In a cave on the southern slope of Spain’s Sierra de Atapuerca, archaeologists have uncovered the scattered remains of at least eleven people—men, women, and children—whose lives ended violently some 5,700 years ago. The bones were cut, broken, burned, and even chewed. Boiling left many with a telltale sheen. The evidence lays bare a grisly verdict: the killers butchered and ate their human victims.
Radiocarbon dating and careful taphonomic analysis (an assessment of the marks left on bone) show that the event unfolded quickly. The victims appear to have been a nuclear or extended family, all local to the region, targeted in what may have been a single episode of intergroup violence.
“Cannibalism is one of the most complex behaviors to interpret,” said Palmira Saladié, a paleoecologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) and lead author of the study in Scientific Reports. “Moreover, in many cases, we lack all the necessary evidence to associate it with a specific behavioral context. Finally, societal biases tend to interpret it invariably as an act of barbarism.”
El Mirador’s Grim Neolithic Secret
The setting was El Mirador cave, part of a karst system with a long history of human use. For much of the Neolithic, it served as a sheepfold. But at some point around 5,700–5,570 years ago, that changed abruptly.
Archaeologists excavating two sections of the cave found 650 human bone fragments with clear signs of postmortem processing. Many carried cut marks from knives and stone tools—on skulls, jaws, ribs, long bones, and even the small bones of the hands and feet—evidence of skinning, defleshing, disarticulation, and evisceration. Long bones were fractured to extract marrow; skulls were broken, likely to reach the brain.
Burn marks and “pot-polishing” (the smoothing of bone ends from boiling) were common. Some bones still bore the indentations of human teeth. The researchers noted that 155 of the specimens with tooth marks also had the glossy surface linked to cooking.
The victims’ ages ranged from under 7 years to over 50, with a balanced spread of children, adolescents, and adults. This pattern, the team argues, does not fit deaths from famine, which often disproportionately claim the very young and the elderly.
“This was neither a funerary tradition nor a response to extreme famine,” said archaeologist Francesc Marginedas of IPHES and the University of Rovira i Virgili. “The evidence points to a violent episode, given how quickly it all took place—possibly the result of conflict between neighboring farming communities.”
Cannibalism in the Neolithic
Cannibalism is no stranger to Europe’s archaeological record. From France’s Fontbrégoua Cave to Germany’s Herxheim site, evidence shows that human consumption sometimes accompanied war, ritual, or social upheaval. But El Mirador stands out because it’s such a clear example of cannibalism: the combination of cooking, marrow extraction, cut marks, and tooth impressions leaves little doubt about what happened.
After the killings, the cave shifted from its role as a livestock enclosure to a funerary space during the Chalcolithic period. No injuries from weapons were identified on the bones, but researchers caution that many lethal blows leave no trace in the skeleton. In massacres such as Talheim in Germany and Els Trocs in Spain, entire communities—including children—were wiped out, suggesting similar motives.
“Conflict and the development of strategies to manage and prevent it are part of human nature,” said Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, an archaeozoologist at Spain’s Institute of Archaeology–Mérida. “Even in less stratified, small-scale societies, violent episodes can occur in which enemies could be consumed as a form of ultimate elimination.”
Why kill and eat an enemy? Ethnographic studies show that in some societies, cannibalism serves as the most complete form of erasure—denying the dead burial, denying their memory, and, symbolically, absorbing their vitality.
Fragments Of A Violent Past
The findings at El Mirador add to a growing picture of the Late Neolithic as a time of tension and upheaval. Farming had spread, populations were rising, and competition for land and resources was intensifying. Against that backdrop, the massacre in the cave may have been a brutal act of retribution, intimidation, or social control.
“The recurrence of these practices at different moments in recent prehistory makes El Mirador a key site for understanding prehistoric human cannibalism,” Saladié said, “and its relationship to death, as well as possible ritual or cultural interpretations of the human body.”
But whatever the motive, the bones from El Mirador preserve a moment when human conflict reached its most intimate and unsettling extreme; when the victors consumed the vanquished, erasing them in flesh as well as in memory. Well… now not entirely.
