Europeans Might Have Eaten Their Dead At Funerals 15,000 Years Ago: Study

A recent study has shed light on a rather remarkable historical practice that took place approximately 15,000 years ago in Europe. According to a study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews that delved into this peculiar aspect of ancient culture, it appears that cannibalism was a routine funerary practice in Europe about 15,000 years ago, with people eating their dead not out of necessity but rather as part of their culture, as indicated in the study. “ undeniable, that the frequency of cannibalistic cases among Magdalenian sites exceeds any incidence of this behaviour among earlier or later hominin groups, and suggests that mortuary cannibalism was a method Magdalenian people used to dispose of their deceased,” the study revealed. “Instead of burying their dead, these people were eating them,” study coauthor Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist and principal researcher at the National History Museum, said in a press release. “There was a shift towards people burying their dead, a behaviour seen widely across south-central Europe and attributed to a second distinct culture, known as the Epigravettian,” the Natural History Museum said in the press release.