Neolithic Cannibalism Wasn't an Act of Desperation. Almost 1,000 Skeletal Fragments From Caves in Southern Spain Show How Eating Human Flesh Was a Continual Practice

More than five decades after hordes of prehistoric bones were unearthed from three caves in Granada, new forensic techniques show how communities continued to consume their dead across distinct cultural eras

Soumya Sagar | Correspondent

November 9, 2026 1:11 p.m.

For generations, human cannibalism in prehistoric Europe was viewed as a desperate response to starvation. Now, a forensic re-examination of three prehistoric cave sites in southern Spain reveals that people ate human remains as a ritual for millennia, including after violent clashes or as a standard funeral rite.

Researchers analyzed 967 skeletal fragments representing at least 60 individuals recovered from the caves of Malalmuerzo, Carigüela and Majolicas in the province of Granada. Using high-resolution microscopy, machine learning and radiocarbon dating, the team discovered that these grisly feasts were not confined to a single crisis, such as war or starvation. Instead, they unfolded in “context-dependent episodes” between roughly 5300 B.C.E. and 3760 B.C.E., according to a recent study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The bone assemblages were first excavated in the 1970s under the direction of Miguel C. Botella, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Granada. Fifty years later, Botella joined a multi-disciplinary team to subject the historical collection to modern forensic analysis.

“Returning to these materials with new tools has allowed us to address questions that were impossible to answer at the time,” lead author Palmira Saladié, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, explains in a statement.

By scrutinizing butchery traces, impact fractures and tooth marks under the microscope, the researchers distinguished between injuries inflicted on fresh bone around the time of death and natural degradation that took place years later. The skeletons bore unmistakable hallmarks of systematic butchery: defleshing cut marks, bones split open to harvest marrow, crushed crania to extract brain tissue and bones rendered translucent from boiling.

Despite common processing methods, each cave documented a distinct social reality behind the cannibalistic practices. Remains from Malalmuerzo Cave—which coincidentally translates to “Bad Lunch,” Botella tells Joshua Rapp Learn of the New York Times—likely date to an episode of communal violence around 5000 B.C.E. There, 77 percent of the 714 recovered fragments displayed fractures, Historia National Geographic’s Juan Pedro Chuet-Missé reported in September.

“At Malalmuerzo … our analyses indicate the presence of remains from all age groups, which would suggest a violent event in which all or almost all the individuals in a group were killed and subsequently consumed,” co-author Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology of Mérida, says in the statement.

Children’s remains from Malalmuerzo also bore human tooth marks indicative of “very intensive consumption,” co-author Ana Solari, an anthropologist at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, tells the Times.

In contrast, Carigüela Cave revealed recurrent visits across more than a millennium, from approximately 5470 B.C.E. to 3650 B.C.E. Among its 43 human remains, researchers identified two “skull cups”—craniums from an adult and a child that had been carefully broken and retouched along the edges to function as drinking vessels, a mortuary pattern seen at other European sites like El Mirador in Spain and Herxheim in Germany.

At Majolicas Cave, occupied between 3950 B.C.E. and 3760 B.C.E., cannibalism was decoupled from evidence of interpersonal violence. The remains, primarily belonging to adults between 18 and 45, were found coated in reddish pigments identified as cinnabar, a rare mineral associated with death rites.

Instead of an act of desperation, eating the dead appears to have been an accepted funerary tradition. While other contemporary European communities practiced internment, burial in open-air graves or, starting in fifth millennium B.C.E., burial in communal megalithic tombs, the dwellers of these southern Spanish caves may have bid farewell to their dead by consuming them.

Did you know? Early cannibals

The earliest known evidence of cannibalism is a 1.45-million-year-old shin bone with nine distinctive cut marks. The bone was found in 1970 in Kenya’s Turkana region.

The absence of any alternative funerary practice such as burial or cremation in the cave further strengthens this explanation. “The great majority of them, they didn’t kill them,” Botella tells the Times. “They just died; and after they died, they ate them.” He speculates that these communities may have consumed deceased relatives or friends to keep them connected to their lives, drawing a parallel to mortuary cannibalism historically recorded in parts of South America.

Silvia Bello, a palaeoanthropologist and an expert in human cannibalism at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the research, tells the Times that the consumption most likely occurred between members of the same group, though marks of blunt-force trauma on skulls from Malalmuerzo still point to occasional episodes of lethal violence.

“For decades, prehistoric cannibalism has tended to be interpreted as a single type of behavior,” Rodríguez-Hidalgo adds in the statement. “Our work shows that … similar archaeological evidence may conceal very different social realities.”

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