice itself. The most significant story in the history of cannibalism involves the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Through the early 20th century, the Fore practiced transumption, eating their dead as an act of love and respect, with women and children typically consuming the bodies, including the brain.
Around the mid-20th century, they began dying from a disease they called kuru, meaning to shiver or tremble. It started with loss of balance, progressed to shaking and uncontrollable laughter which earned it the nickname the laughing sickness, and killed victims within about a year. The disease hit women and children hardest, the exact people who ate the brains, wiping out entire villages and leaving some communities with three times as many men as women. American doctor Carleton Gajdusek lived with the Fore and collected samples.
In 1966, he injected infected human brain material into chimpanzees, which later developed kuru, proving the disease was transmissible. He won the 1976 Nobel Prize for this work. The real culprit was identified by Stanley Prusiner, who won his own Nobel in 1997. The disease was caused not by a slow virus but by a prion, a misfolded protein with no DNA or RNA.
It forces healthy proteins in the brain to misfold, eventually turning the brain into a sponge full of holes. Kuru could hide in the body for decades, sometimes 50 years or more, which explains why cases continued appearing long after the practice stopped. Remarkably, evolution fought back. British scientists led by John Collinge and Simon Mead found that a number of Fore people carried a genetic variant in the prion gene called G127V that made them resistant to kuru.
They genotyped more than 3,000 people, including over 700 who participated in the mortuary feasts. The protective gene spread quickly as the disease killed those who lacked it. This stands as one of the strongest examples of recent evolution in our species, driven by cannibalism. While European explorers condemned other cultures as savages, Europe itself practiced corpse medicine for centuries.
In the 1500s and 1600s, pharmacies sold ground-up Egyptian mummies called mummia for internal bleeding and bruises, human fat for aching joints, fresh blood drunk at execution scaffolds, and powdered human skull for headaches and seizures. Moss growing on the skulls of hanged men was considered premium medicine. King Charles II of England was a fan of a medicine made from powdered human skull dissolved in alcohol, which became known as the king’s drops. At the same time European sailors wrote horrified journals about the barbaric flesh eaters they met overseas, their own monarch was drinking crushed human skulls prescribed by respectable physicians.
Historian Richard Sugg summarized it best: Europe was a continent of cannibals loudly condemning cannibalism. The Aztecs also practiced ritual cannibalism alongside their famous human sacrifices. In 1977, anthropologist Michael Harner argued the Aztecs ate people because they were desperate for protein, noting the Valley of Mexico had no large domestic animals. This theory was popularized by Marvin Harris, but other scholars strongly rejected it.
Marshall Sahlins pointed out the practice was drenched in religion and cosmology. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano showed the Aztecs had plenty of protein from farming, beans, insects, and algae. Modern scholarship mostly rejects the protein-deficiency explanation. Survival cannibalism remains the most understandable version.
In the winter of 1846, the Donner Party, a group of around 87 settlers heading to California, got trapped by early snow in the Sierra Nevada. After eating their oxen, pets, and boiled hides, roughly half of the survivors ate the flesh of those who had died. Only about 45 of the original group survived. Some families reportedly swapped with each other, agreeing to eat each other’s dead because they could not bring themselves to eat their own relatives.
In 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes. Of the 45 people aboard, 16 survived after 72 days by eating their dead friends, a decision the deeply Catholic young men compared to communion. One survivor, Roberto Canessa, became a heart doctor. In 1820, the whaling ship Essex was rammed by a sperm whale, inspiring the novel Moby Dick.
The drifting crew drew lots to decide who would die to feed the others. The lot fell on 17-year-old Owen Coffin, who was the captain’s cousin. Eight of 20 men survived. In 1816, the French naval ship Medusa ran aground off West Africa.
Around 147 people were crammed onto a hastily built raft and cut loose. Over 13 days, the raft descended into chaos with fighting, murder, and cannibalism. Only around 15 people survived. The disaster inspired Theodore Gericault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa, which hangs in the Louvre.
In 1845, 129 men on the Franklin expedition vanished in the Arctic. Modern researchers found cut marks on about a quarter of recovered remains plus smooth polish marks from boiling bones in pots. In 2024, DNA identified one of the eaten men as Captain James Fitzjames. Cannibalism is not unique to humans, either.
Praying mantises sometimes eat their mates, and hungry females are the most likely to do so. Australian redback spiders have males that actively somersault into the female’s jaws because getting eaten buys them more time to fertilize her eggs. Fish eat their own eggs, scorpions eat each other, and chimpanzees have been filmed killing and eating infants of their own kind. The practice may even linger in human DNA.
In 2003, scientists who studied the Fore examined the prion gene in about a thousand people from around the world. They found signs of the same protective evolution in virtually every population, suggesting cannibalism and the brain diseases it caused were so common in our ancient past that humans everywhere developed partial resistance. The finding is debated, but the implication is that the reason your DNA looks the way it does might partly be because your distant ancestors ate other people and survived. For most of human history, eating people was not the extraordinary exception.
It was common across multiple human species, on multiple continents, for hundreds of thousands of years.
