Roughly 850,000 years ago, in a cave in what is now northern Spain, an early human used a sharpened stone to decapitate a two-year-old child. The cut marks were clean and practiced, matching the strokes used on deer and wild horses. Then the child was eaten. This is the oldest solid evidence of human cannibalism ever found.
The remains were uncovered at Gran Dolina, part of the Atapuerca site in Spain, and belong to a species called Homo antecessor. Researchers have identified at least ten individuals, mostly children and teenagers, showing cut marks, deliberate bone fractures, and smashed skulls. The chilling detail is that the human bones were processed in exactly the same way as animal bones found in the same dirt layer. To Homo antecessor, there was no clear line between food and people.
In 2025, Dr. Palmira Saladié’s team reported finding a neck bone with clean cut marks indicating the child had been decapitated and processed. Evidence suggests this was not a desperate act of starvation. It may have been routine territorial defense—killing and eating rival groups who entered their territory.
Around 14,700 years ago, at Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England, people took cannibalism to a more elaborate level. Archaeologists found remains of at least six people, including a young child. Human tooth marks were found on 87 of the lower body bones examined. The bodies were skinned, sliced, and cracked open for marrow.
What makes Gough’s Cave famous is that three skulls were not casually discarded. They were carefully shaped into cups. The faces were removed, the bases cleaned, and the rough edges trimmed to create smooth drinking bowls. Dr.
Silvia Bello, who studies the bones, found a human arm bone engraved with a zigzag pattern. She believes this was not simple hunger but ritual behavior—a customary way of handling the dead that involved eating them. Neanderthals also practiced cannibalism. At Moula Guercy in France, bones from at least six individuals dating back around 100,000 years show cut marks and hammerstone blows, processed much like the red deer in the same cave.
At El Sidrón in Spain, a group of about a dozen Neanderthals was skinned, dismembered, and chewed roughly 49,000 years ago. At Goyet in Belgium, Neanderthal bones were not only consumed but repurposed as tools. The practice was widespread across human species and continents for hundreds of thousands of years. Anthropologists distinguish several types of cannibalism.
Endocannibalism involves eating members of one’s own group, often as a funeral custom. Exocannibalism means eating outsiders and enemies, a demonstration of power. Survival cannibalism occurs during starvation. Nutritional cannibalism treats people as a regular food source.
Medicinal cannibalism involves eating human remains as treatment for illness. For a time, some scholars doubted the extent of cannibalism. In 1979, anthropologist William Arens wrote that man-eating was mostly a slur used to dehumanize other groups. The bones, however, provided physical evidence that could not be dismissed.
The word cannibal itself came from a misunderstanding. Christopher Columbus recorded the name of the Kalinago people as Caniba in 1492. Rumors that they ate human flesh connected the name to the practice. Later writers linked Caniba to the Latin word for dog.
The older and more precise term is anthropophagy, from ancient Greek. The most important story in the history of cannibalism comes from the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Through the early 20th century, the Fore ate their dead as an act of love and respect. Women and children typically handled the consumption, eating all parts including the brain.
Then something horrifying emerged. The Fore began dying of a disease they called kuru, meaning to shiver or tremble. It started with loss of balance, progressed to uncontrollable shaking, and sometimes caused bursts of laughter that earned it the nickname “laughing sickness. ” Within about a year, victims died.
The disease hit women and children hardest, wiping out entire villages. In some communities, men outnumbered women three to one. The cycle was tragic: a relative dies, women eat the body to honor them, and if the person carried kuru, the women become infected. Years later, they die, and their bodies are eaten at their own funerals.
The practice was mostly stopped in the late 1950s, but new cases continued appearing for another 50 years because the disease could remain hidden for decades. Dr. Carleton Gajdusek lived with the Fore, collected samples, and in 1966 injected brain material from victims into chimpanzees. Years later, the chimps developed kuru.
It was transmissible. Gajdusek won the 1976 Nobel Prize for showing this, though he believed the cause was a slow virus. The actual culprit was identified by Stanley Prusiner: a prion. A prion is a misfolded protein with no DNA or RNA.
It forces healthy proteins in the brain to misfold as well, creating holes in brain tissue. Prusiner won his own Nobel in 1997. Kuru could hide for decades, sometimes more than 50 years, which explained why deaths continued long after the practice stopped. Evolution fought back.
British scientists led by John Collinge and Simon Mead found that some Fore people carried a genetic variant in the prion gene called G127V. This variant made them resistant to kuru. Those who had it could participate in funeral feasts and not get sick. The scientists genotyped more than 3,000 people, including over 700 who had taken part in mortuary feasts.
The pattern was unmistakable. The protective gene was rare or nonexistent before the epidemic. The disease killed those without it, and survivors had children who inherited the resistance. In a matter of decades, the gene spread.
This is natural selection occurring in living human memory, driven by cannibalism. While European explorers condemned other cultures as savages, Europe itself practiced cannibalism for medicine. This “corpse medicine” peaked in the 1500s and 1600s. Ground Egyptian mummies were swallowed to treat internal bleeding.
Human fat was applied to joints and wounds. Human blood was consumed at executions. Powdered human skull was prescribed for headaches and seizures. King Charles II of England drank a medicine made from powdered human skull dissolved in alcohol.
It became known as “the king’s drops. ” Historian Richard Sugg concluded that Europe was a continent of cannibals loudly condemning cannibalism. The Aztecs present a major scholarly debate. Everyone agrees human sacrifice occurred, with evidence of ritual cannibalism.
In 1977, anthropologist Michael Harner argued the Aztecs ate people due to protein deficiency. The theory was popularized by Marvin Harris. Other scholars strongly objected. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano showed the Aztecs had ample protein from intensive farming, beans, amaranth, insects, and algae.
Sacrifices aligned with harvest seasons, not famines. The modern view is that cannibalism was real but religiously motivated, not nutritional. Survival cannibalism can happen to anyone under extreme circumstances. The Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846, ran out of food and ate oxen, pets, and hides before turning to the dead.
Roughly half the survivors ate the flesh of those who had died. Some families reportedly could not eat their own relatives, so they quietly swapped with other families. In 1972, a Uruguayan rugby team’s plane crashed in the Andes. Sixteen of 45 people survived 72 days by eating their dead friends.
One survivor, Roberto Canessa, later became a heart doctor. In 1820, the whaling ship Essex was sunk by a sperm whale, inspiring 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, the captain’s cousin.
Coffin accepted his fate. Eight of 20 men survived. In 1816, the French ship Medusa ran aground off West Africa. Officers placed roughly 147 people on a hastily built raft and cut it loose.
Over 13 days, the survivors experienced fighting, murder, and cannibalism. Only about 15 people were alive when rescue arrived. Artist Théodore Géricault turned the event into the painting The Raft of the Medusa, which hangs in the Louvre. In 1845, 129 British men sailed into the Arctic on the Franklin expedition and vanished.
Victorian England refused to believe Inuit accounts that the crew ate each other, with Charles Dickens angrily denying it. Modern researchers found cut marks on about a quarter of recovered remains, plus “pot polishing”—the shine bones get from being boiled to extract marrow. In 2024, DNA identified one of the eaten men as Captain James Fitzjames. Cannibalism is common in nature.
Female praying mantises sometimes eat their mates. Australian redback spiders males willingly somersault into the female’s jaws during mating, as being eaten allows more time to fertilize eggs. Chimpanzees have been observed killing and eating infants. It is a widespread survival strategy, not a uniquely human aberration.
In 2003, the scientists who solved the Fore mystery found signs of the same protective evolution in the prion gene across people from every population on Earth. The conclusion was that cannibalism and the brain diseases it caused were so common in ancient human history that populations everywhere developed partial resistance. The finding is debated, but the implication is extraordinary: the reason human DNA looks the way it does may be partly because distant ancestors ate other people and survived. For most of human history, eating people was not an exception.
It was a normal part of life.
